Finding a certain person

Boys’ Anti-School Culture? Narratives and School Practices RICKARD JONSSON Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University

Boys’ underachievement and oppositional behavior in school has for a long time been the target of various public debates. Drawing on ethnographic data from fieldwork in two Swedish secondary schools, this article explores how the influential theory of boys’ anti-school culture can be inter- preted as a master narrative that is reproduced, but also contradicted and subverted, by students and teachers in social interaction within local school contexts. [masculinity, anti-school culture, failing boys, narrative analysis, small stories]

Introduction

“Boys perform worse and worse in school and that is a situation we can no longer accept” [says Swedish Minister for Education Jan Björklund]. He believes that new pedagogical methods, where the pupils mainly have to work on their own, may have contributed to that development. “That method benefits girls, who usually are more mature compared to boys of the same age, while many guys prefer a coffee break instead of doing studying” [—] Jan Björklund believes more male teachers would help to improve boys’ results. “If school is perceived as a very feminine place, there is a risk that some guys think that ‘this is not for me.’ That’s why it is important to have male role models for teenage boys in school,” states Björklund. [Sydsvenska Dagbladet 2008 June 13, author’s translation]

The issue of young men’s academic achievement—described along the lines of boys as the new losers in a so-called feminized school—has for a long time now been the subject of various Swedish public debates. These debates are further fueled by national and international surveys that indicate a gender difference in academic success, according to which girls and women appear to be winners throughout the educational system (Epstein et al. 1998; Francis and Skelton 2005; Kimmel 2010; Sunderland 2004). The epigraph with which this paper begins, concerning the worrying “discovery” that existing pedagogic methods are no longer suitable for boys, also echoes similar debates that have taken place in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other countries over the past decades. As noted by many gender scholars, the issue of gender and school achieve- ment is often portrayed as constituting an educational crisis (cf. Epstein et al. 1998; Francis 2006; Smith 2003), and critical voices have underlined the risk of a moral panic as well as a feminist backlash hidden in these debates (Foster et al. 2001; Smith 2003). Griffin (2000) stated already a decade ago that such debates on boys and their schooling are usually organized around the theme of a “loss.” On the one hand, boys are constructed as victims of the educational crisis, and on the other hand, the tone of the public discussion is, in many instances, tinged with nostalgia for a lost masculinity whose superiority is left unchallenged. Also note the causality between education and boys’ lower grades, as pointed out by the minister in the quotation above: gender is seen as something crucial for teaching (the minister claims that boys need more male role models) and learning (the minister surmises also that while girls can work independently because of their maturity, boys would rather spend their time on a coffee break). Thus, boys and girls are constructed as two distinct, homogeneous, and different categories with both discrete and varying needs. Gender relations are hardly challenged in this short quotation; on the contrary, male teachers are blessed with something specific by virtue of their gender, which is supposed

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Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 45, Issue 3, pp. 276–292, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/aeq.12068

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to favor boys’ learning. In this article, I claim that the “rowdy boy” category is taken for granted in this and other similar contributions on the subject. The category may be used to explain rule-breaking activities and disciplinary problems in classrooms, and it is often treated as an unchallenged fact that needs to be dealt with. I argue that it is precisely this category that needs to be deconstructed. As part of a critical discussion of dominant conceptions of boys’ underachievement in school, this article takes as its point of depar- ture Judith Butler’s call for reversing the relationship between deeds and identity, as represented in the claim that there is no doer behind the deed, or as Butler puts it, in a classic quote “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (1999:33).

I shall first explore how the phenomenon of failing boys and their anti-school attitudes are dealt with in Swedish public reports. Here, I approach the anti-school culture theory as a master narrative (Bamberg 2004), which provides certain explanations, as well as categories and presumed activities related to failing boys in school. Thereafter, drawing on ethnographic data from fieldwork in two Swedish secondary schools, I explore the ways in which the anti-school narrative permeates and is contradicted by social interaction in everyday school life.

Anti-School Culture in Swedish Public Reports

One theory widely used in both academia and the popular media to explain boys’ underachievement posits the existence of an anti-school culture. This thesis was originally established by Paul Willis (1977), in his pioneering work Learning to Labour, along with several other contributions that have followed in his tracks. Willis, however, has been criticized for, among other things, not depicting girls and for romanticizing boys’ resis- tance (McRobbie 1980). This criticism withstanding, Willis’ description of an anti-school culture among young men has surprisingly not been the subject of much critical scrutiny. On the contrary, the idea has won considerable approval, not least in major Swedish public reports on the subject. According to the idea of an anti-school culture, to make a serious effort to do well at school is simply not consistent with performing “cool” or other normative forms of masculinities. Other scholars have, in a similar vein, discussed a “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 1995, 2000) or “traditional ideologies of masculinity” (Kimmel 2010) as not consistent with schoolwork (see also Mac an Ghaill 1994). However, in their oft-cited book Young Masculinities, Stephen Frosh, Ann Phoenix, and Rob Pattman (2002) claim that many of the British schoolboys who they interviewed have developed a middle way, according to which boys engage in popular practices of masculinity and yet (albeit more implicitly and quietly) remain focused on their studies. The authors demon- strate how, in their British study, boys talk about the importance of gaining good grades, but they have to make it look as if they had made such achievements without making any effort (cf. Nyström 2012).

