Gendered Learning Environments: Constitution of the Celebrated Student in the STEM Classroom

This proposal is concerned with the challenge of recruiting more women and girls into science and engineering programs. The outset of the study is the fact that many science classrooms seem to be gendered in ways that favors masculinity (Danielsson, 2014). The proposal discusses how the learning environment at a three-year, non-compulsory upper secondary school is gendered and how this gendering is closely connected to an implicit ideal of the celebrated student in the science classroom. The study builds on feminist, poststructuralist theory and critical masculinity studies and combines this theoretical outset with ethnographic fieldwork. Through analysis of empirical findings obtained through in-depth participant observations in two science classrooms the authors show that the celebrated student position in the chemistry lab is a white, masculine position. The position as celebrated student is co-constituted through social processes of interactions between the students and between the students and the teacher. Participant observations allow for nuanced and detailed descriptions of the social processes through which identity is constituted. The position of the celebrated student is not challenged in the interactions in the classroom and thus the implicit ideal of the celebrated student seems to be reproduced and emphasized through the same social processes that constitute it.