2018_EJRNL_PP_ANNA_DANIELSSON_1.pdf
Terbatas Rina Kania
» ITB
Terbatas Rina Kania
» ITB
This article explores how the doing of social class and gender can intersect with
the learning of science, through case studies of two male, working-class university students’
constitutions of identities as physics students. In doing so, I challenge the taken-for-granted
notion that male physics students have an unproblematic relation to their chosen discipline,
and nuance the picture of how working-class students relate to higher education by the
explicit focus on one disciplinary culture. Working from the perspective of situated learning
theory, the interviews with the two male students were analysed for how they negotiated the
practice of the physics student laboratory and their own classed and gendered participation
in this practice. By drawing on the heterogeneity of the practice of physics the two students
were able to use the practical and technological aspects of physics as a gateway into the
discipline. However, this is not to say that their participation in physics was completely
frictionless. The students were both engaged in a continuous negotiation of how skills they
had learned to value in the background may or may not be compatible with the ones they
perceived to be valued in the university physicist community.