School Talk: Gender and Adolescent Culture

by Donna Eder, Catherine Colleen Evans, Stephen Parker

Donna Eder is Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. She earned her Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of Wisconsin. She has written numerous journal articles and book chapters in the areas of gender, schooling, and women's culture. Her current research involves in-depth interviews with storytellers from different cultures to better understand the role of storytelling in teaching about social differences and social dynamics.Eder has a deep interest in the sociology of education—and in community. Her first major research study of adolescent peer culture, SCHOOL GENDER AND ADOLESCENT CULTURE, led to her creating a service project in the Bloomington schools, Kids Against Cruel Treatment in Schools. KACTIS became an essential part of her first service-learning course, Social Context of Schooling. 

KACTIS revealed many social and ethical issues, launching Eder into more research, this time learning from Navajo and Kenyan storytellers how children can understand ethics and diversity through practices used in oral cultures. She borrowed non-Western concepts of learning as she crafted a service-learning project, Storytelling as Reflecting Time (START), which became the basis of a service-learning course, Knowledge and Community, taught to sociology majors and honor students.

The approach is so effective that Eder cannot accommodate all of the requests she receives for START, which is conducted both in the classroom and through extracurricular activities throughout Bloomington. She works with the Hutton Philanthropic Initiative, where students use storytelling to interact with community children in a meaningful way. Students in her Community Building Across Generations course take their storytelling to a nursing home and a program for children whose families are escaping domestic violence.

Eder also mentors other instructors on campus who are interested in service-learning.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Gender

209 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1995

Reviews

[Silke · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the lens of an educator, I found this book to be useful in understanding my students and some of their behaviors. From the lens of an empowerment self-defense instructor, this book offered some insights into peer socialization of gender norms for both masculinity and femininity and how each is enforced through language in middle school situations. The author suggests that teaching girls to be assertive and to assert their rights may be insufficient and may lead to further ridicule. Instead, their research showed that "making an even more ridiculous or humorous comment , turning the humor back on the initial insulter, or finding ways to transform the meaning of an act or comment into a non-sexual domain" is often more effective (p. 163). The author makes a number of other useful suggestions to help girls (and boys) reject the enforcement and policing of gender roles.

[Tiny Pants · Rating 4 out of 5]

I give the people who worked on this project much credit for spending three years -- years, people! -- listening to and observing Indiana middle schoolers' cafeteria talk. While so much of their talk sounds utterly mundane (or profane, depending how you look at it), these authors' continued observation allowed them to find the patterns in how styles of everyday talk like insults, group storytelling, and gossip contribute to adolescents' gender identity projects. Particularly interesting as well are the authors' insights into how cliques and social hierarchies are formed and maintained.

[Rachel Nickens · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. It explores my major research areas. They did years of fieldwork. And yet, in the words of my many professors, the authors failed to answer the "So what?" question. The findings are unsurprising. The analysis is obvious. I'm honestly surprised Rutgers published this.