These important findings are often referred to in various Swedish official reports on the topic of gender and school achievement (Björnsson 2005; DEJA 2010; Kimmel 2010; Skolverket 2006, 2009; Wernersson 2010). There has been a significant production of such texts, and yet, in spite of their plurality, what appears so striking is a general convergence around the thesis that there exists an anti-school culture. For example, in a report that received much public attention upon publication, Mats Björnsson claims that,

Compared to boys, it is easier for a girl to be both “popular” and a “swot” in school. This situation is framed by the fact that schools are being more and more feminized with respect to school staff [. . .] Boys often develop their positions within an anti-school culture, something that seems to decline in higher education. [Björnsson 2005:41, author’s translation]

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In another report, published by the Agency for Education in 2006, the gender gap in school achievement is discussed in terms of certain characteristics that are attributed to boys: compared to girls, boys are described in the report as having more relaxed and less ambitious attitudes towards schoolwork. Furthermore, in another report published by this agency that investigated factors affecting school results in Swedish elementary schools, the presence of an anti-school culture is used to explain boys’ school achievements:

Several studies show that anti-school cultures—of various kinds and strengths—are rather wide- spread above all among boys from working class homes, and this in turn plays a crucial factor in their school achievements. [Skolverket 2009:238, author’s translation]

Moreover, in 2008, the Swedish Ministry of Education and Research appointed a commit- tee, named “Delegationen för jämställdhet i skolan” (DEJA), to inquire into equality in schools. The results of the inquiry were published in several volumes of the Swedish government’s official reports series. In their final and concluding publication, DEJA (2010) wrote that the “boy problem” could be explained by the fact that to make a serious effort at school is not perceived among boys as “cool” and that, furthermore, a negative male peer culture is believed to emerge as a result of boys’ later maturity.

Needless to say, the quotations above do not account for the full content of the reports, and some of the texts provide critical discussions of the same concepts (see Wernersson 2010). Nonetheless, in the reports, one can identify plenty of descriptions of “cool” or “traditional” masculinities, which are said not to be fully compatible with the efforts needed in order to get on at school, as well as judgments about the existence of an anti-school culture among boys. My point here is that the theory discussed by Willis and others has in many respects during the last decade taken on a life of its own, serving as the unquestioned backdrop against which the issue is discussed in policy documents. In this article, I shall not undertake any further critical review of Willis’ (or others’) original academic works. What I shall argue, instead, is that it is possible to investigate the theory of anti-school culture as a master narrative—that is, a sociocultural form of interpretation, which both precedes and provides a way to make sense of experiences, practices, and identities about school (see Andrews 2004:1; Bamberg 2004:360).

According to Bethan Benwell and Elizabeth Stokoe, for a piece of talk or text to be categorized as a narrative, it has to “ incorporate basic structural features including a narrator, characters, settings, a plot, events that evolve over time, crisis and resolutions” (2006:133). In addition, to be called a narrative, the story should be able to answer the question of tellability; that is, it has to provide an answer to why the story is worth telling. The anti-school culture theory, as presented in the Swedish reports, includes all these elements: first, there are the narrators who produce the reports; second, we have the presence of established gendered characters, for example “the relaxed, cool, and rowdy boy” or “the ambitious school girl”; third, there is a distinct plot about boys’ disengagement in school as well as, fourth, a clearly defined setting, the school, in which the narrative is said to reside. Furthermore, the story of failing boys and their anti-school culture unfolds temporally. Note how the DEJA report refers to how girls and boys may over time develop different attitudes towards schoolwork; the aspect of boys’ later maturity is believed to cause different, gender-related, peer cultures. The theme of crisis is also present: the narrative gains much of its sustenance in diagnosing a gender gap in school achievement, with reports seeking to offer up possible solutions. Finally, considering the amount of texts written on the subject, there is no doubt that the narrative of boys’ anti-school culture is indeed tellable. As I mentioned in the introduction, my principal interest is in how this narrative is treated, in policy reports, as an unchallenged fact that must be dealt with. The aim of this article is therefore to explore the ways in which the anti-school culture narrative is reproduced, at the same time as it is also contradicted and subverted by students and teachers in social

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interaction within local school contexts. Thus, an implicit consequence of this study may be to contribute to a critical discussion of dominant understandings of boys’ lower academic achievement and oppositional behaviors in school.

A Narrative Perspective

Drawing on Butler’s (1999) theory of performativity, my analysis will stress the impor- tance of language use in the construction of gender identities. This implies the recognition of the constitutive character of language, according to which both the stories told and linguistic styles used (Bucholtz 2011; Coupland 2007) play a crucial role in the construction of particular identities. Thus, the position of the young male student is understood as being constituted in interaction through talk. This statement should, however, not be interpreted as supposing that individuals are free to “choose their own identity” by using whatever linguistic feature they like. Rather, I regard the “rowdy boy” as a subject position that emerges through the intersection of both what particular individuals do with linguis- tic practices and the attitudes about boys and schooling that circulate in public discourse, and that come to be transmitted within the school setting itself (cf. Cameron and Kulick 2003).

One way of analyzing talk as action is through a narrative perspective. Narratives provide us with explanations and meaning, as well as resources with which to construct identities and to make sense of experiences (Riessman 2008; Squire et al. 2008). When students describe their positions or experiences in school, they use stories that are cultur- ally known. Furthermore, within the anti-school narrative, the category of the “rowdy boy” is ascribed certain category bound activities (Sacks 1992)—activities that the category is expected to do—such as “being cool,” “relaxed,” “independent,” “a rule breaker,” “active,” or “immature.” I shall be taking as my point of departure that master narratives may “structure how the world is intelligible, and therefore permeate the petit narratives of our everyday talk” (Bamberg 2004:361). As Andrews states, dominant cultural narratives “become the vehicle through which we comprehend not only the stories of others, but crucially of ourselves as well” (2004:1).

