Black males as a group experience disproportionate amounts of school failure. Compared to Black females and White males, for example, Black males have the highest dropout rates, poorest achievement, and lowest test scores. Further, they are sorely under-represented in gifted education and over-represented in special education. Of those Black males…

Music is central to the lives of most high-school age boys. However, music education is a marginalised area of the school curriculum, decreasing in popularity as students approach senior school and succumb to pressures to choose subjects perceived to be more useful in the "real world". While this process is common for both boys and girls, the…

Cognitive therapists may be able to help fathers increase their involvement with their children by identifying and changing restrictive masculine schemas that interfere with men's parenting roles. In this paper, we (a) discuss the development of restrictive masculine schemas, (b) explain how these schemas may affect men's involvement in fathering…

This study examines the classroom practice(s) of seven gay male teachers from four school districts within a large southeastern state. Through the use of semi-structured interviews, it examines two main issues they face: how and when to introduce and use gay-themed materials while teaching the curriculum and how to confront homophobic slurs heard…

During adolescence, the number of cross-sex friends increases dramatically. This study focused on correlates of adolescents' cross-sex friendship satisfaction. Three hundred and twenty Hong Kong secondary four (10th grade) students were asked to rate their best cross-sex friends on the Friendship Satisfaction Scale (Tsuzuki & Matsui, 2000).…

Verbal abuse has been identified as a common element in the life of children in school. This paper explores how this discursive practice is used in the construction of masculinities and femininities among children aged 14-15 through observations and interviews in classes in two schools in Stockholm. Verbal abuse, often with sexual content,…

In this portrait, Travis Wright, writing as a psychology counselor in training, brings the reader into one morning's events in his clinical work with Jorge, a three-year-old boy whose family is experiencing difficult times. Throughout the morning at Jorge's day-care center, Wright encounters scenarios that force him to ask questions about child…

In his book "To Be a Boy, To Be a Reader: Engaging Teen and Preteen Boys in Active Literacy," William Brozo suggested that many adolescent boys have become mentally and academically detached from school. While Brozo acknowledges that a solution to these problems is multifaceted, he asserts that engaging boys in literature that makes use of…

This article presents comments on "The Heroism of Women and Men" by Selwyn W. Becker and Alice H. Eagly. Their article specifically addressed the "cultural association of heroism with men and masculinity . . . in natural settings." Becker and Eagly evidenced roughly equivalent rates of heroism by women and men in a variety of settings. However,…

"A Man" is an original text created by the author that deals with the struggles that Black men experience when confronted by White privilege. By using autoethnographic analysis, the author critiques the language, ironies, tensions, emotions, and opportunities expressed within "A Man," then extends findings to confront the issues that Black men…

Pedhazur and Tetenbaum speculated that factor structures from self-ratings of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) personality traits would be different from factor structures from desirability ratings of the same traits. To explore this hypothesis, both desirability ratings of BSRI traits (both "for a man" and "for a woman") and…

This article describes the formation and enactment of a student and teacher-generated framework for re-authoring a troubling representation of Black masculinity in a popular culture narrative. This data-driven framework highlights the ways students and teacher provided a means for literacies to serve students' desire to re-author images and words…

In Western countries, discourses concerning "boys failing school" are circulated in media as well as in schools. Research is conducted that offers sweeping sociological, societal or biological explanations, or context-sensitive ethnographic or social psychological and variable explanations on the relation between boys and school life. In…

This paper explores issues of critical literacy, gender justice and masculinity through "Mr A's" story. Mr A is head of English at "Grange College"--an all boys' school in a large urban centre in Queensland (Australia). The paper highlights how the privileging of rationality, control and "the masculine" within Mr A's…