In this paper we explore how 'teaching communication' in the classroom is connected to school culture. In the age of accountability the outcome focus force to the forefront a 'blame game' which either blame students' achievements on the teachers and teacher education, or the students and their socioeconomic background. We argue that to succeed with teaching and learning is dependent on the school culture more than the single teacher or the students' background. School culture is understood as attitudes, communication, student focus and engagement. Teaching communication in this paper is studied as teachers' and students' talk about subject matter in whole-class teaching. We explore how different school cultures give students different opportunities to experience meaning from teaching communication. The perspective on meaning is derived from Bildung-centred didactics. By using qualitative comparative case method in Norwegian Lower Secondary schools we find three different types of 'teaching communication' typical for different school cultures: 'Dialogic teaching communication', 'storytelling teaching communication' and 'reproducing teaching communication'. The school culture with the 'dialogic' variant is characterised by trust and reciprocity, making students' experiencing meaning a possibility.

In this ethnographic study conducted in two classrooms in Norway, grade nine (14-year-olds) in lower secondary school and the first year (16-year-olds) of upper secondary school, attention is drawn to how classroom culture is constituted through relationships between students. Through processes of power, dominance, hegemony and marginalisation, classroom culture forms the conditions for a learning environment, and has different opportunities, dilemmas and costs for the students. As classroom culture is negotiated in contextual and relational processes, classroom culture and ways of performing masculinities and femininities vary in the different classrooms, even within the same school. This article explores two classroom cultures, a "rule-breaking" classroom culture and a classroom culture in which the fear of being labelled a "nerd" dominates, to show how boys and girls use different solutions to balance the development of their identity as youths (the youth project) and the acquisition of academic competence and skills (the qualifications project).

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Media play an important role in children’s and young people’s construction of identity and construction of experience in Western cultures. Masculine identity can be constructed by the ways boys use, relate and talk about media; but construction of identity is not only gendered, it is also ‘age-related’. This article seeks to figure out how particularly television constitutes a framework for interpretation, where boys may demonstrate individual growth by marking themselves as young boys in opposition to their earlier life as younger boys.It describes some of the binary oppositions that constitute boys’ concepts of growing older compared with being younger, and shows that the concept of development is powerful compared to newer thinking of childhood as a valued period in its own right. The analysis is based on interviews of boys aged 15 to 17, who have grown up in three different areas of Norway.

Gutter som skolens tapere er blitt en dominerende fortelling gjennom mange år og gjentas nok en gang gjennom Stoltenbergutvalgets rapport om kjønnsforskjellene i skolen. Fortellingen bygger på en dikotomisk kjønnsforståelse og ikke en forståelse av at kjønn er mangfoldig og konstrueres kontinuerlig i kulturelle, sosiale og språklige sammenhenger. Ved å betrakte gutter som skolens tapere som et dominerende narrativ belyser jeg premissene for en slik fortelling, konsekvensene den har og hvilke fortellinger som usynliggjøres eller stilles i skyggen-fortellinger om en skole som ikke evner å utjevne de sosiale ulikhetene den har et mål om å utjevne.