Furthermore, following Michael Bamberg’s call (2006:140) for “small stories” in narra- tive research, this article shall consider storytelling as an activity that takes place between people, with the narrative emerging at the very point of its telling. This perspective on narratives and small stories should be contrasted with a tradition of studying what we might call more canonical stories, often collected in interviews by a researcher with the ambition of grasping the informants’ lengthy and undisturbed narratives. On the contrary, a small story perspective takes an interest in stories that are jointly constructed in inter- action. Following Ellinor Ochs and Lisa Capps (2001), I am looking for the “less polished, less coherent narratives that pervade ordinary social encounters and are a hallmark of the human condition” (2001:57). A key issue in the analysis of small stories is, as Alexandra Georgakopoulou (2007:4) states, to recognize narratives as phenomena embedded in local practices and to understand these stories as both emergent and as a result of processes of negotiation and interaction among members engaged in conversation (see also Milani and Jonsson 2011; Phoenix 2008). This perspective includes an interest in what conversational actions people accomplish in their storytelling (Stokoe and Edwards 2006:57). I will pay specific attention to one such aspect of narrative action, namely the practice of giving accounts, which is defined by Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman as:

[A] linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative inquiry. Such devices are a crucial element in the social order since they prevent conflicts from arising by verbally bridging the gap between action and expectation [. . .] By an account, then, we mean a statement made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior. [1968:46]

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Accounts can in this sense be described as forms of justification, which play the role of saving face for the actor giving the account. In a similar vein, Richard Buttny (1993) suggests that accounts can be viewed as “the use of language to interactionally construct preferred meanings of problematic events” (1993:21). However, Buttny states that accounts have many different functions and cannot solely be said to have a reparative function. They emerge in social interaction and are given meaning in and through a specifiable context. Michael Billig (1996) adds that the purpose of giving an account is far from always to seek consensus, stating that “accounts can be controversial, rather than being devices which prevent controversy” (Billig 1996:212). In this sense, an account can be described as a sort of accusatory disagreement in which the account needs to be performed, otherwise others will presume the accused agrees with the blame (Buttny 1993:60). In other words, blame, accusation, or other forms of criticism call for the addressee to offer an account, an explanation “designed to recast the pejorative significance of action and an individual’s responsibility of it” (Buttny 1993:1; see also Evaldsson 2007).

Methodology and School Context

The data used in this article are taken from two ethnographic studies in two secondary schools; both of them are situated in multi-ethnic suburbs of the Swedish capital Stock- holm. The schools are referred to as the South (project 1) and the North (project 2) school in the text. Despite a widespread image of Sweden as the egalitarian welfare society of northern Europe, the multi-ethnic suburbs of Sweden’s larger cities have become associ- ated with social and ethnic segregation, unemployment, discrimination, poor Swedish language skills, and, not least, underachieving students in underachieving schools (Bunar 2011:142; Kallstenius 2010). Both schools in this article can be described as such examples. Even if some of the students I followed have attained good grades, narratives of the underperforming suburban school, and especially the “rowdy immigrant school boy,” flourish among the informants. The Swedish media plays its part in establishing this image by comparing the achievement of schools, and recurrently publishing their average grades, providing thereby a picture of the winners and losers of schools. This, in turn, serves to strengthen a pattern of well-performing students fleeing from low-status subur- ban schools to the schools of the inner city (which in a Swedish context is equivalent with high status).

Because there is a greater concentration of low-income jobs and higher rates of unem- ployment in the multi-ethnic suburbs, issues of ethnicity and class are very much inter- woven here. Indeed, while I shall talk about students in multi-ethnic schools, many of these same students could be described as children of a new Swedish working class. All the same, in this article it is gender—rather than ethnicity and class—that is the primary focus, principally because I wish to highlight the assumptions underpinning the Swedish reports of both a “male anti-school culture” and “the rowdy boy” category. Though gender is the main focus, the context of the two multi-ethnic schools I have just offered remains relevant for the cases presented in this article and thus should be kept in mind.

The first project took place in a secondary school in a suburban area south of Stockholm over a period of one year, from 2003 to 2004. About half of all students at the school are categorized by school staff as “immigrant pupils” or students of “immigrant descent” (with both parents having been born outside Sweden). I spent three days a week in the school, both at lessons and breaks, with the intended aim of accounting for the pupil’s entire school day. Methodologically, the project involved tape recordings of informal conversations, participant observation annotated in the form of field notes (about 400 printed pages), five group interviews, and 12 individual interviews with students in Years 8 and 9 (age 14–16).

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The second project was conducted in a secondary school north of Stockholm, situated in a multi-ethnic setting, in which a majority of its population are either immigrants or have parents who migrated to Sweden. As part of a commissioned research project to examine why boys from the municipal’s school are performing below the national average, I followed the students two days a week between September 2007 and February 2008, during which time I observed five of the school’s classes in Years 6–9 (ages 12–16). Field notes (about 100 printed pages) were complemented with tape recordings of naturally occurring talk and semistructured group interviews with 18 pupils. When, in this article, I present excerpts of conversations, I am referring to data that were audiotaped and then transcribed. When I present students’ conversations in text with quotation marks but without using excerpts, I am utilizing data that were documented by my field notes, which were written down as the conversations took place.

