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In this article I focus on the narratives of girls who describe the events that shape their lives and get them into trouble. The narratives are explored against Darrell Steffensmeier and Emilie Allan’s (1996) proffered Gender Theory, to consider whether it offers an adequate explanatory framework. The article adds to the body of knowledge about girlhood, gender norms, and transgression and provides fresh insight into the relevance of physical strength to girls’ violence. I conclude that girls are defining girlhood as they live it and it is the disjuncture with normative concepts that leads them into conflict with institutions of social control.

Representations of the boy in Dutch educational literature shift considerably during the twentieth century while educational goals remain importantly unchanged. Optimism in education seen before the Second World War diminishes after the war as a result of social changes. While representations of boys take on increasingly negative tones, boys themselves may be changing little. This is suggested by the goals of education that remain constant during the entire century, goals which aim to free the boy as much as possible from troublesome behavior as mischief. Pedagogical aims to have boys adopt desired behavior, like courteousness, change during the 1970s and stress those of care and emotional strength. However, boys’ adoption of caring behaviors progresses so slowly the boy, often embraced as the hope of the fatherland in the first half of the twentieth century, is increasingly seen as a problem at the end of it.

This article explores attitudes toward boyhood shaped by the traumatic experiences of the First World War. It focuses particularly on the work of the little-known French author, Paul Cazin, and his attempts to commemorate the entirety of “the lost generation” by transcending divisions of religion and secularism that characterized boyhood activities in France before the war. The figure of the “Manneken-Pis” enables him to do this and is particularly suited to the expression of conflicting attitudes toward militarism in boyhood. Cazin’s intellectual program leads to a reading of the famous Manneken-Pis fountain depicting a urinating boy as a religious artifact. A variety of interwar responses to the statue demonstrate the strength of emotion provoked by the figure of the young boy. The fact that these responses have been enshrined in modern cultural and artistic practices suggests the extent to which the experience of the First World War still conditions attitudes toward boyhood.

Post-conflict settings often contain high levels of risk for war-affected girls, yet these same settings also support hope for them. In such contexts, what risks exist for girls and how do they construct responses to these risks? is article is based on an ethnographic study which included a cohort of fifteen girls who had been caught up in the decade-long war in Sierra Leone, a war noted for its gender-based viciousness. Having lived through horrific situations, a major task of these girls has been to make meaning of, and respond to, the risks existing within their post-conflict environments. Following an analysis of the current context of the lives of these girls, this article examines the risks the girls face in their daily lives and the strategies they employ as strength-based responses to these risks.

Abject female intergenerational poverty is a systemic issue which denies girls the opportunity to access a higher quality of life because of poor health that results in under-development. The article focuses on the root cause-gender inequality-that is responsible for their inability to access adequate nutrition, particularly during their critical period of physical and intellectual growth and development. Their resulting sub-standard health has a bad impact on their school attendance. This article follows the lives of a group of ten girls between the ages of ten and fourteen years living in a peri-urban community outside Maputo. It outlines the importance of engaging girls, through participatory methodologies, and giving them the opportunity to express themselves, their challenges, strengths and ideas for possible resolution of the problem.

This section discusses how the changing students’ experiences necessitated a rethinking of the educational programme and the development of an active pedagogy. The reform used two powerful instruments: an adaptation of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which allows the language coordinator to evaluate the linguistic needs of students upon arrival (and the students to recognise their own strengths and weaknesses) and to design strategies that help them improve during the semester; and the new Common Framework for Intercultural Learning, inspired by the former, which allows students to acquire and improve behavioural intercultural skills through self-managed research practices. This section describes how the language teaching reform was carried out in the programme, the role of the Common Framework for Intercultural Learning, the role of the mentors who accompany students in their learning paths throughout the semester and describes the combined use of these tools.