‘They just don’t seem to really care,
they just think it’s cool to sit there and
talk’: Laddism in Higher Education
Professor Carolyn Jackson
Lancaster University
c.jackson@lancaster.ac.uk
Background
Student ‘lad culture’ has become a national issue.
The phenomenon, often associated with the
website Unilad, has become a catch-all term for
anything from boozy boisterousness to casual
misogyny and even sexual abuse. But despite
numerous media reports on laddism, universities
still have little idea of how widespread its effects
are. (Guardian.co.uk, 05/04/13)
Lad culture's beery, shouty voice is dominating
student life and alienating women (The Observer,
28/4/13)
NUS Project
‘Lad culture’ was seen as a ‘pack’ mentality
evident in activities such as sport and heavy
alcohol consumption, and ‘banter’ which was
often sexist, misogynist and homophobic. It
was also thought to be sexualized and to
involve the objectification of women, and at its
extremes rape supportive attitudes and sexual
harassment and violence.
(Phipps and Young, 2013: 53)
NUS Project
‘Lad culture’ affected our participants in
educational, social and personal spheres of their
university lives. While many felt that its impact
was limited in educational settings, they also
described these environments as ‘gendered’,
and during our discussions it became evident
that many factors in this gendering could be
linked to elements of ‘lad culture’.
(Phipps and Young, 2013: 53)
Overview
• The research project
• What constitutes laddism in this H.E. context?
• Laddism in teaching-learning contexts
– Who is laddish and how is it manifest?
– Challenging Laddism
– Impact on the lads
• Summary
The Research (SES funded)
• Steve Dempster (Lancaster University) and Lucie Pollard
(University of Greenwich)
• Site - one post-1992 university in southern England
• Questionnaires – all sports science students (years 1-3)
• Observations – 6 x 2 hour lectures
• Interviews - individual interviews with 33 students (11
women and 22 men) and 5 members of staff (2 women
and 3 men).
Jackson’s Secondary School Research
(2002, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2010)
Two projects exploring motives for ‘laddishness’
•
•
•
•
8 secondary schools: 6 co-ed, 2 single-sex
Questionnaire data from ~800 pupils
Interviews with 203 pupils (year 9)
Interviews with 30 teachers
What constitutes laddism in this H.E. Context?
‘Lads’ were typically presented as:
loud and attention-seeking, confident,
into sport, popular, jokers, often heavy
drinkers and sexually promiscuous.
What constitutes laddism in this H.E. Context?
Quite cocky, loud, I guess athletic, big
personalities, just boyish really. (Hazel, Y1, sports science)
There is this laddish culture with drinking and
stuff and I think it goes with every university. …
I’d say to include sleeping around as well
sometimes, I think, and yeah, just, you know,
looking to be popular as well. So … in a team,
like in a sports team or whatever, like say the
rugby team or something, you know, and quite a
big figure in the team. (Jack, Y3, sports science and football)
What constitutes laddism in this H.E. Context?
… like typical look at me, I’m just an idiot. Basically I
see them [lads] as an idiot but they think they’re
really cool. (laughs)
OK, so what do these sort of ‘idiots’ do and why do
they think it’s cool?
Because … they seem to want to be the centre of
attention and [want] people laughing at them, like
their friends laughing at them: oh, that’s really
funny, I’ll do that again, I’ll carry on doing that. But
as long as they’re getting a laugh they’ll do it again
and again no matter how stupid they look.
(Justine, Y2, sports science and coaching)
Laddish behaviours in teaching-learning contexts
There’s a big group of them [lads]; they turn up
about twenty minutes late … and I’ve complained
about them a few times … I sit like right at the front
[of the lecture theatre], so for me to be able to hear
them like it’s affecting my learning ... I’ve had to ask
for extra help when I shouldn’t have [had to]
because I would have understood it if they weren’t
talking, so that’s annoying. But that’s just boys isn’t
it! … but they just don’t seem to really care, they just
think it’s cool to sit there and talk. Like the worst is a
Monday morning because they’ll talk about football
and you don’t really want to hear about football
when you’re in an anatomy class. (Paris, Y1 Sports Science)
Laddish behaviours in teaching-learning contexts
It’s more of the popular ones that will act like that
[laddishly]. The quieter ones that sit at the front, they
don’t act all laddish and that, it’s the popular guys that go
on like that.
OK, so it’s the guys that don’t sit at the front. And what
are the ways they behave that sort of distinguish them
from the guys that sit at the front?
Stupid. Like, they might, it’s the loud jokes that they
make, or they might even throw stuff at each other, you
know, all that silly laddish stuff where they’ll throw things
at each other and they find that funny. They do nothing
against like the women or anything, it’s just towards each
other, they just, yeah, they just act like boys; they just
throw things and laugh about each other and all that.
Mia continued (Y2, sports science)
Yeah. And does it actually disrupt the teaching
sometimes, do you think?
