Boys and Their Schooling: The Experience of Becoming Someone Else

by John Whelen

Overview

This book presents an ethnographic study of the experiences of teenage boys in an Australian high school. It follows a group of thirteen to fifteen year olds over a period of more than two years, and seeks to understand why so many boys say they hate school yet enjoy being with one another in their daily confrontations with the formal school. The study acknowledges the ongoing significance of the "boys' debate" to policy-makers and the media, and therefore to teachers and parents, but moves it on from issues of gender construction and the panic about achievement to the broader question of what it is to experience being schooled as a boy in the new liberal educational environment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415879170
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/28/2011
Series:	Routledge Research in Education , #54
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Whelen is a tutor and research assistant in the faculty of education at Monash University, Australia.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Boys in the Frame 1. Getting at Experience 2. The Schoolboy as Object of Study 3. Writing the Schoolboy 4. Observing Participation Part 2: That Unstable Construct 5. Monday Morning 6. George 7. Year 9 8. The Student Body 9. The Aspirational Self 10. Conclusion: Another New Beginning. Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

'Having taught in a secondary school in Melbourne, Australia for 20-plus years, Whelen decided to pursue a PhD (Monash U.) and for his dissertation chose to do an ethnographic study of boys in school over a two-year period. The topic is alive with debate concerning such issues as whether schools have become "feminized" in recent years. Along with his theoretical framework, observations, and conclusions about the students, the author intertwines the experience of being an ethnographer in an environment where he had been an "insider" for many years.'-Reference and Research Book News

'In short, the text encompassing valuable ideas and perspectives for anyone seeking to understand a different way of reading a well-established discourse.' - Garth Stahl, Gender and Education

'This poststructural ethnography, drawing on the work of Foucault and Butler, explores the technologies of schooling that make students "knowable" and the ways in which the particular "truth regimes" bring the schoolboy subject into being...it is a welcome addition to debates about boys and schooling and it has much to say about the conduct of ethnographic research.' - Martin Mills, British Journal of Sociology of Education

From the Publisher