So as to obtain a variety of narratives and perspectives on the subject, I followed both male and female students, both those who do well and those who do less well at school. Because I am interested in the performance of gender, alongside the positions that stu- dents come to occupy in everyday school life, participant observations together with tape recordings of naturally occurring talk have, in my data collection, been privileged over individual interviews. Nonetheless, interviews—which I consider as another instance of social interaction, jointly produced by the researcher and the participants in the study— offer a further opportunity to discuss the topic of gender and school achievement under circumstances that differ from interaction in the classroom and during break times; such data therefore provide additional perspectives on the subject.

The four cases presented below have been selected from this large data corpus for several reasons. First, they all relate to the anti-school culture narrative and thus allow an investi- gation into how this narrative is used or contested in mundane talk. For instance, in focusing exclusively on these four cases, a possibility will be afforded to make sense of those situations in which students in various ways oppose schoolwork. Second, they offer examples in which the participants themselves (whether teachers or students) explicitly define the situation or the story as one about rule-breaking activity, in one form or another, or an unwillingness among students to fulfill what school requires. Third, these types of activities—along with the commentaries offered on these same activities—are part of everyday school life, insofar as they remain common to my material, broadly speaking. During my time at the two schools, I noticed daily examples of students disengaging themselves from schoolwork, whether sharing a joke among friends or partaking in other oppositional interactions within the class room. At the same time, my field notes are equally filled with examples of situations where those same students followed teachers’ instruc- tions and fulfilled their school tasks with quiet efficiency. Having said that, I shall not claim that the examples below are in any way representative of all the interactions that took place in the schools under investigation, neither shall I provide any form of typology of all kinds of rule-breaking activities that might exist in these schools. Rather, I have selected these four cases in order to critically discuss the prevailing narrative of boys’ anti-school culture.

We Have to Focus!

Locally collated statistics on pupils’ grades show that the North School has a lower ranking than the municipal average, with boys having somewhat lower grades than girls in all the schools in the area. This is, after all, the reason why I was invited to the school’s classrooms in the first place; as part of a commissioned research project, I was asked to study and comment on boys’ achievement in one of the municipality’s schools.

On one particular day, I sit in a Swedish class for Year 9 pupils (15 to 16 years old) when the teacher, Inger, instructs the pupils to work in small groups and write a short essay.

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Dennis, Nima, Ale, and Mark—four boys described by some of their peers as “popular” or “those who think they’re cool”—quickly ask their teacher if they can work in a small study room next to the classroom. With Inger’s permission, the boys enter the study room, and as they close the door the atmosphere changes from quiet classroom chit-chat to loud banter. Dennis looks at me and asks: “Why are you following us?” Before I have an opportunity to respond, Mark suggests: “Well, to get the worst examples!” By posing the question, Dennis, for a few moments, reminds me about my position in the class. Being a white adult male in my mid-thirties, I am not perceived as one of the boys in school, nor am I seen as a teacher; simply, I am recognized as a researcher by students.

Retrospectively I sometimes felt that my presence served to accentuate an anti-school culture narrative, as if the boys had an idea of what kind of stories I was trying to collect in my role as “researcher.” By endeavoring not to lecture the boys, of habitually taking field notes while suspending moral judgments whenever the classroom norm was being overrun, sometimes these strategies provoked laughter from the students and, even, instigated more rule-breaking activities among those I followed. On the other hand, my presence generated many accounts of students seeking explicitly to distance themselves from anti-school culture attitudes, as a way of absolving themselves from being held responsible for any rule-breaking actions. Interestingly, both the performance of the student position that Mark then labels as the “worst example,” and the strategy to disso- ciate oneself from the same position, draws on the narrative of boys’ anti-school culture. To be able to embody as well as to mark out a distance from the “rowdy boy” category means that the category of the “rowdy boy” must have already been culturally established.

Therefore, when Mark describes his group as “the worst example,” I cannot avoid thinking that this is an interesting self-presentation—what exactly is he referring to? Maybe the next few minutes in the study room will give some indication.

On one side of the study room, books and other school supplies are stored on some shelves. There Mark finds some rolls of tape which he starts unwinding so that he can make a ball of tape. Suddenly, Inger opens the door and the lads are caught off guard. They try to hide the ball and pretend to be doing their schoolwork. Nonetheless, Inger notices the ball of tape and tells Mark to throw it in the rubbish bin, whereupon she underlines the importance of concentrating on the classwork. The boys then mumble their explanations as they briefly lean over their textbooks. However, as soon as Inger leaves the room again, Mark says: “Pick up the ball of tape, she’ll kill me if she sees me, give me the tape too! I hope she won’t see me, I don’t want no shit!” The boys continue chatting while throwing the ball to each other. Now and then, they look out through the room’s glass windows to see if the teacher will return. They disobey their teacher’s order not to play with the ball, and they run the risk of being found out by the teacher.

Within narrative analysis, temporality is often described as a hallmark that distin- guishes narratives from other linguistic features. However, Georgakopoulou (2007) argues that this aspect should not be restricted solely to time that has passed. In the studio room, the boys discuss a near future—what might happen if the teacher discovers their rule-breaking activities. This small story of theirs includes a possible crisis: the risk of being detected and then falling from their teacher’s grace. The very point of the game with the tape ball seems to be exactly this: to collectively break a class rule, to dare to take that risk and to talk about what will happen if or when the teacher enters. Furthermore, both the practices of breaking the school rules as well as speculations surrounding a possible future conflict with the teacher are associated with the category of the “rowdy student.” Otherwise put, we can say that this short conversation indexes (Georgakopoulou 2007:142; Ochs 1992) who the boys in the study room are.

