A schooling system that claims to offer its students the opportunities to develop their
talents and help towards self-determination in their adult lives might be expected to
have a career structure itself that demonstrated these virtues, one in which there was
equality of the genders in positions of influence and leadership, and no gender
stereotyping of roles. Apart from the fairness and consistency of that expectation, it
is also reasonable to expect the neutral template of teacher employment and textbook
selection in schools.
Many children may grow up with few books in their homes but lots of those in their
schools. Many of the textbooks used in elementary schools, according to recent
studies, contain gender stereotypes. In these, females are rarely found as central
characters and when they appear at all, they are often passive figures dependent on
male characters. Women are frequently shown in domestic roles / in most textbooks it
is assumed that only males ' / go out to work' / whereas daughters are the best helpers of
their mothers whose sons are allowed to do what they wish.
In the light of those allegations, this research is designed as a case study which
addresses itself to the aim of looking into stereotyped gender role presentations
existing in elementary school textbooks used by the students studying at 1st-5th
grades in 2001/2002 academic year of an elementary school placed in Burdur and to
see whether these students are affected by the exposure of those stereotyped gender
role presentations. For this purpose, the textbooks being studied are analyzed
according to pre-set categories to deduce how they include stereotyped gender role
presentations and the evaluation of the effects of that exposure on students are made
by asking 1st-3rd grade students to draw and 4th-5th grade students to write
compositions on a given topic.
This study also attempts to find out both whether Turkish elementary school teachers
teaching at 1st-5th grades are aware of stereotyped gender role presentations in those
textbooks that they use and their own points of view about stereotyped gender role
presentations via interviews carried out with them. In conclusion, stereotyped gender
role presentations are encountered in those analyzed school textbooks studied at 1st-
5th grades in 2001/2002 academic year of the elementary school placed in Burdur and
the perceptions of those presentations are also obtained in the drawn and written
productions of the students studied at the same school. Through the teachers' / interviews, various kinds of perceptions towards gender role concept and its
stereotyped presentations that take place in those textbooks are observed in their
sayings
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12604939/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 January 2003 |
| Creators | Kaya, Havva Eylem |
| Contributors | Varoslu, Demet |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.S. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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