Contribution
Description: I'm writing my doctoral thesis about the discourses of craft and gender in the Finnish (school) culture. I'm especially interested in the explicit and implicit gender system concerning craft making and teaching, in which gender system means culturally defined places and habits for a woman or a man.
Craft education in the Finnish school system is divided into textile and technical work, and is compulsory for every pupil during the first seven years of school. In the first four years, every pupil is taught with the same content. Beginning from the fifth grade, the pupils have to choose between textile work and technical work in the majority of schools. The choices are mostly gender-based: girls choose textile work and boys choose technical work.
The theoretical framework of this research consists of cultural studies and feminist research.
Methodology: I'm making ethnographic research on wide fields, where in the middle is my ethnographic staying and participation in the craft lessons at two schools in Helsinki. I participated at and videotaped craft lessons and asked the pupils to write small essays and interviewed both pupils and teachers last year. Around these two schools I see the field of Finnish craft education which I have been both participating and observating, e.g. through e-mail messages. As one data I have also the Finnish comprehensive school curricula from 1970-2004. In addition, in order to open the cultural representations I have collected articles in Helsingin Sanomat and some magazines.
The aim of this paper is to open my methodological framework, which consist of social constructionism, ethnography, and discourse analysis. I'm especially interested in opening the concept "cultural stream of negotiations" (Juhila 2002), which I see as intertwining concept of the previously mentioned methods.
Conclusions: In this paper I'm going to show some fragments of my data and search for - or even swim in - the cultural stream of negotiations. The expected outcome is that the different fragments from various data speak almost similarly about gender and craft. Only the texts of the newest curricula are totally silent about the gender.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.