TY - JOUR
AU - Mangini, Romina
AB - Abstract This reflective piece seeks to show how teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in primary schools can include a gender perspective as a tool to promote and develop social transformation and reflection when integrating Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) in their lessons using different literary materials. The development of a gender perspective involves a critical examination of power and unequal relations between sexed bodies. In the case of Argentina, the passing of Law 26,150 created a National CSE Program, which enforces the teaching of a responsible sexuality education from a gender and human rights perspective. This article describes some of the literary materials and initiatives that we, two EFL primary level teachers, have designed and implemented for the development of such perspective in our lessons following a critical and dialogical pedagogy. We hope these initiatives can help other EFL teachers carry out similar practices according to their contexts. Introduction According to UNESCO, Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) is a curriculum-based process of teaching and learning about different aspects that integrate human beings’ sexuality. It aims to provide children and young adults with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that will help them develop a social and sexually healthy life (UNESCO 2018). In the case of Argentina, and since the passing of National Law 26,150 (Ley 26,150 2006), which created the National Programme of Comprehensive Sexuality Education, CSE must be present in all educational proposals, English Foreign Language (EFL) included, and at all levels of the educational system. With this law, CSE is expected to be addressed transversally and throughout all school subjects by the development of initiatives that involve all participants in an institution. These initiatives should be linked to the contents included in each level (preschool, primary and secondary school, teacher training college, and tertiary level education) according to the CSE Curricular Guidelines designed by the Argentine Federal Board of Education (CFE in Spanish) in 2008. However, EFL teachers struggle with the implementation of such contents. While the Law and CSE Curricular Guidelines state that CSE is compulsory and transversal to all subjects and levels, during the first ten years after the passing of the law, the implementation of CSE has been largely erratic, deficient and left to two or three events per year delivered by medical doctors, biology teachers or school psychologists, whose main objectives were the teaching of the reproductive system, contraceptive methods and the prevention of venereal diseases, as was the case in the City of Buenos Aires (Velasco 2016). Thus, the time left for CSE was invested in content related to reproduction, teen pregnancies and sexual health. As Banegas (2020: 2) states, ‘the inclusion of CSE in English language teaching is at embryonic stage’ in Argentina. Thanks to the insistence of students, teachers and teachers’ unions, CSE has started to be present in most educational proposals. Regarding teacher training colleges, CSE has been included as a compulsory subject in their programs since 2015, and a number of locally generated publications, and continuing professional development activities attest to the presence of CSE in teacher education (e.g. Brun and Cossu 2019; Banegas, Jacovkis and Romiti 2020). Nevertheless, these proposals are scarce and therefore support is needed to enable teachers to include CSE in ELT. One of the main challenges that EFL primary level teachers still face when teaching English from a gender perspective is the lack of equal representation found in their teaching materials, which deeply contradicts the inclusion of CSE contents. This leads teachers to look for extra materials to bring in a gender perspective to their own lessons. Against this background, the aim of this article is to provide teachers with initiatives where there has been collaborative work with other school subjects through use of preexisting school curriculum guidelines and the creation of materials beyond those offered by coursebooks. Therefore, in this article, we, Silvana Accardo and Romina Mangini, describe two initiatives we designed and implemented to include and develop a gender perspective and a critical approach through the use of a picturebook and illustrated biographies. Both initiatives took place in primary schools in the City of Buenos Aires. It should be stressed that this is a reflective article based on our own exploratory practices (Hanks 2017) and we provide examples gathered as part of our daily teaching. Conceptual framework A gender perspective involves the critical examination of power relations and, therefore, of unequal relations between sexed bodies (Morgade 2017). A gender perspective, therefore, can be included in the EFL lesson by examining the content suggested by the CSE Curricular Guidelines (Consejo Federal de Educación 2008) and by thinking how we can develop them in our class with our own materials and resources in English. Among the contents related to gender perspective in the CSE Curricular Guidelines, the following could be mentioned: identification of the roles given to boys and girls in advertisements and media according to their age; recognition of family transformations and changes in terms of structure and dynamics along history and across cultures and social contexts; reflection upon the different social and cultural expectations to what