Gender Categorizations during Group Work in Physical Education

Purpose: To explore how the use of gender categorizations inform children’s preferences of working with others in physical education. Method: Draw, write, and tell procedures were used to elicit the thoughts and feelings of 42 children, across four schools, about their peers and working together in groups. The children, aged between 11 and 13 years, were distributed across 14 focus groups to talk about conditions in group work that they thought facilitated and inhibited their learning. Results: Two meta-themes—(a) classmates and friendships and (b) work intention and trust—emerged from the interview data about their preferences for the ways groups were constituted. The results indicated that these children created or constructed categories of their peers based on gender but using gender-neutral words. Conclusion: Their constructions of working with others in PE contributed to an implicit curriculum consisting of different expectations for the same gender and for other gender groups.