On the one hand, the anti-school culture narrative offers the positions to which the boys relate in their discussion of what will happen if their teacher sees them playing with the

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ball; it is through this established narrative that, indeed, the jokes and the tape-ball game come to make sense. On the other hand, however, this very narrative is contradicted by other statements made during the same interaction event. While playing with the ball of tape, the boys begin to think aloud about who should initiate the classwork. This is a lengthy procedure: “I cannot, you can write!” Nima says. “No, I can’t be bothered” Ale replies. “We really should be working by now, we have to finish in time!” Nima repeats, commenting on the fact that time is running out in the lesson. Nima’s turn is almost identical to Inger’s previous words, even though she is no longer present in the room. After having reminded his comrades of the importance of doing schoolwork, Nima sits down and starts writing the first few lines in his notebook and after a short while Dennis suddenly takes over from Nima as the author of the essay. He sits in Nima’s seat and starts writing where Nima had stopped. There seems to be a tacit agreement that someone has to assume responsibility to ensure that the work is coming along while the others keep him company, telling jokes, playing with the ball, and being social. Inger once again opens the study room door and asks how they are getting on with the work. “We’re discussing the key points today, and putting it in words tomorrow,” Nima explains in a way that I perceive as a strategy to confirm that they really are working on the essay and to conceal the fact that a few minutes earlier they were not doing the work and were clearly breaking the class rules. However, when the teacher leaves the room, the same points are made, but this time it is Nima telling his friends: “Now we’ve really got to work. We’ve got to keep up, this is Year 9!” “Well, I can read if you write, I’m not important to the group anyway!” Mark states.

How to interpret Mark’s response, here? Maybe it is to be read along the lines of the anti-school narrative, as a strategy adopted by Mark to avoid making an effort. And yet, at the same time, the statement is presented as an excuse; he provides an account (Buttny 1993) for not doing the school task. According to Ochs and Capps (2001:103), a social group holds its members morally accountable for their actions. An important way to construct membership in such a community is for its members to recognize what is to count as the moral standard, what principles shall keep right distinct from wrong? This question is addressed by Mark in the form of a comment to the discussion about the school task. His account includes a norm, such that one is supposed to contribute to schoolwork and be important to the group. All the boys agree to finish the schoolwork, and finally Ale summarizes this agreement by asking about the standard of their work: “All right, what grade are we aiming for then, a high or an average one?”

The boys use different recognizable linguistic features, or what Coupland (2007) calls styles, with various performative effects during the short episode. Note how Nima uses a style that mimics the voice of the teacher. Because no laughter follows his words, his speech is not perceived as a form of parody or irony. Nima’s shift in style serves none- theless to challenge hegemonic discourses about how boys are categorized as the “cool” boys in their local school context, and how such boys are expected and appear to speak. By shifting styles, Nima is for a moment embracing the position of the school-oriented student. By showing themselves as both rule-breaking and ambitious school students, the boys negotiate identities and piece together an evaluative perspective (Ochs and Capps 2001:36) on school strategies. This situation resembles what Frosh, Phoenix, and Pattman (2002:201) note about boys’ balancing act between performing hegemonic masculinity and being successful students. There is, however, a crucial difference when comparing their research with the situated example I have described above. Drawing on data from indi- vidual and group interviews, the British study pointed out that boys’ school-oriented approach should not be visible to other boys. This meant that young men tried to achieve good grades in school without showing the others their efforts. Conversely, in the present study, Ale, Mark, Dennis, and Nima are very open about the importance of producing

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good school assignments. Although, admittedly, the strategy of playing with a ball of tape while writing the essay is probably not the most efficient way of achieving the best grades. And yet the boys make plain that they must make an effort, as demonstrated by their comments: “Come on!,” “Now we have to focus!,” “This is Year 9!,” and “What grade are we aiming for?” Obviously, it is possible in the boys’ community to perform other masculinities than solely the one of the anti-school–oriented young man. Therefore, it is neither a refusal to study nor a risk of losing face in front of male friends when engaging in schoolwork that explains the situation.

I Don’t Care!

There are now different types of rule-breaking activities taking place in school, and the above example of boys who challenge classroom norms while showing a willingness to do well in their studies is far from the only scenario. The following case is taken from an ethnographic study at a secondary school in the south of Stockholm.

Daniel, 14, is often described by teachers and classmates as a “rowdy boy.” This categorization carries within itself a narrative of who he is and how he is to be addressed in school: when it came to light during my year of fieldwork that there had been various violations of school rules, I noticed that Daniel was usually singled out as a suspect for questioning. During an interview, he explains to me that he has been summoned to the principal’s office many times and that he has to, in different ways, defend his conduct in school. He describes himself to me as someone who is “not the teacher’s pet” and who dissociates himself from both the teachers and the vast majority of his classmates. In the same interview, Daniel presents himself as “Swedish,” in opposition to what he calls the “disturbing immigrant boys” at the school. His statements, jokes, and disparaging remarks on the theme of immigrant identities are also the reason why he is accused of being racist by some of his classmates—a label from which he clearly disidentifies. Nonetheless, such an allegation further establishes his position among classmates as somewhat strange, exhibiting as he does the wrong or immoral set of beliefs. At school, Daniel has few friends and, apart from these friendships, he describes his schooldays as a pretty frustrating part of his life.

