This thesis is a qualitative ethnographic inquiry that explores how to apprentice senior secondary school students into critical awareness of gender issues within the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary Liberal Studies (hereafter NSSLS) curriculum context. The project attempts to engage students in thinking about gender issues from different levels of criticality or critical thinking. It was guided by the following research questions: (a) What Discourses of gender are co-constructed, negotiated or/and resisted by the NSSLS curriculum and teachers and students? (b) What Discourses about critical thinking are co-constructed by the NSSLS curriculum and teachers and students? (c) Is it possible to enhance these students’ critical thinking regarding gender issues in the NSSLS subject? To this end, an intervention unit on gender stereotyping designed with genre-based pedagogy was taught and co-taught by the researcher in one traditionally Chinese as the medium-of-instruction (TCMI) and one traditionally English as the medium-of-instruction (TEMI) secondary schools. The study had three stages and adopted multiple research methods, triangulating ethnographic data from interviews, classroom observation, and students’ writing assignments. In the first stage, the pre-intervention stage, the intervention unit was designed by the researcher and the LS teachers in the two schools. Interviews were conducted with focal students to gain insights of their perceptions of gender stereotypes. Pre-measure writing assignments were also given to the students to investigate their cognitive academic language proficiency and gender identities. In the second stage, the intervention unit was respectively taught and co-taught by the researcher and lessons were video- and audio-taped in both schools. In the third stage, the post-measure writing assignments were given to the same groups of students to interpret the potential effectiveness of the unit. Additionally the focal student informants from both schools were interviewed again. Data analysis drew upon theoretical perspectives from poststructuralism, social constructivism and critical theories. Specifically Reisigl and Wodak (2009)’s discourse-historical (DHA) approach to CDA, positioning theory, and other discourse analysis tools were used to examine the Discourses of gender and criticality embedded in the teaching and learning of NSSLS in the two schools. It is found that the Discourses of gender equity, essentializing gender differences, resistance and submission to traditional gender norms, together with the Discourses of criticality such as multiple perspective thinking and writing logical and substantiated arguments are constructed and re-constructed across different fields of action of the NSSLS subject. It is also revealed that some students embody higher critical gender awareness after the intervention unit. Taken as a whole, the study shows that it is a difficult and yet still possible task to raise students’ critical gender awareness in the NSSLS subject. It is hoped that the study will serve as a springboard for future research on critical literacy/pedagogy in NSSLS and longitudinal studies on the itinerary of transformation of secondary school students’ gender identity in a time of change for the Asian societies. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Gender is a social construction. Society presents us with acceptable models of masculinity and femininity, and these teach us how to be masculine or feminine in a sense. We learn how to be as women and men through some sort of social conditioning, although we have some agency to resist such normative constructions. This study sets to explore how boys and girls responded to dominant constructions of gender in a rural primary schooling context. The idea was to explore ways in which boys and girls colluded with and/or challenged constructions that "boxed‟ them into particular versions and constructions of feminity and masculinity. A qualitative case study located within the critical paradigm was used. Poststructural feminist theory was used as a lens to understand how participants responded to the dominant constructions of gender. Participatory methods of generating data were used to address the key research questions, namely, transect walks, mapping, non-participant observations, and document analysis. The existence of alternative discourses in the voices of participants helped us to understand how boys and girls constructed, negotiated and performed gender in the context of the research study. Findings revealed that participants' views represented processes of constructing, reconstructing and negotiating their gendered social identities. This was not a static process. It was a confluence of fluid processes of pushing boundaries and challenging stereotypes and coded messages characterising dominant definitions and expectations of femininity and masculinity. However, on the other hand, it was a mixture of interrelated acts of submitting and colluding with dominant constructions of femininity and masculinity. In essence, with regards to participants' responses to dominant gender constructions, there existed a criss-crossing of competing discourses some of which had more powerful influences on participants, making the act of challenging dominant gender discourses a complex affair to construe. / Thesis (M.Ed)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.