ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Interface Between Social Psychology and Educational Psychology: Interactional Phenomena in Educational SettingsView all 12 articles
Unfair differentiating, fragmented interventions, and gender reinforcing: A qualitative study on how students experience teachers school climate work focusing on gender
Provisionally accepted
- Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
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Characteristics of the school climate are crucial because they can influence students' academic achievement, well-being, and interpersonal relationships, including peer aggression. Teachers play a significant role in promoting a positive school climate grounded in care, fairness, support, and responsiveness. However, qualitative research on how students experience and reflect upon their school climate remains limited. In this qualitative study, we explored students' perspectives on student-teacher relationships, school climate, and gender. Fifty-nine focus group interviews were conducted with students in grades 1–9 (ages 7–15 years) from two schools in Sweden. The data were analyzed using constructivist grounded theory. The findings revealed that students experienced a gender-normative teacher practice in everyday student-teacher interactions and in teachers' broader efforts to shape the school climate. This included gender reinforcement, fragmented interventions in student-to-student incidents, and unfair differentiation in classroom management practices. From the students' perspective, the qualitative findings illustrate how taken-for-granted gender norms may at times influence teachers to engage in interactions and practices that constrain gender identities, reinforce inequality, and potentially undermine a supportive school climate.
Keywords: gender, Qualitaive analysis, School Climate, Socio-ecologic framework, Student-teacher interactions
Received: 04 Jul 2025; Accepted: 30 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Forsberg, Thornberg and Hammar Chiriac. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Camilla Forsberg
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