is feminine and masculine and their impact on social and emotional relations among people; and subjectivity, identity construction and access to equal opportunities and/or practices (Consejo Federal de Educación 2008). In education, a gender perspective is informed by critical pedagogy, as such a perspective seeks to create socially just education and social practices. With a focus on emancipatory and transformative pedagogies such as critical pedagogy, researchers (e.g. Banegas et al. 2020) have focused on encouraging students’ reflection, expanding their knowledge and facilitating students’ activism by interacting with their peers through the use of a dialogic teaching approach. By dialogic we mean a Socratic but also a Freirean concept of the act of teaching and educating. According to Freire (1970), ‘without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education’ (65–66). Freire adds that it is through dialogue, through naming the world, that the world is changed and transformed. That is to say that the world is transformed through the exchange of words, a dialogue between oneself and others. Human beings can transform who they are and the world by questioning the cultural and social structures, gender constructions included, that oppress and condition them as human beings. In this sense, one cannot educate oneself alone, but rather with others. Therefore, as a democratic and emancipatory practice, critical pedagogy could be present in EFL teaching practices not only by including more voices and experiences in the selection of literature, in the selection of teaching themes and in classroom interactions through a dialogical practice. In line with dialogic practice, hooks (2003) underscores that conversation is the central location of pedagogy for the democratic educator. However, discussion of personal experience alone is not sufficient. Dialogue, according to Freire (op.cit.), is not a mechanical discussion conducted by taking turns in the classroom asking and answering questions. Dialogue is meaningful and democratic interaction, between the teacher and their students, where everyone takes part in creating new knowledge. This means that all the students’ personal experiences come to exist together with the texts that were brought to class, so as to create their own production of knowledge based on their own reflections. The goal of merging these critical pedagogy approaches is to raise the students’ awareness of the reality in which they live and to provide them with tools to analyse critically that reality in order to change it. Following a dialogical critical pedagogy approach, our goal was to maximize the students’ participation, engagement levels and critical thinking skills. In this quest, language became an instrument of communication and a means to discussing important topics such as gender roles and gender stereotypes. We decided to scaffold students through tasks in order to arrive at a final outcome. The activities enabled the students to investigate, share ideas and focus on achieving a final product while providing students with plenty of opportunities to interact with one another through reflection and action. Initiatives Initiative 1: a picturebook This initiative took place in the year 2017 with a group of fourth graders, aged nine to ten, of a double-shift school with an intensification in foreign languages, located in an economically and socially disadvantaged neighbourhood in Buenos Aires. At that school, students have eight periods of 40 minutes of EFL per week, from first to fifth grade, and seven periods of EFL from sixth to seventh grade. When students reach fourth grade, a second foreign language (Portuguese) is added to the curricular plan with a lesser load. For this initiative, Romina Mangini, the EFL teacher, decided to work with a picturebook, a genre that provides a wide variety of themes, styles and narratives (both visual and written) to include and develop contents of CSE in the EFL class. This time, Romina chose Piggybook (Browne 1986) a classic children’s picturebook that tells the story of the Piggott family, composed of a mother, a father and two sons. In this family, the housework load falls entirely upon Mrs Piggott who also works outside the house. One evening, when Mr Piggot and the boys arrive home, they find that Mrs Piggott has left the house and a note (‘You are pigs’). Mr Piggott and the boys find themselves, for the first time in their lives, trying to cook. This takes them hours and they start turning into pigs. One day, Mrs Piggott comes back. Mr Piggott and the boys beg her to stay and promise to start sharing the house chores among them all. The last page of the book shows Mrs Piggott fixing a car. Piggybook provided a story that is suitable to address the identification of the roles given to boys and girls and the social and cultural expectations present in society according to gender. So, Piggybook was the story selected to work with a group of fourth graders with the characteristics anticipated before and within the framework of a CSE special week at school. The classroom teacher and the students had been discussing jobs and occupations in relation to gender in the lesson before EFL. They had worked with advertisements and images and debated around this content. The EFL teacher decided then to work with the same content but with an emphasis on house chores. The procedure was the following. First, students were asked what house chores they knew or remembered in English. Teacher wrote on the board: ironing, making the beds, cooking, etc. She then asked who did the