This contribution builds on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in a 6^th turned 7^th grade class in inland Norway between January and December of 2020. The study was conducted for my PhD-project about Boys’ identity formation in at school and in the classroom which has a focus on gender, social class, and identity. The main research question for the project is “How does gender and class play a part in identity formation in the social life of boys between 11 and 13 in school, and how does it form their understanding of the world and the future?”. An inspiration for the project is the ongoing discussion regarding boys in school getting lower grades than the girls and dropping out of upper secondary and tertiary education more frequently (Eurostat, 2021), which makes it important to understand how ideas and practices of gender and masculinities are formed and take place among pupils at school. Furthermore, it is of importance to understand the interplay between the school and its pupils, and how they mutually influence each other, and produce more and less acceptable ways of being and behaving.

In this contribution I discuss how certain behaviors and ways of being are associated with perceptions of risk, and how they are manifested and communicated in the classroom. In school pupils are aware that bad behavior leads to bad results, which then can turn into bad grades in secondary school, and later to dropping out of school and/or not getting a good job/future. As a consequence, a failure to follow expectations set by the school is perceived with an inherent risk. In this contribution I will discuss this perception of risk (regardless of whether the risk is “real” or not) through the use of relevant ethnographic examples from my fieldwork. I will especially look at how ideas of the future and what it holds are used on one hand to keep pupils in line by the teachers, and on the other hand as a part of oppositional practices by some of the pupils.

The ethnographic context will be linked to the more general discussion regarding how boys are doing at school to highlight how risk perceptions in the classroom are affected by the discourse surrounding boys at school and vice versa. To explore these issues, I will make use of the concept of learner identities, which Kristinn Hegna describes as the way a learner see themselves in the world and how it makes them relate to their participation in learning (Hegna, 2019, p. 53). These learner identities, in turn, can be related to subject positions and pupil roles, and the expectations related to them in the classroom and at school (Lyng, 2004). To connect these oppositional and problematic pupil roles with the already existing societal worry about boys’ school performances I will use Ian Hacking’s concept of looping effect where categories and category mutually affect and constitute each other (1992). Furthermore, Anthony Giddens’ perspectives regarding self-identity on how modernity have made the self into a reflexive project where the future is always making itself known in the present (1991, p.3) is highly relevant. This ever-looming future in the present coupled with the reflexive project of the self has given the individual responsibility of a successful life, thus creating a possibility of leading a failed life. This makes inhabiting divergent learner identities and pupil roles deemed problematic a risky endeavor. The aim of this contribution is to show how these discourses and ideas makes themselves known and felt in everyday life at a school in Inland Norway.

This research project is ethnographic and contained a year-long fieldwork at a school in inland Norway. The main research method used is participant observation, but I also conducted interviews. Throughout the year-long fieldwork I went to the school every day and sat in class with them, talked and played with them during recess, and ate with them during the lunch breaks. When Norway went into lockdown due to the pandemic, I participated in the home schooling through Teams, where I paid attention to the different chatrooms as well as some of the many online lessons that were held. Participant observation is a preferable method for studying the topic at hand because “the social world must be interpreted from the perspective of the people being studied” (Bryman, 2012, 399). My research activities consisted of taking part in the everyday life at the schools, and through building close social relationships with the participants learned more about who they were and the taken for granted aspects of their identifications, classifications, and everyday norms. In that sense, the aim of using this method was not only to map out the explicit ways in which the boys socialize with each other, but rather the norms and values that underlies their actions. In that sense, qualitative methods are useful to “probe beneath surface appearances” (Bryman, 2012, 400), and find the taken for granted underneath. In addition to this, participant observation is also useful because “there are always things that people do not say publicly, or do not even know how to say” (Cohen, 1984, 220) which can then be picked up by the researcher through observation and description. In addition to participant observation, I conducted interviews. I interviewed 25 of the 50 pupils in this class, 22 boys and 3 girls. They were loosely structured interviews where the focus was on letting the pupils talk about themselves, their class and their school while being led into relevant topics by my questions. The goal in my interviews was to get the participant to talk about their lives and thoughts freely while being led gently by my questions. In that sense, my interviews viewed knowledge as conversational, but also contextual and narrative based (Brinkman & Kvale, p. 64-65). To get the participant to speak as freely as possible I focused on asking open, descriptive questions encouraging the participant to ponder different sides of the topics raised.

What I expect to find in this project is a more nuanced view of young lives at school. Through rich ethnographic descriptions I aim to show how the boys in my study operate within the school’s framework to make it as fitting as possible for themselves, while also challenging, bending, and breaking the rules and norms of this framework. In this contribution I expect to find grounds to argue that while there are valid reasons to worry about boys falling behind at school (Vogt, 2018), ideas about the future and about risk contributes to create and exacerbate this worry while also contributing to creating the problem it is worrying about. A further aim in and beyond this contribution is to make room for diverse ways of thinking about both life trajectories and identity project to help alleviate the pressure put on the individual by the ever-present self-reflexive identity project inherent in late modernity (Giddens, 1991).

-Brinkmann, S. & Kvale, S. (2015). Interviews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sage. -Bryman, A. (2016). Social research methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. -Cohen, A. (1984). Participant Observation. In R. Ellen (ed.) Ethnographic research: A guide to general conduct (pp.216-229). London: Academic Press. -Eurostat. (2021, June). Educational attainment statistics. Ec.europa. Educational attainment statistics - Statistics Explained (europa.eu) -Giddens, A. (1991). Medernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity. -Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? Harvard University Press. -Hegna, K. (2019). Learning identities in vocational education and training – from school to apprenticeship. Journal of Education and Work, 32(1), 52-65. -Lyng, S. T. (2004). Være eller lære? Om Elevroller, Identitet og Læring i Ungdomsskolen. Universitetsforlaget. -Willis, P. (1977). Learning to Labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. Routledge.