School achievement, gender and race: the pupils agency at middle school

Abstract

The Brazilian educational data is marked by gender and race inequalities. Boys tend to present more troubled school trajectories, when compared to the girl's trajectories of the same race; and whites tend to have more linear school trajectories than black ones. In order to contribute to the understanding of these differences, I intend to study the schooling experiences of boys and girls, also considering the intersection between gender and race. The study will be focused on students' interactions and perspectives with the objective of analyzing how students articulate school engagement with the collective conceptions of gender (in intersection with race) of their peer groups. For this purpose, a qualitative research should be developed in a public school, through the observation of the student's interactions in a 9th grade class. From the fieldwork, approximately 12 students, blacks and whites, should be selected to conduct semi-structured interviews. Throughout the field work, other research instruments that may contribute to the characterization of the school and the students, such as socioeconomic questionnaires and racial classification, may also be used. (AU)