Learning the 'Hard' Way: boys, hegemonic masculinity and the negotiation of learner identities in the primary school

Abstract

The ways in which young boys, masculinity and academic achievement intersect to impact upon boys' disposition to and experience of schooling is relatively under-researched. Drawing on data from an ethnographic exploration into children's gender and sexual identities in their final year of primary school (aged 10/11), this paper sets out to illustrate how the discourses of hegemonic masculinity operate to shape and form boys' learner identities. The first half of the paper explores the processes and strategies by which different boys' negotiate the tensions between the perceived feminisation of academic success and/or 'studiousness', and the need to project a coherent and stable hegemonic masculinity. The remainder of the paper examines the increasing pressures of hegemonic masculinity upon high-achieving boys, and the extent to which some boys managed to carve out and maintain alternative masculinities. The implications for current and future interventions and initiatives, directed at boys' attitudes and experiences of schooling and schoolwork, are briefly outlined in the concluding sections.