Gender differences play out in a slightly unique way in Northfield High School’s French classes. Unlike classes that everyone takes, like English or Math, French is an elective and one of three languages offered at the school. From what I’ve observed, students are electing to take French along somewhat gendered lines. There are about twenty students in French ⅘, but only two of them are boys (these numbers are based off of my assessment of how students present, so I recognize that I don’t have the full picture of students’ gender identities). This makes it more difficult to analyze the ways in which students subscribe to or reject gender norms within the classroom, because there isn’t much of a point of comparison between genders. However, the gender imbalance raises interesting questions about what students choose to focus on in school based on their gender. Does the fact that more girls are enrolled in a language class underscore Gilligan’s point that women are more driven by interpersonal relationships than men are? Or is there something about French itself that is perceived as particularly “feminine”?

French 3 does offer a point of comparison to French 4/5, as it has a more substantial group of boys—probably five or six, and the smaller class size makes the ratio of boys to girls a bit more even. I sense a dynamic centered around joking and mockery among several of the boys. One boy in particular likes to joke about the content of the class. For instance, while discussing the genres of different films, he remarked, “Dirty Dancing—clearly a horror film.” When an ad in English began playing before a video, he joked, “I’ve never heard French like that before.” He seems to be looking for laughs in class, drawing attention to himself in a way that I don’t see students doing in the primarily female French 4/5. Other times, I sense that boys in the class are poking fun at each other. Denise told me that a fight broke out between two people on a day that I wasn’t there, and while I don’t know who was involved and what their genders were, I wonder if the more aggressive environment of French 3 compared to French 4/5 is related to the class’ gender makeup. As I wrote about in my response to Izzy’s post last week, I’ve generally observed the girls in French 4/5 being very supportive and complimentary of each other; this attitude does not seem to translate to French 3.

I can’t say I’m surprised to see the gender divide in French ⅘, given my own experience of French classes disproportionately representing women. Again, I’m curious about exactly why this happens, but I do wonder if being surrounded by people sharing my gender identity has led me to feel more comfortable in my French classes and ultimately driven my interest in the subject. I’ve generally felt a strong sense of community in the French classes I’ve taken throughout middle school, high school and college alike; perhaps this is because I find it easier to build communities with other women. However, I think this sense of community is also related to the fact that my French classes have generally been smaller and I tend to take them with people I know due to the limited number of people in the French departments of my high school and at Carleton. I hadn’t thought much before about shared gender identity as a reason why I might feel more at ease in French classes than in other academic settings, but I’m realizing it could very well be a factor.

I think I was especially attuned to gender this week during my observation of the French classes, because I was struck by the ways in which the French 4/5 curriculum might reinforce traditional notions of gender. The class has been discussing different families, and while Denise gives a nod to variation among families during her lesson, pointing to different types of families (homoparentale, monoparentale, recomposée, etc.), I couldn’t help but notice that the fictional family discussed in an audio clip students were using to improve listening comprehension was fairly traditional and heteronormative, containing a mother, a father, and three children. Even the descriptions of the family members seemed to subscribe to gender norms (although this assessment may be colored by my deliberate search for ways in which gender roles played out in the classroom). The father was described as “severe,” while the mother was “less severe.” The brother was “self-centered,” which especially caught my attention given that Kohlberg and Gilligan’s theories suggest that men value the individual more, while women tend to place more value on the feelings of other people. While the goal of the exercise was simply to understand a description of a family, I can’t help but notice the subtle ways in which a class’ curriculum can perpetuate existing notions of gender—but also the untapped potential for subtle ways in which the curriculum could be adjusted to become more inclusive.