Yeah, it does, yeah, big time … I can hear them laughing
and joking behind me, and that alone, that just stops
whoever’s teaching to tell them to be quiet. Or if they
catch them throwing something at one of their friends
then that stops the class as well, and it’s just little things
like that that they do. Or even, some of them will make
stupid noises, just silly noises that their friends will find
funny - nobody else does - and that, again, would stop
the class. …
Does that tend to be blokes, are women involved?
It’s the guys. No, the women, there’s only some girls that
will be there and you’ll hear them laugh, but they’re not,
there’s no girls on our course that act like the boys where
they’ll start throwing things and being really destructive.
Challenging Laddism
With sports science you get a lot of students who just came
out of school so, you know, a lot of them are growing up still …
For me, being a mature student, I’m there for a reason: I’m not
there because my parents told me I must go, I’m there to learn
I think one of my biggest problems we had in class was
basically people being rude and disrespectful in class, and
basically making noise, not paying attention to lecturers ...
Were they in the minority would you say, or was it quite a
sizeable group?
Yeah, they were only a minority, a group of boys really.
A group of boys. OK. With that group of boys sort of like being
rude or maybe being noisy, would that affect your learning do
you think, in the class?
Challenging Laddism
Yeah, it does, it does, it does when you’re trying to
listen to a lecturer explaining to you something you
don’t know, you’re learning something new and you’ve
got people in the background making noise, disrupting
the class, you know. It does interrupt with your learning
and it interrupts with listening, especially if … you don’t
get something because someone’s been making noise
in the background and then you have to keep asking
the lecturer ‘oh can you repeat yourself’. … a couple of
times I had to say, and a couple of my other classmates
had to say, you know, ‘quieten down, I’m here to learn,
I pay my fees to come here, if you don’t want to learn
come out of the class’.
(Saisha, Y1 sports science)
Challenging Laddism
Do you think the laddish behaviour affects other people’s
learning?
Sometimes, coz I know some students that sit at the back
can get quite loud while lecturers are talking, so I know
some of the girls at the front always have a go at them for
talking too loud, or for talking at all during a lecture.
So students at the back are talking during the lecture?
Yeah.
Right. And is it just a few people who find that a nuisance,
or would you say most people?
I’d say it was most people, but it’s only those couple of girls
at the front that actually have the courage to speak up and
actually tell them to be quiet. (Hazel, Y1, Sports Science)
Challenging Laddism
‘one student a couple years ago, she was great,
a very strong lass, who stood up, turned round
and said, “Will you shut the fuck up, I’m trying
to learn”. And they did … peer pressure gets
them a lot more ‘coz suddenly they’re made to
look fools by a girl, and actually, they didn’t like
that.’ (John, Lecturer)
Impacts on ‘the lads’
Sitting in my classes now compared to the first year is
completely different.
In what way?
Oh, just like … the laddishness and the messing about and
sort of the effort is sort of completely flipped around with
almost all the students.
So what were they like in the first year?
You can definitely tell there was more … laddishness,
loudness, messing about, giggling, laughing in classes and
trying to get away with stuff and push the teacher as
much as they could.
(Pete, Y3, sports science with coaching, mature)
Impacts on ‘the lads’
From year 1 to year 2 you see the biggest
drop, where you lose all the students that
either are not really cut out for the university
life or don’t really have the drive to carry on
to university. And I guess that’s the thing with
year 1, it weeds out the people that are not
really that focused and want to go on to year
2, and I guess year 2 to year 3’s pretty much
the same as well. (Ryan, Y3, sports science)
Utilising this concept [alienation] can help to
explain the behaviour of some students in terms
of coming to lectures late; talking at the back of
the lecture theatre; texting throughout, all of
which lecturers and students highlighted as
problematic. This behaviour could be construed
as refusing to adopt the ‘good student’
subjectivity (Grant 1997) but what it actually
points to is the need for lecturers to look afresh
at teaching styles and the context of learning in
which some students are being marginalised.
(Burke et al 2013, 40)
In respect to the football coaching side of it, I
think, well speaking to the other lads they were
quite disappointed with the fact that we
thought we’d be more hands on with the
football coaching side of it and we weren’t
actually. We didn’t actually do that much
practical and when we had the coaching lectures
they were just generalised coaching whereas we
thought they’d be more football based.
(Tim Y3, sports science with football)
Quite a lot of students who come to do sports science
come from a BTEC background, and I think the problem
with that is they are used to doing things in a practical
fashion more than actually in a classroom set up. And
some of the students who come in suffer from the actual
perception that it is a sports thing that they are coming to
do here, OK, and they miss that it’s sports science. And
that is what creates, I think, some of the problems which
we have seen in sports science. I can’t say that it’s a
major, you know, a huge, big problem we have been
seeing, but I think they come in thinking that it’s going to
be more of a physical thing rather than sitting in a
classroom and being introduced to metabolism and
biochemistry and physiology and things like that. (Nader,
Lecturer)
‘They just don’t seem to really care,
they just think it’s cool to sit there
and talk’: Laddism in Higher
Education
Professor Carolyn Jackson
Lancaster University
c.jackson@lancaster.ac.uk