Session Information
Paper Session
Contribution
The school is an important place for young people to learn the values and rules of the surrounding educational community and also of the society at large. In the Finnish National Curriculum (2004), the basic values of the school include respecting human rights, equality, and democracy, and promoting the equality between sexes is mentioned as an important task. These kinds of values are constructed especially in the classroom through interactional practices of the participants, teachers and students. The teachers are seen to be responsible for maintaining the classroom atmosphere, organizing activities, and directing the conversation, and the management of classroom can be seen as arena for participants to maintain the social and interactional norms of educational contexts, as well as to practice skills pursuing the values mentioned in the curriculum.
In the middle of the 1990’s the educational atmosphere and the values of everyday life of Finnish schools was observed within a large research project by a group of school ethnographers, who focused especially on the gender orders of the school (e.g. Gordon, Holland & Lahelma 2000). They found, for instance, that teachers in Finnish schools frequently used gendered address forms while talking to students. This practice was considered inconvenient and discriminating among the students (e.g. ´Tolonen 2001; Palmu, 2003).
In this paper, I further analyze Finnish classroom interaction and especially those interactional sequences where teachers use gendered address terms when talking to groups of students. The aim is to examine why teachers use these address terms in certain contexts and what are the consequences of using them in interaction. My data consists of naturally occurring classroom interaction in 1999-2004 in ordinary Finnish secondary schools (students aged 13-15 years). In spite of earlier findings, in my data (28 video recorded and transcribed lessons) the use of gendered address terms, such as ‘boys’, is not very common. In the data occurrences, the address term ‘boys’ is more frequent than the address term ‘girls’.
All of those turns that contain gendered address terms were used as reproaches, and more specifically, as reproaches that aim to silence students, that is, to get students to stop talking in ways that the teacher or the students themselves see as inappropriate in their linguistic or prosodic shape and/or sequential placement. By using reproaches including the gendered term, the teachers contribute especially to the construction of the gender category of ‘boys’ in classroom interaction. However, in their own turns-at-talk, the students – boys and girls – make use of the teacher’s gendered address terms. By adopting and repeating the address terms in their own contributions, the students both entertain themselves by teasing the addressed students as well as the teacher in a humorous way and at the same time implicitly criticize the use of gendered address terms in classroom interaction.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Gordon, T., Holland, J., & Lahelma, E. (2000). Making spaces. Citizenship and difference in schools. New York & London: St. Martin's Press & MacMillan Press. Hellermann, J. (2008). Social Actions for Classroom Language Learning. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Margutti, P. (2006). Undermining the teacher’s authority: how students respond to teachers’ reproaches. In L. Ionescu-Ruxanoiu (ed.) Co-operation and conflict in ingroup and intergroup communication. Selected papers from the Xth Biennial Congress of the IADA Bucharest. Editure Universitatii din Bucuresti, pp. 407-419. Markee, N. (2000). Conversation analysis. London: Lawrence Erlbaum associates. Sahlström, F. (1999). Up the hill backwards. On interactional constraints and affordances for equity-constitution in the classrooms of the Swedish comprehensive school. .Uppsala Studies in Education 85. Uppsala. Seedhouse, P. (2004). The interactional architecture of language classroom: a conversation analytic perspective. Oxford: Blackwell.
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