Come Along Then the Naughty Boys: Perspectives on Boys and Discipline

This paper offers an analysis of the complexity of the interrelationship of boys, schooling, and the construction of identity. Boys often respond to cultural cues, and teachers' management strategies cannot be used in isolation from the larger social context in which boys are situated. Insights from literature and research should form the explanatory framework, thus serving as the discourse from which meaning is adduced. However, teachers continuously stereotype boys' behavior and unknowingly exhibit power relations in pedagogy that take the form of surveillance, normalization, exclusion, classification, distribution, totalization, and regulation. Such behavior reveals inadequacies in teacher-education programs, and it is important that teachers be given evidence of flawed pedagogies. Teachers need information on bullying and violence, and they should be taught to interrogate the debate on boys and schooling so that they can make informed decisions. All of this has implications for teacher-education programs, many of which do not adequately prepare teachers to cope with increasing diversity in schools. Such programs should be reconceptualized so that they are embedded in connectedness rather than in categorization. (RJM)