This presentation focuses on the concept of “gender positioning” and its potential to grasp how gender order is enacted in the everyday life of the class. When investigating gender in educational practices the French didactique approach examines the ways girls and boys differently construct their knowledge through actions and discourses (Amade-Escot, 2016). It provides fine-grained, descriptive accounts of classroom interactions and students gendered learning trajectories. Drawing on the notion of gender in social sciences (Butler, 1990; Chabaud-Rychter et al., 2010), this line of didactical research sees gender as a relational concept, that is a fluid, multiple and shifting category beyond the traditional male and female binary (Amade-Escot, Elandoulsi & Verscheure, 2015). Gender studies in schools have shown that pedagogical practices reproduce gendered aspects of the cultural heritage of societies. Didactical analyses deepen this understanding by capturing in detail the curriculum in motion in classroom settings. The approach relies on the idea that the knowledge taught and learned and all meaning making associated are co-produced by teacher and students, namely their didactical joint action (Ligozat, 2011; Sensevy, 2010). Using the joint action in didactics (JAD) framework, the presentation argues that “gender positioning” is a productive tool to understand the relations between gender, knowledge, classroom interactions and student learning. The notion of “positioning” is borrowed from Harré (2004). In emphasising the importance of context and language the notion goes beyond the static concept of “role’, and draws on the social, symbolic and interactional dimensions of human action to account for the dynamics of the social construction of identities. Harre’s “positioning theory” assumes that human behaviour is goal-directed by group norms, and that human subjectivity is a product of the history of each individual’s interactions with other. Thus “positions” are not fixed but fluid and can change from one moment to the next, depending on context, participants, meanings and interactions. Our research group elaborates the concept of “gender positioning” and conducts empirical studies against background of the JAD framework to describe students’ and teacher’s actions in class. Building on PE excerpts, the presentation shows how gender differences and even inequalities between students occur through very tiny and almost imperceptible actions. It provides an understanding of how gendered positioning interplays with teacher’s supervision in relation with the knowledge content studied. The conclusion discusses the potential of the concept of “gender positioning” to investigate gender in didactics, teaching and learning in different subjects.

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