Paul Willis Context And Concepts
Context and concepts
Paul Willis conducted a study called “Learning to labour” in 1977 in which he studied 12 working class students in their last 18 months at a school in the West-Midlands, the methods he used were observation and participant observation.
The boys he studied were known as the “lads”. These boys knew what they needed to do in order to achieve and get qualifications but instead they chose to reject school and developed laddish behaviour, because they believed that education was unmasculine and uncool and that they would get a job even if they didn’t have any qualifications. They thought that manual labour was more worthy than work at a desk or an office.
This is where my first concept “laddism” stems from. This is a male script of toughness which is characterised by …show more content…
For example teachers tend to be less strict with boys and they tolerate low standards of work from them, which leads to them overestimating their abilities and they become overconfident and not work hard enough in order to achieve highly, which links to my second concept of “teacher’s expectations”
Before I operationalise my research method I will need to design an observational framework that meets the needs of my research and that corresponds to my contextual studies. It will also help me to be consistent in what I observe. The things that I will need to look out for are: they way that the pupils are seated, the amount of times that the lesson has been stopped due to disturbance and if this was mostly from boys, and how the badly behaved pupils react to the good kids, do they bully them? Also I will be looking at the way that the boys contribute to the lessons, are they keen to learn?
This will show that the boys are behaving in a “laddish” way, which operationalises my first
Paul Willis conducted a study called “Learning to labour” in 1977 in which he studied 12 working class students in their last 18 months at a school in the West-Midlands, the methods he used were observation and participant observation.
The boys he studied were known as the “lads”. These boys knew what they needed to do in order to achieve and get qualifications but instead they chose to reject school and developed laddish behaviour, because they believed that education was unmasculine and uncool and that they would get a job even if they didn’t have any qualifications. They thought that manual labour was more worthy than work at a desk or an office.
This is where my first concept “laddism” stems from. This is a male script of toughness which is characterised by …show more content…
For example teachers tend to be less strict with boys and they tolerate low standards of work from them, which leads to them overestimating their abilities and they become overconfident and not work hard enough in order to achieve highly, which links to my second concept of “teacher’s expectations”
Before I operationalise my research method I will need to design an observational framework that meets the needs of my research and that corresponds to my contextual studies. It will also help me to be consistent in what I observe. The things that I will need to look out for are: they way that the pupils are seated, the amount of times that the lesson has been stopped due to disturbance and if this was mostly from boys, and how the badly behaved pupils react to the good kids, do they bully them? Also I will be looking at the way that the boys contribute to the lessons, are they keen to learn?
This will show that the boys are behaving in a “laddish” way, which operationalises my first