During one of his English classes, Daniel sits beside me at the back of the classroom. The teacher, Berit, tells her pupils to listen carefully to a tape-recorded story and to be ready to answer questions afterwards about the piece to which they have listened. It is a story about someone at a radio station who makes a prank call and, in jest, tells a lie. Daniel is slouched over his desk; it looks like he is asleep when the teacher turns off the tape recorder and asks him the first question: “Who is the caller?” Daniel replies that he does not know, but Berit is unsatisfied with his answer. “Why don’t you know, were you asleep?” Daniel defends himself by saying: “I didn’t hear!” Berit rewinds the tape and plays the story once again as Daniel openly goes back to slouching over his desk. When the story finishes for the second time, Berit asks him the same question: “Who is the caller?” “The studio . . .” Daniel begins, but then falls silent. “If I ask you to listen, then you should listen!” “The studio technicians” Daniel replies and Berit confirms that he finally got it right, adding that, in any case, he has to keep up and do what is expected of him during her lessons.

The class picks up where it left off. Berit asks her pupils questions about the story, and for a moment Daniel escapes her attention. At the end of the lesson though, Berit returns to him with new questions, and once more he cannot give satisfactory answers. Berit now switches from English to Swedish, so as to emphasize the seriousness of what she says and to ensure that no words will be misunderstood: “Don’t you understand that I am disap- pointed with you, you have done well otherwise!” Daniel replies that he doesn’t under-

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stand why she would be disappointed with him, saying that he will switch to another teacher’s language group anyway, adding; “So I don’t care!”

Daniel’s replies, in combination with his way of openly slouching over his desk, are illustrative of the anti-school narrative. We are here presented with the necessary narrative elements: the male student character who (as the plot of the story) distances himself from school, who expressly says he does not bother about either the teacher’s instructions or her reprimands, and who performs a “cool” masculinity with his classmates as his audience. This is also the retelling of a story that is clearly evaluated by his teacher: Daniel’s actions are taken by her as an example of bad manners and serve as a reason for her to be disappointed. However, there are some ambiguities in this situation that ought to be considered too. When I ask other students in the class about the incident, it does not look like Daniel’s comments have gained him popularity, and he does not seem to have performed a “cool masculinity” at all. On the contrary, the dominant view among his classmates is that he has disturbed the lesson; he is generally annoying and somewhat odd to boot. Thus, I understand the classroom interaction as follows: Daniel’s defiant reply, “I don’t care,” is a linguistic resource he uses in classroom dialogue framed by evaluation and discipline. When Berit repeats her questions, Daniel is revealed as someone who is not paying enough attention, or in other words, he is positioned as a failing student. This is an accusation that calls for an account, and the practice of giving accounts is therefore an important part of the narrative work undertaken in this classroom example.

Buttny (1993:21) describes accounts as closely related to the normative organization of adjacency pairs in talk. An adjacency pair is composed by two utterances, expressed by two speakers. Either the second part provides an expected answer to the first part’s turn, or the speaker gives an account of why the preferred answer does not work. Failure to provide one of these responses counts as violating the adjacency pair rule (Buttny 1993:42). Daniel clearly provides a dispreferred response because he answers that he does not know who the caller in the story is. The teacher’s questions are not only a test of knowledge here; by posing the questions, Berit does not only blame him for not giving the correct answers but also for not being watchful at her lesson. The teacher’s questions have, in that sense, a disciplinary effect.

Despite the fact that the teacher and the student do not agree, I regard their classroom conversation as an example of how a narrative of the “rowdy school boy” emerges in interaction. This narrative includes a certain dramaturgical element: Daniel is asked ques- tions he initially cannot answer, and the fact that the teacher returns at the end of the lesson with new questions that remain unanswered serves to consolidate Daniel’s position as a pupil who does not perform well at school. By announcing that he will switch language groups and telling his teacher that he does not care, he is claiming he is not dependent on the class that makes judgments on his behavior. Thus, the teacher’s words do not have such a profound effect on him. Daniel’s account reduces thereby the power of the blame (Buttny 1993). This is in line with Goodwin’s finding (1990) that expressions like “I do not care” can be used to demonstrate that the previous speaker’s turn will have less impact. It is a strategy to reduce the force of the previous speaker’s words, a way to claim that what has just been said is irrelevant. Moreover, I would assert that the “rowdy boy” category is deeply ingrained in the school’s local discourse. Berit’s appeals to Daniel— calling upon him to change his behavior and start listening to the lesson—have their point of derivation in the existence of this position. Equally, Daniel’s defense that he does not care has its origin in the presence of the “rowdy boy” category. The classroom dialogue evokes this masculine position. According to this interpretation, Daniel is basically not distancing himself from the school in order to construct a “cool masculinity.” On the contrary, his use of the expression “I don’t care” could be understood as a way to escape the accusation that he is failing at school. To be categorized as a failed student, or as a pupil

Jonsson Boys’ Anti-School Culture? 285

in whom the teacher has reason to be disappointed, is a blame that Daniel seems to defend himself against. At the same time, telling the teacher “I don’t care” confirms the anti-school narrative as well as Daniel’s position as the “rowdy boy” in the classroom.

You Shouldn’t Be a Doormat!

