Girls in education: citizenship, agency and emotions

Abstract

Education has been expected to maintain status quo through regulation of citizens, but also to contribute to social change and emancipation. In a collective ethnographic project we have proposed that these contradictions manifest themselves in everyday life at school through tensions between control and agency. Girls encounter practices whereby their use of space is curtailed, their embodiment is controlled and their voice is frequently considered inappropriate. Limitations encountered by girls when striving for independent individuality and citizenship generate a range of emotions. Girls enter educational spaces with the expectation of attaining rational individuality as learners. They often bestow great expectations on schooling and long to attain the position of an abstract independent individual and a citizen capable of exercising agency. In this process they enter a ‘transpositional’ space that frequently reminds them of their gender, as Victoria Foster suggests. The analysis is based on an ethnographic study and subsequent life history interviews on transitions of girls in ethnography.