ABSTRACT
Social and political context of the study The chapter reports part of a wider study that has been investigating how schools in the United Kingdom have been reacting to the moral panic about boys ‘under achievement’, particularly in English. . . . Local education authorities and schools have been obliged to respond to this by introducing ameliorative strategies to support boys’ learning (Murphy and Ivinson, 2000). These strategies advocated at policy level treat boys and girls as homogeneous groups, and only differentiate between them in terms of achievement. We have been investigating the impact of some of these strategies, such as gendered seating (boy-girl-boy) and single sex teaching from a sociocultural perspective, in order to make visible the intended and unintended effects on students’ access to subject knowledge of treating boys and girls in this way. [. . .]
The study Monks Secondary School, where the comparative case study took place, had instigated what they called, ‘The Year of the Boy’. The two English teachers in the study had employed different, but related ameliorative strategies that focused attention on the needs of low achieving boys and assumed for girls an unproblematic peer-tutoring role. In classroom A, all the average and high achieving boys had been placed together. In classroom B, the other boys in the year had been dispersed with mixed ability girls in a ratio of 2 : 1 girls to boys. Gendered seating (boy-girl-boy) was also introduced. Both teachers agreed to teach the same creative writing activity to their year 10 classes (students aged 14-15). This chapter describes how each setting influenced the way teachers using the same activity realised (recontextualised) subject knowledge.