What I have tried to show so far is how the anti-school culture theory could be interpreted as a master narrative, which is both reproduced and contested in local school contexts. The influence of the narrative, when used to make sense of experiences from school life, is also evident when, in group interviews, I ask students at the North School to reflect on study strategies and gender. A recurring response when I ask them to describe how a good student is expected to act—or what the characteristics of a successful study strategy are—is that one should be attentive and willing to follow the teacher’s instruc- tions. However, this strategy seems to be associated with a problem.

On one occasion, Ale, Saman, Dennis, and Nima speak ironically about being able to follow instructions, and then, in a more serious tone, they add that students awarded the highest grades “are silent and feel embarrassed.”

A—Ale (student) S—Saman (student) R—Researcher

A: Like it’s like this, what do you call it? Girls who feel embarrassed and are quiet all the time.

S: They get the good grades! A: Even if they do badly, even if their results are bad but they’re kind- R: What do you mean they feel embarrassed? I think that’s interesting. A: Well, they’re quiet, they do not talk, and they don’t dare to speak. R: No, and then you get good grades? A: Yes that’s (.) yes kind of, or like if I’ve got good grades good results but at the same

time I’m a bit disruptive then maybe someone else who’s quiet and feels embarrassed and who has worse results than me, they can still get just as good grades as mine or even better! [—]

R: Does that go for both boys and girls or is it- A: For girls because most guys are not so quiet (yes) and then they say that you should

be active and participate in the lessons (.) but (1.0) it seems that when you don’t participate you get good grades.

The above discussion includes a metalinguistic reflection; what Ale portrays as a success- ful study strategy is at the same time a description of a linguistic style characterized by not speaking during a classroom discussion and by feeling embarrassed, which the boys in their comments index as something feminine. Here, Ale makes a comment on gender and language as well as on academic performances—two phenomena that, according to his description, are closely connected. His reflection is also reminiscent of dominant descrip- tions of “silent girls” and “noisy boys” in school. Boys’ domination in classroom talk has been ascribed to their anti-school culture, whereas girls’ silence (whatever that means) does not seem to prevent them from performing well in schoolwork (for a critical discus- sion, see Sunderland 2004).

Furthermore, in their conversation, femininity is constructed in relation to masculinity and is described as something of which the boys are not a part; femininity is described as something, more to the point, deemed to be of lower value, associated with characteristics

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such as cowardice and obsequiousness (cf. Frosh et al. 2002). The boys, however, articulate this feminine style with what it means to be successful in the school system. Being quiet and being a girl is, according to the boys, rewarded with high grades in the school’s hidden curriculum.

Ale continues the conversation a little bit later, saying that in order to succeed in school, you have to “brown nose.” “You have to bake biscuits and bring music from your country of origin,” Dennis adds, as one of the girls in his class once did. “Be nice and do your homework,” Saman continues; “Never argue!” Dennis further adds, and once the topic is introduced, the examples seem to never end: “Don’t be late, do not talk during classes because even if you are smart and know the subject, your chances are ruined if you talk too much.” “So then they will judge you before they’ve seen your results,” Ale says, and Nima agrees: “Exactly, they judge you if you talk in the classroom.”

What performative work is being done, and what narrative is being told here? Through their jointly constructed story on silent girls and talkative boys, the boys construct them- selves as autonomous, independent, and unfairly treated. They manage to do so by using characters from established narratives on gender and school achievement; the “indepen- dent boy,” the “unfair teacher,” and the “brown-nosing” and “quiet girl.” These categories are drawn upon to explain why the boys themselves are unable to achieve higher grades or why there is no point studying more than they already do. Together the boys construct a story where the word embarrassed, along with the strategy of brown nosing, includes aspects of subordination to the teacher’s authority but also performs expected pupil identities—in the boys’ account, a student passes as a good student by not challenging the teacher’s position. This, we can add, is a highly tellable story; not just one of many to be told, rather it is greatly encouraged in the conversation.

Ale and Saman comment on a further category, namely that of “immigrant students.” An “immigrant student” is expected to perform an immigrant stereotype who “brings biscuits and music from their homeland” as the boys ironically remark. These comments shall be interpreted in relation to another influential narrative, which is sometimes drawn upon by the schools’ staff when non-white students, who happen to have parents who were born outside of Sweden, are affirmed as “immigrant students” in school. This is often carried out in a positive tone that nonetheless makes race and ethnicity the principal marker of difference. I have shown in previous writings (Jonsson 2007; Milani and Jonsson 2011; Milani and Jonsson 2012) how the category of the “young immigrant lad” is often associated with trouble, disturbance, and improper language use in every- day school life. In the excerpt above, however, we discover an interesting twist on this theme: the boys critically point out an equally common stereotype, namely the well- behaved “immigrant girl” who helps around the house, baking cookies with an “ethnic recipe.”

Furthermore, even though much school ethnographic research shows examples of the active, gender-bending school girl or the cocky working-class girls who connect “being a nice girl” to a deficit and a lack of toughness and personality (Ambjörnsson 2004; Reay 2001), the discourse of the silent and obedient girl stands firm. Thus, the boys’ reflections are also a description of the problems associated with being too quiet in school.

Berivan and Shirin, two girls from middle-class homes, both of whom have very good grades, give a similar description when I ask them about their study strategies. They point out that although they both achieve good grades in school, they do not always intend to be hard-working students, and it would probably not even be wise for them to do so:

S—Shirin (student) B—Berivan (student) R—Researcher

Jonsson Boys’ Anti-School Culture? 287

S: Well, you can’t go nine years in school without getting thrown out of the classroom at some time or other! Without getting told off at some stage and without anything bad written in your absence report, it just isn’t possible, you would go crazy, it simply can’t be done!

