Gender and Ethnicity in Schools

Ethnographic Accounts

Martyn Hammersley, Peter Woods

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136139888
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A serious but highly accessible look at recent work on the issues of gender and race. Gender and Ethnicity in Schools raises crucial educational and political issues, paying particular attention to the pupils' experience of school.

Part I

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Gender

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Chapter 1

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Gender implications of children's playground culture

Elizabeth Grugeon

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INTRODUCTION

Starting school at the age of 5 is daunting. Whatever their previous pre-school experience – nursery, playgroup, four-plus unit – for most children the move into statutory schooling requires the most formidable readjustment. It is a time of considerable stress which parents and teachers attempt to buffer in a variety of thoughtful ways. Becoming a pupil, entering the new culture of the school, means learning new patterns of behaviour, developing new expectations and relationships (Willes 1983). Adult intervention in this process tends to focus on the child's role as a member of a new community which is predominantly concerned with the child's development as a learner. The demands are predictable, the process well-structured. Parents and teachers consciously mediate this process, ensuring as easy a transition into the new culture as possible. In this brief study, I want to explore the possibility that the children themselves have a means of negotiating this particular status passage that is often overlooked.

On the school playground there is also a culture to be negotiated and it is every bit as complex, structured and rule-bound as anything that goes on in the classroom. Entering this culture requires learning sets of rules and rituals which are quite as arbitrary as those produced by the education system. While the culture of childhood is contextual-ized by the adult world, it is also the context within which children socialize one another as well as with each other (Geertz 1975: 12). The playground is the site for the rehearsal and exploration of adult roles.

Observation on playgrounds also suggests that the process of entering the culture may be different for girls and boys. A brief glance at any infant or lower school playground will usually reveal that boys and girls are not playing together and may also show different kinds of grouping, the girls in small inward-looking groups often sitting down, the boys running about.

A recent study in Norwich (Stutz 1992) involving over 500 pupils aged from 7 to 14 observed that, on the playground, boys and girls tended to play separately.

Certain patterns of behaviour emerged which were repeated with slight variations in each of the playgrounds visited. These patterns clearly showed in the differences discernible between the girls' and boys' play.

Girls' play seemed to be characterized by a physical closeness and intimacy. They played in ‘little or big circles or knots, always facing into the centre’. Sometimes sitting in small groups, at other times in large circles, they were observed playing ‘complicated, and energetic games’ where it appeared that

they all know exactly what they are doing although one cannot see them discussing any plans or rules, and it is difficult to understand from the outside what the rules are. These games may come into being quite suddenly and then, just as quickly, come to an abrupt but happy end. Or they go on for quite a long time. In all these games the girls are completely absorbed. It is clear that they have a well developed communication system.

Another characteristic of the girls' play that was observed

was the universality of their sociability and friendliness. They all seemed happy and well integrated with their friends and I was never aware of any disharmony, quarrelling or competitiveness between them.

It seemed that boys would often stand on the edge watching these games with evident interest and respect.

On a number of occasions they joined in and the girls showed no sign of either pleasure or displeasure at this; they just accepted them as a matter of course. And I never saw a boy spoiling such a game. On a number of occasions I noticed girls teaching boys how to skip and do hand clapping or dipping games, the boys happily following instructions.

The Norwich research provides further evidence of the co-operative nature of girls' play in the large variety of singing, rhyming, hand-clapping and dipping games that were observed. In contrast, a dominant feature of the boys' play was its competitiveness and ‘a combative or confrontational tendency which can easily flare up into a fight’. Boys' play seemed to lack ‘the sociability which was such a marked feature with the girls’ (Stutz 1992: 26).

There is evidently a fairly rigid gender separation in children's play at school and in the culture of childhood itself. Looking more closely at some of the cultural practices involved in this process of socialization in the playground, it is possible to isolate some of the ways in which girls acquire a social identity, largely in the company of other girls.

I first became aware of this phenomenon – an informal status passage – when my daughter Jessica started school. She was just 5 and playing with Sarah, nearly 7, in the back garden. I could see that Sarah was teaching her an elaborate hand-clapping routine. They were deeply engrossed in getting the movements right. Jessica was concentrating ferociously; I was witnessing an example of the process of apprenticeship by which older girls pass on to younger girls the traditional games of an oral culture which seems to be their exclusive property (Opie and Opie 1985). Later, I asked Jessica to show me what she and Sarah had been doing and was amazed to discover that in her first six weeks at school she had acquired a repertoire of songs and games that were certainly not part of the mainstream curriculum. I had to admit that I was surprised by the number of rhymes she had learnt in such a short time; even more by their subject matter. The oral culture of the playground engaged with issues of birth, death, courtship and marriage, using a dynamic, dramatic vocabulary (Ashton-Warner 1980): ‘supersonic’, ‘dynamite’, ‘fart’, ‘willy’, and played with nonsense, rhyme and rhythm: ‘rom pom pooli’, ‘elli elli chickali, chickali’, ‘ticker tacker tooey’. The narrative structures ‘and this is how my story goes’, ‘one day when I was walking’, ‘and this is what she said’ – were a far cry from the adult-mediated text of her first reading schemes (see Appendix). I made a recording and put it in a drawer.

It was some years later that I became interested again. I had returned to school playgrounds as a lecturer in education and the Opies' book The Singing Game had just been published. All Jessica's songs were there, some were very old, others from far away. I started to observe and talk to children as I crossed their playgrounds and soon had an increasing collection of examples.

COLLECTING AND ANALYSING THE EVIDENCE

To begin with, I did not have a particular methodology: the process of collecting examples continued over a period of years in a random way. However, I did develop certain procedural rules. It was important to respect the players' privacy. These games are not intended for public performance or adult ears. Permission to observe, record and photograph had to be obtained, not only from the schools but from the players.

Whenever possible, I taped the songs in the playground and occasionally obtained permission to photograph the action. It is helpful to record these games as they are being played in a naturalistic setting. It is essential to hear them, as each one has a different tune and the mode of delivery, speed, intonation and emphasis tells the listener a great deal about the players' attitudes. Versions collected indoors, in more formal interview situations, lack dynamic and dramatic immediacy; often the players forget what comes next or feel constrained about the appropriate actions and accompanying movements. Written versions recorded in notebooks give no sense of the urgency of the players nor of the particular effects they are trying to create. The games are essentially unselfconscious existential events, no two are ever the same in performance.

As my collection grew, so did the need for some explanation of the phenomena. I began to talk to older girls, 11- and 12-year-olds, to see what light they could throw on a process which they had only recently outgrown. A series of interviews conducted at home and in school provided interesting insights. I would play a sample recording of the games I had collected and ask them to tell me what games they remembered playing, who had played them, where and when they had played them, how they had learned to play them and whether boys had joined in. I also asked them about playing generally, what other games they had played at school and after school. At the same time, I continued to talk to younger children and recorded their perceptions of the process as they were involved in it. Their responses gradually began to provide a context for the examples I had been collecting. They reinforced my impression of the gender specificity of particular gam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Gender
• Part II Ethnicity
• Index