Topic.  

International comparisons of boys’ performance—and underachievement—in reading is often framed as a persistent and significant international problem (OECD, 2016).    Reported achievement gaps along with declining job markets in de-industrialized economies and increasing numbers of women entering post-secondary institutions, have prompted much debate about boys’ education, contributing to the sense of ‘moral panic’ about their lack of achievement (Mills, 2003; Watson, 2011; Weaver-Hightower, 2003). Discourses evident in government policy, the media and populist literature include ‘poor boys’, ‘failing schools, failing boys’, and ‘boys will be boys’ (Epstein et al., 1998; Francis & Skelton, 2005; Lingard et al., 2009; Mills, 2003; Weaver-Hightower, 2003).  Compounding the perceived ongoing gender gap in reading achievement are problematics for boys who associate reading as a gender marked behaviour or position reading as boring and ‘a bit nerdy’ (Alloway, 2007; BRC, 2012; Martino, 2001).

An emerging program of work however makes visible a diversity of attitudes towards reading and highlights nuances associated with boys’ experiences as readers at school (Scholes, 2010, 2013, 2018).  To further explore diversity and differences we are interested in the narratives of boys attending a range of elementary school locations as they describe their reading preferences and practices.

The paper addressed the following research question.   

              How do Year 4 boys describe their reading preferences and practices?

Objective.

The objective of the paper is to explore the narratives of 29 boys attending Year 4 (9-10 years) in six diverse school locations.  How they talk about reading, their descriptions of what they read, and links to broader social aspects of their lives are of particular interest.  Rather than taking a deficit view of boys and their attitudes towards reading we are interested in teasing out the stories of boys’ experiences and opening up discussions about personal preferences and their affinities with reading materials.

Conceptual or theoretical framework.

We propose that the popular technical–rational discourse of educational policy-making neglects the ethical importance of considering the uniqueness of the student and of human relationality in education (Winter, 2017).  Such performativity discourses generate recognition of particular forms of literacies and sets of cognitive skills that are attached to benchmark testing.  This data is frequently used to sort, measure and make broad assumptions about gender and achievement, or lack of achievement, in particular domains (cf. Macqueen, 2012).  Moving beyond such discourse requires understanding literacy as a social practice (Barton & Hamilton, 2012; Street, 1995) so that the embodied lives of boys as readers is foregrounded in addition to school based academic accountabilities.

The paper disrupts taken-for-granted assumptions about boys and reading that are reflected in gender-based reforms that reinforce rather than challenge stereotypes about boys.  Examples of interventions that have been implemented to address the ‘boy problem’ in schools include the introduction of a more ‘boy-friendly’ curriculum, more male teachers, and single-sex classes where boys do not have to worry about girls and where teachers can more easily cater to boys’ interests and learning styles (Martino, Kehler & Hightower, 2009; Martino & Kehler, 2007).  In this paper, we explore the way boys describe their personal affinities with particular authors, genres and content in ways that imply a love of reading.  These discussions contribute to debates that move beyond normative gender configurations to consider differences within students’ experiences, disrupting taken for granted notions shaped by societies and cultures in which we live to dislocate the purported ‘naturalness’ of girls’ engagement and boys’ aversion with regards to reading. 

The data is drawn from a broader project in Australia exploring boys’ and girls ‘attitudes towards a range of school-related activities that included surveys with 615 boys and girls when they were in Year 3, 4 and 5 and 80 follow up interviews one year later. This paper draws on one section of the follow up interviews with 29 Year 4 boys attending schools in a range of socioeconomic locations. During the interviews students were asked to expand on their survey responses concerning their enjoyment of reading, on the one hand, and to reflect on their experiences as readers at school, on the other hand. Additional information was also collected concerning the reading level of the students and socioeconomic status of the school community. Interviews were conducted individually with students in a quiet space close to their classrooms and participants were reminded of the confidentiality of their responses, their right to withdraw from the interview at any time, and the use of pseudonyms. Each interview took approximately 30 minutes and was audio recorded for later transcription. Data was first analysed to confirm students’ survey responses (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011) then an additional layer involved thematic analysis (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013). Categories were used to assign meaning to descriptive information or topics. Categories were then subdivided into subcategories (Miles et al., 2013). This approach led to the establishment of a coding template that was applied to the remaining interviews. The three authors each coded the interview transcripts and then discussed their coding decisions and any discrepancies that arose with only excepts representing coding consensus presented. The crosschecks ensured dialogic reliability of the analysis and agreement through discussions and negotiations (Åkerlind, 2005). Themes that emerged from the boy’s narratives are presented with representative quotes highlighting the salience of the categories. Discussions related to the themes associated with boys’ reading preferences, reading practices and reading patterns are presented with links to related literature about boys and reading, reading for pleasure and reading pedagogies.

In response to international data, boys’ underachievement in reading is often generalized and so is not representative of diverse groups of boys (Martino & Kehler, 2007). This perpetrates a divide between boys and girls, positioning young males as a homogenous group discounting differences between boys and their experiences at school (Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 2013; Lingard et al., 2009; Morris, 2012). Our findings highlight that many boys do love reading and have particular reading interests that are not always supported by current skill based academic approaches to teaching reading. We disrupt discourses that homogenise all boys as disengaged readers and challenge traditional responses to boys’ underachievement such as recruiting more male teachers, promoting ‘boy-friendly schooling’, didactic teaching and implementing single-sex classes that have not been successful (Lingard et al., 2009). Simplistic approaches are not appropriate and only serve to emphasize the embodied presence of maleness, and to further homogenise boys. Alternative pedagogical approaches to engaging boys in reading are proposed where teachers recognize students’ personal reading repertoires and tap into authentic reading experiences at school that may be at tensions with academically sanctioned pedagogies associated with skills-based requirements.

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