Drawing on cross-cultural qualitative research in comprehensive (primary and middle) schools in Finland and Korea, this article explores students' peer relationships as well as tensions and negotiations that occur between student agency and school control. Based on school observations and interviews with students and teachers, this article…

This article reports a case study conducted at a school in Bogotá. It was based on constructivist and poststructuralist frameworks that viewed gender positioning as a social construction in foreign language learning contexts (Baxter, 2003; Sunderland, 1992; Tannen, 1996). Aiming to understand how ninth grade gender positioning is constructed, and…

As an opinionated and often challenging class of year 10 boys, they demonstrated a strong sense of their identity as a group of "bright boys". One of their English teachers described the class as "boisterous, but very motivated--they love discussing texts", but she also recognised their tendency to "descend into…

In this ethnographic study conducted in two classrooms in Norway, grade nine (14-year-olds) in lower secondary school and the first year (16-year-olds) of upper secondary school, attention is drawn to how classroom culture is constituted through relationships between students. Through processes of power, dominance, hegemony and marginalisation,…

The goal of the study was twofold: (1) to examine the relationship between the gender-stereotyped perceptions of prototypic peers excelling in different school subjects and the personal liking for these subjects: (2) to examine whether the popularity of adolescents depends on their gender-role congruent achievement at school. Participants were n =…