This study explores the influence of geographical location on young pupils’ educational orientations and their transition from lower to upper secondary school; it pays particular attention to the voices of male youths from a rural area. More specifically, it investigates the interplay between gender and geographical contexts and the significance of these factors in understanding the processes associated with educational orientations. Margaret Archer’s framework is used to analyse how pupils’ agency is constrained and/or enabled by objective structures. The data material consists of qualitative interviews with 18 pupils transitioning from lower to upper secondary school in Norway. Each of the pupils was interviewed twice: first when they were in their last year of lower secondary education, and then during their first year of upper secondary education. The findings show that pupils consider geographical locations when making decisions about further education and work. In addition, they believe that education beyond compulsory schooling benefits their life in the rural areas. However, unlike their urban counterparts, pupils from rural areas appear to have a more constraining transition to upper secondary education. Through the analyses in this article, it becomes clear that both geographical location and gender are key factors for understanding processes connected to education.
Research on bullying and harassment in Scandinavia has been going on for several decades, and is appearing in new frameworks and forms since the new categories of "cyber harassment" or "cyberbullying" has been introduced. Bullying is a phenomenon of great importance, as it seems to affect persons negatively in their everyday functioning. We designed a questionnaire on cyber harassment, which was answered by pupils, at five schools in Tromsø (N=878). This questionnaire included a section of questions concerning traditional forms of harassment and bullying, as well as a set of quality of life (QoL) questions. The main questions asked here are: 1) What is the prevalence in percentages of classical bullying and cyberbullying; 2) Are there gender and/or age differences; 3) What percentage of children bullied classically were also cyber-bullied; 4) In what way was the quality of life affected for those that were classically bullied or cyber-bullied? Our main finding is that students who report being cyber-harassed or cyber-bullied, report a significantly lower QoL-score than their non-harassed peers, and thus share the same negative characteristics in relation to quality of life as classical harassment and bullying. Cyberbullying is less common than classical bullying, but it now affects some 3.5% of the pupils, and nearly half of the cyberbullying comes in addition to traditional bullying.
This article gives voice to coastal Sámi students and explores their negotiations over being Sámi or Norwegian within the Norwegian education system. Through interviews, students share insights on the extent to which education focuses on Sámi issues and reflect upon their identity. The article explores how youths negotiate personal identity within pre-existing structures by employing Archer’s theory on structure and agency as a backdrop. The changing phases in how ‘western’ societies view indigenous practices and knowledges are applied together with (de)colonial perspectives to understand (colonial) structures. Some key findings are that the coastal Sámi students’ identity negotiations are complex, as official discourses seem to restrict them from identifying as ‘real’ Sámi, and that the local Sámi is within a discursive void due to unintended consequences resulting from the unification in the centralised education system. In focusing on students and using the educational system as a backdrop, this article seeks to deepen the understanding of how society and the educational system in particular condition students’ notions of what it entails to be Sámi and how students negotiate their identity.
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