Discussion regarding students’ performance in the Western school in the wake of the PISA study, TIMMs and national testing has in Norway focused to a large degree on school content, curriculum, teacher skills etc. Studies in England show however that school quality accounts for less than twenty percent of individual performances. Most variations are explained by other factors, as gender, social class, family income, and ethnicity. But even these external factors are not fixed, but variable positions. One has to take into consideration that different groups of students, gendered as social classes, gather together in the classroom, influence each other and create classroom cultures, which again influence the learning environment and the students’ positions. The main issue in this paper is to question what kind of cultural context the classroom constitutes for the students. It involves identifying the meaningful processes, which take place between the students, and between teachers and students. It also involves relating those processes to the social structure, which the classroom is a part of, and to the social agency of the students. Sherry Orter’s concepts of agency of power, and agency of project, are used, which include the idea of power, dominance as well as resistance, and intentions and wishes as people’s culturally constituted project in the world and their ability to engage and enact them. Classroom cultures in secondary school seem to contain two central projects which form the students’ positions; the qualification project which is the task of society, and the youth project which is the students’ own project, influenced by the idea of ‘youthscape’. These two projects may not be regarded independently; youth identity is seen as a part of the various ways of relating, interpreting, and actualizing the demands of qualification and effort. Peer groups mean a lot to the student positioning, but peer groups are not equal in this process. Peer groups enter into processes of power, dominance and hegemony, which subordinate some and superior other, constitute the dominating classroom culture and decide the condition for learning and possibilities for individual positions

Data rises from ethnographic studies in two classrooms, grade 1 in upper secondary school, academic study program, and grade 9, lower secondary school. The methods have been participating observation in classroom and focus group discussion with students (in peer groups). The focus group discussion was mainly related to photos students were asked to take in school before the discussion. The study of two different kinds of schools, grade 9 in compulsory school, and grade 1 in upper secondary which in principle is voluntary and gives choices for types of study programs, gives the possibility to compare the two cultures and to identify processes of transition.

The paper explains different ways the teaching and learning conditions are constructed in classrooms and how differet groups of students negotiate them. In grade 9 the though, opposing masculinity has become the hegemonic masculinity, even supported by the propert and ambitious girls, while the proper bedrooms-culture boys are marginalized. In grade 1 in upper secondary the students bring forth the frightening of being a nerd into the class culture, which also marginalizes the ambitious, serious boys.