Disrupting the 'boys don't read' discourse: primary school boys who love reading fiction
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2021
Authors
Scholes, L.
Spina, N.
Comber, B.
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British Educational Research Journal (BERJ), 2021; 47(1):163-180
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This article disrupts dominant discourses around boys and reading that often homogenise young males as reluctant, disengaged and, at times, adversarial readers. Rather than essentialising boys, we argue there is a need for a more sophisticated knowledge base about the influences, constraints and diverse experiences of boys as readers in society today. Drawing on interviews (n=30) with Year 4 (8 – 9 year old) boys at 6 schools, we consider their personal recounts of their enjoyment for reading, their preferred reading choices, and narratives related to their experiences as readers at school. Analysis highlights boys’ emerging reading interests, sophisticated and specific reading preferences, and changes in reading identities over time. Boys’ preferences for particular fiction authors, novel series, and genres dispute the common assumption in educational contexts that boys prefer to engage with non-fiction books. This finding is significant as negative gendered stereotypes can impact on boys’ reading self-concepts. It is also critical given Jerrim and Moss’ (2019) recent research highlighting the importance of fiction in the development of reading skills. We consider implications for pedagogical practices that broaden reading experiences for the diversity of emerging masculine reading identities in nations such as Australia where there is an absence of reading for pleasure in education policies.
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Copyright 2020 The author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)