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A challenge for history education in Sweden involves integrating questions regarding relationships and sex education. The purpose of this article is to explore how students and teachers relate historical narratives about women’s sexuality between the past and present, with a particular focus on students’ discussion of shame. To analyse shame as something beyond the individual, we focus on the interrelationship of gender, sexuality and shame. The study builds on a poststructural understanding of gender, norms, sexuality and subjectification. The data comprise video-recorded classroom observations, focus group interviews with 16–19-year-old students, and interviews with their teachers. The findings are structured into two themes: shame as regulating women’s sexuality, and sexualised shame as a historical continuity. We conclude that it is highly challenging for a history teacher to construe a classroom environment that breaks with traditional historiography without resorting to a fragmentation of history into isolated case studies of the spectacular.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Qualitative Methods in PER: A Critical Examination.] This article details methodologies employed to enable sharing and coconstructing the stories of three women’s lives in physics. The first case explores the usefulness of timeline interviewing, where participants narrate episodes that are coconstructed with the researcher as meaningful over time. We illustrate this method in the case of a mature student in Sweden from a working-class background who shared moments that added up to a life outside of physics and then a sharp turn into physics later in life. The second case explores life-history interviewing using a narrative-inquiry approach and deep relationship building which enabled the coconstruction of stories of experiences over time. These moments are coconstructed with the researcher and analyzed using an intersectionality lens to yield a story depicting the transnational experiences of a woman of color moving across various European contexts into the North American physics context. The final case is of a first-generation Canadian woman of color who shared her navigations of in and out of school physics via a method known as the “Rivers of Life.” Using this method, the participant narrates their experiences with physics as a river, using metaphorical tools like rafts, rocks, rapids, tributaries to discuss various moments described as twists and turns over time that together amount to a life in physics. We discuss the value of different approaches to coconstructing narratives with participants and, in particular, the need for this kind of research in physics contexts.

This article explores how female university students' abilities to present themselves as 'authentic' engineers are imbricated with discursive constructions of gender and gender equality. The empirical data comes from interviews and video diaries collected with three female engineering students. The analysis demonstrates the power of the Swedish gender equality discourse to inform the students' talk as they negotiate their gendered identities to become intelligible as engineering students and engineers. We suggest that gender equality is used as a resource in the repertoires, but we also demonstrate that this discourse becomes a dilemma in that it limits possibilities for gender performances to go beyond old patterns. Despite this, the article still shows three unique ways of negotiating gender and other social categories in different situations connected to university learning and participation in internships.

Physics- and computer-related disciplines are strongly male dominated in Western higher education. Feminist research has demonstrated how this can be understood as reflecting a strong privileging of mind and rationality (over body/nature/emotions) in these disciplines, which harmonises with broader notions of masculinity as transcendental and disembodied. However, as we demonstrate in this paper, being recognised as legitimate in these fields is also tightly connected to embodiment. Drawing on post-structural gender theory, we explore how notions of corporeality, style and aesthetics are articulated within computer engineering and physics settings at two higher education institutions, one in Canada, one in Sweden. Using empirical data from two case studies, we demonstrate that these disciplines are usually understood as 'gender neutral' by students but that interest and competence in these fields are simultaneously understood as embodied through neglect for style and corporeal aesthetics, in ways that contribute to the masculinisation of these fields.

This article reports the results of an empirical study exploring the discourses of physics teacher educators. We ask how the expressed understandings of a physics teacher education programme in the talk of teacher educators potentially support the identity construction of new teachers. Nine teacher educators from different sections of a physics teacher programme in Sweden were interviewed. The concept of discourse models was used to operationalise how the discourses of the teacher education programme potentially enable the performance of different physics teacher identities. The analysis resulted in the construction of four discourse models that could be seen to be both enabling and limiting the kinds of identity performances trainee physics teachers can enact. Knowledge of the models thus potentially empowers trainee physics teachers to understand the different goals of their educational programme and from there make informed choices about their own particular approach to becoming a professional physics teacher. We also suggest that for teacher educators, knowledge of the discourse models could facilitate making conscious, informed decisions about their own teaching practice.

This study examines preservice preschool teachers' university science education experience.The empirical data are from a research and intervention project conducted on teacher education programs at two Swedish universities. We analyzed one of the assignments completed by 111 students within a science course as well as their conversations about the assignment at a number of seminars. We combined culture contrast and thematic analysis to examine the data. The results showed a tension between the preschool culture and the university science culture. We described this tension between the boundary lines of the two cultures as a chafing borderland. These cultures do not merge, and the defined boundaries cause chafing with each other. We discuss ways of diminishing this chafing of borderlands, potential border crossings such as caring and children as boundary objects and equalizing power imbalances.

his article explores gendered processes in preschool science through Barad’s agential realism [2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics of the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke Universal Press], and as such, the study makes both theoretical and empirical contributions in how it combines perspectives from emergent science [Siraj-Blatchford, J. 2001. Emergent Science and Technology in the Early Years.” Paper presented at the XXIII World Congress of OMEP. Santiago, Chile, August 3], new materialism, and gender theory. Empirically, the study makes use of data constructed during a field study in a Swedish preschool with five-year-old children. The focus of the field study was the children’s play and explorations together with the preschool environment, during activities not specifically guided by teachers. The analysis highlights how the children’s identities and scientific explorations are made possible as well as constrained together with the preschool’s material-discursive environment. As such, the study demonstrates how teachers cannot rely on any environment, activity, choice or subject content to be (gender) neutral.

Over several decades, studies have documented differences between men and women’s achievement and participation in physics, or have sought social or psychological explanations for differences in physics engagement. This dualistic understanding of gender and its consequences for physics learning has long been challenged theoretically, but only recently have new perspectives on gender and physics been taken up in the field of physics education research (PER). A recent epistemological shift in research on gender and physics education is turning our gaze away from documenting differences and rather towards understanding how gendered identities are constructed in physics learning and practice. As this book will detail, identity frameworks have much to offer our understanding of gender in physics education research. Frameworks that highlight identity work in physics can be used to explore how gender interacts with constructs like power, privilege, agency, discourse, positionality and inequity and how these are tied up in identity construction and trajectories into and out of physics. In this chapter, we introduce a growing scholarship using sociocultural frameworks to understand learning and participation in physics, that seeks to challenge dominant understandings of who does physics and what counts as physics competence. We discuss the various perspectives taken in the subsequent chapters of this book, and the potential these have to help us construct a broad picture of the complexity inherent in doing physics and doing gender.