Indisciplined girls in a highschool: a study under gender approach

Author(s)

Lilian Piorkowsky dos Santos

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Educação (FE/SBD)
• Defense date: 2007-04-11

Examining board members

Marilia Pinto de Carvalho; Marilia Pontes Esposito; Maria de Fátima Salum Moreira

• Advisor: Marilia Pinto de Carvalho

Abstract

This research intended to comprehend both the meanings of indiscipline at school and the consequential punishments based on the students\' perspective. It focuses on female students who were considered bad-behaved girls by the school staff, in a public high school in São Paulo. The study was based on a qualitative methodology and the following steps were taken: school documents analysis, observation of students in different places within the school, interviews with several school professionals and students. We believed that the many different ways of disciplining students at school worked as a form of building gender relations, while these gender relations were also part of the dominant conceptions of discipline and indiscipline. As a result, we found that there were multiple meanings of school indiscipline and of the rules that worked effectively: we could notice that teachers and students had different perceptions about the meaning of being badbehaved; girls who where considered bad-behaved were unlikely to define themselves the same way. Moreover, students and staff tended to consider boys\' and girls\' behaviors as natural attributions. However, they were also able to: evaluate these behaviors in more flexible and multiple ways, notice changes and try to understand them. Additionally, girls expressed ambiguous feelings about school, perceiving it as both a \"prison\" and a place where they were freer than at home. In the last chapter, the analyses were focused in the bad-behaved girls\' perception of injustice: bad-behaved boys and girls received different punishments and were treated differently among themselves and also in relation to other girls, in different places within the school, even during Physical Education classes. These different treatments happened due to lack of knowledge and precise laws as well as to the attention bad-behaved girls would catch - not only did they not fit to the dominant female pattern accepted by the school professionals, but they also created different forms of being feminine at school. (AU)