The “Boy Turn” in Research on Gender and Education

Abstract

Although the majority of research in gender and education has rightly focused on girls, recent research in the United States and elsewhere has focused much more on the learning, social outcomes, and schooling experiences of boys. This “boy turn” has produced a large corpus of theoretically oriented and practice-oriented research alongside popular and rhetorical works and feminist and pro-feminist responses, each of which this article reviews. To answer why boys have become such a concern at this time, this article explores the origins and motivations of the boy turn, examines major critiques of the distress about boys, and suggests possible directions for debates and research.