Adolescent girls' culture and its impact on their science interests

Abstract

This paper will describe an ethnographic study carried out in Malta as part of the first author's Master's degree. Six adolescent girls from working-class families were interviewed and asked to respond to open-ended questions in journal entries. They were all students in a single-sex school designed for low achievers, and had been labelled as failures by both the education system and by their families. From the discourse of the girls comes a clear picture of their culture, described in their own voices. They express freely their views on science and its appropriateness as an object of study for girls, and on their choice of subject matter in science. More important, perhaps, they talk of their fears, founded on misinformation, their ambitions, and their recognition of their educational needs. They describe cultural forces which drive away from the study of science, but which, at the same time, raise issues and questions that can be answered by science.