One of the readings from this past week that really stuck with me was "Missing in Interaction" in which the authors detail sexism in the classroom, much of which is accidental. While I have heard much of this before, I was surprised at how much the hidden curriculum shows children that their gender should dictate their behavior. Specifically, the greatest offense I saw here was the book "I'm Glad I'm a Boy! I'm Glad I'm a Girl!" which contained terrible stereotypes that I can see may have damaged children's perceptions of themselves during the time period in which it was widely used. Showing boys that they can earn whatever job they want, while showing girls that they will live in the shadows of men and always need their help, is truly degrading. In the classroom, these girls are taught to be inactive and focus on their physical attributes, while the boys are encouraged to be active and speak out in regards to their opinions.
It further complicates this issue that educators often don't realize that they're instilling these stereotypes into the children. The teachers in the reading didn't notice this until they were shown their own teaching methods through recordings. Many were shocked and appalled by their behavior, which positive attention and criticism directed toward male students, while the females settled into quiet obscurity. This gender divide in schools is something that was very prominent when I was in elementary school, but I never really gave it much thought other than just accepting it as the way things are. This is a major issue, although I'm not sure what a possible solution to this might be. We talked in class about how to potentially solve education problems in regards to lower class minority students, but not how to deal with the divide between genders during these school years.
This is a very interesting topic for sure. I agree with you that gender is put into stereotypes through education purposes, and it is very sad to see it happen, but also when I look back to my own education I can also see where it did effect me in becoming the stereotypical girl or doing girl things due to schooling purposes, such as sitting quietly not out lashing and getting good grades. I currently work in a preschool and I do see this happening a lot, we have several boys that will talk out of turn and speak over girls, also a lot more attention is guided towards the boys because they don't listen as well, and behave in improper at school. So in conclusion the teachers are showing more attention and spending a lot more time with the boys which, causes the girls to have less attention.
ReplyDeleteI found that chapter to be interesting to because it made me think back to when I was in middle school. During recess, us guys would always take up the majority of the field to play a big game of football while the girls were just around. I never paid much attention to the girls during recess because the football game was the most important part of my day. My question is how do we raise awareness to this issue in places like Wisconsin. This seems like an easy situation to raise awareness for because it's interesting to think how much attention guys get that girls don't receive. It may also inspire teacher to think about their classroom habits and maybe change the way they go about teaching the class.
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