R: What do you mean by that? Why would you go crazy? S: Hey listen! Imagine you have been in school for nine years and just have listened to

what people say and only done what others are telling you to do (1.0), how would you then cope with working life after school? It doesn’t work!

R: No, so you also need- S: Your boss would take the rip! [In original “driva sönder,” meaning tease and exploit]

(Berivan laughs)

R: What else do you need then? S: You would become a doormat, it doesn’t work! You have to- R: So instead you have to? S: Well different opinions, sometimes you just have to live! R: But what does that mean? Just to live? S: You can’t simply be a school person, just go home from school, back to school! (yeah)

then you would go completely (1.0) insane! B: Instead go out sometimes, go home, eat, and take it easy.

Even though Berivan and Shirin themselves really are aiming to achieve high grades, they claim in the excerpt that there are still reasons for violating the position of being completely loyal to the lesson. “You can’t simply be a school person” as Shirin says. The girls seem to denote a different ability, beyond those that are rewarded in the classroom. This ability could be described as acting independently. “Take it easy” and “go out” are used in the talk as positive words that indicate independence in relation to school and studies. Time—both with respect to the past and the future—is used as a resource in the girls’ narrative. To spend nine years of compulsory schooling as the passive student is evaluated against the girls’ future positions as adults in the labor market. Through the use of time in their narrative telling, the girls transform various student positions, from a past and present in school to a coming future beyond the school yard. A link is thus made between various chronological selves (Blomberg and Börjesson 2013), according to which of those positions established in school are presumed to follow you into adult life and, specifically, into the workplace. In this way, the girls use a narrative that orders the characters of students in both time and space (Bamberg 2004:354). In addition, the silent or passive student, which was previously rendered feminine in the boys’ conver- sation, is obviously a position from which Berivan and Shirin clearly wish to distance themselves.

Concluding Remarks

Many gender scholars have critically discussed discourses of a “feminized school” or “the poor boys as the new losers” as dominant explanations to the gender gap in school achievement (Epstein et al. 1998). I concur with their criticism and also with the argu- ment that there are reasons for drawing attention to other categorizations than gender when investigating students’ different learning outcomes (Lahelma 2005). As Griffin (2000) has pointed out, boys are often constructed as a homogeneous group within the dominant discourse that focuses on their collective underachievement. Nonetheless, there is an implicit understanding also as to which boys are actually at risk—often

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categorized as working-class or ethnic “other” (Francis 2006; Nordberg 2008; Reed 1999). The discourses on failing boys in school may therefore actually reproduce a normative masculinity at the same time that it marginalizes other groups of pupils as deviant, in need of a firmer upbringing and more discipline. In this article, I have sought to make a further contribution to this critical discussion. I have argued that when the concept of boys’ anti-school culture is used as both a master narrative and the unquestioned point of departure in explaining boys’ attitudes and behaviors in schools, it risks reconstructing the “rowdy boy” category and establishing it in a way that fails to elucidate the complexity of students’ negotiations of both study strategies and pupil identities.

I have advocated an analysis that pays close attention to linguistic resources in social interaction. I have promoted a small story perspective, based on ethnographic field notes and the documentation of naturally occurring talk and group interviews. This perspective has been harnessed in order to grasp the co-constructiveness of narratives and moreover to understand how stories about failing boys in school can be seen as the results of processes of negotiation among students and school staff, engaged in everyday conversa- tions (Georgakopoulou 2007). Within this perspective, the anti-school culture theory shall not be seen solely as a way to explain attitudes and school experiences that students express; it also constitutes a master narrative that precedes identities and that is available to use—or to contradict—when students and teachers make sense of their everyday school lives.

Finally, with use of the concept of account, it is possible to analyze situations in which students in various ways oppose schoolwork and thus shift analytical focus on the inter- actional work being done in specific classroom events. Departing from Buttny’s (1993:1) description of accounts as talk designed to recast the pejorative significance of action and an individual’s responsibility for that said action, I argue that situations of protest in classrooms are not necessarily or always expressions of “cool masculinities” or boys’ anti-school culture. When Daniel informed his teacher he could not hear the tape, nor that he cared about her criticism, he used these expressions to escape the accusation of being labelled a failing student. For further research on boys and schooling, I call for an analysis that considers various expressions of opposition as linguistic resources, and their avail- ability to some students, as part of their complex and ongoing performances of gender and pupil positions in everyday school life.

Rickard Jonsson is associate professor of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm Univer- sity ([email protected]).

Notes

Acknowledgments. Special thanks to former AEQ editor professor Nancy H. Hornberger and three anonymous reviewers for their incisive critique. I am also grateful to Tommaso M. Milani for useful feedback on an earlier version of this text and to David Payne for proofreading as well as making insightful comments on the article. Earlier versions of this text were presented at the International Multidisciplinary Workshop of Marginalization Processes, Örebro, April 2012, and at the Platform for Research on Inclusive Schooling, Göteborg, March 2013. This research has been generously funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Transcription conventions: (.) denotes a short pause of less than one second; (1.0) denotes a longer pause, time in seconds; underlined marks something said with emphasis; ? denotes question into- nation; ! denotes exclamation intonation;—denotes words that are cut off; [—] marks removed part of speech or text.

Jonsson Boys’ Anti-School Culture? 289

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