housework at home. Most students answered their mums, and some said that they themselves or their siblings helped as well. Then Romina asked students why they thought it was like that. Students could not yet give an answer. However, by now the classroom became a democratic space where students could not only exchange their own experiences but also start to reflect upon their own culture in terms of gender roles by noticing that women and children were mostly in charge of the house chores, for example. This moment became the first step towards students’ raising awareness of the reality in which they lived and a critical analysis of that reality (hooks 2003). Romina proceeded to read Piggybook. Students found the story funny and amusing, especially when Mr Piggott and his sons turned into pigs. At the end, she asked students why these characters turned into pigs in the middle of the story. Many answered that it was because they never helped mum before and they did not clean in general. Giroux (1988) mentions that group interaction provides students with the experiences that they need in order to realise that they can learn from one another. Thus, Romina and students engaged in a discussion about house chores (whether housework was a job, whether it should be done by women only or not, and why) and if there were jobs that were for women and jobs that were for men. After that, Romina drew the students’ attention back to the house chores’ list they wrote on the board and they reflected upon those tasks in a final activity. Romina drew the silhouette of a house that contained all the house chores on the board. Students had to draw their own houses and write the chores that were usually done at home and, if they wanted, who they lived with. A bigger poster was made with all the drawings and with the title ‘After reading Piggybook, by Anthony Browne, the class conclude that ALL members of the family must share the housework’. By working with this picturebook and, especially, by focusing on how unequally and unfairly housework was distributed among the members of the Piggot family in terms of gender, Romina was able to effectively include and develop a gender perspective in her lesson. In turn, by sharing their own opinions and experiences, students could focus on how household chores are usually and generally connected to women. Following Freire’s dialogical approach, all the students’ personal experiences come to exist together with the text that was brought to class so as to create their own production of knowledge based on their own reflections. Thus, Romina was able to raise students’ awareness of gender roles as social constructions, which can be deconstructed and changed. Initiative 2: illustrated biographies The following initiative was carried out during the first part of 2020 at a Catholic private primary school in Buenos Aires City, with two joined courses of seventh graders, ages twelve to thirteen. Students belonged to middle-class and low-middle-class families and most of them lived near the school in the same neighbourhood. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, students had a 50-minute online session once a week. The school held teaching staff meetings to share plans and future projects in order to guarantee connections between areas. The EFL teacher, Silvana Accardo, joined the classroom teachers in a project related to women’s rights encompassing Social Studies and EFL. The main objective of this initiative and sequence of activities was to highlight women’s role in history, their fight for equality and their presence in different social and scientific fields such as science, history, politics, sports, and the arts. Silvana began the project by carrying out a brainstorming activity to check students’ assumptions about women. Students shared their ideas by expressing the first word (adjectives, mostly) that came to their minds when thinking about women's qualities and characters (Figures 1 and 2). Some students expressed a more traditional view by focusing on women’s appearance, whereas others stated that women were strong, powerful, and important. figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Word cloud created by the first group of seventh graders figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Word cloud created by the first group of seventh graders figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Word cloud created by the second group of seventh graders figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Word cloud created by the second group of seventh graders After that, Silvana asked students if they knew what women could and could not do in the past. Students expressed their ideas and notions while the teacher made a list of what they mentioned. Students focused on the right to vote and to go to work. Then, Silvana asked students what famous women in history they knew or remembered. She wrote the list of names that were mentioned and asked students if they knew whether any of those women had played a role in the fight for those rights. The dialogical nature of this introduction to the new project and unit of work aimed at revising students’ own previous concepts. Both Freire (op.cit.) and hooks (2003) made an emphasis on the central role of conversation in a democratic and emancipatory classroom. Students could make connections, expand their knowledge and reflect upon the role of women in the fight towards equality. Finally, students had to choose an important pioneer woman in history to represent. To do so, students had to bring an object or an item of clothing and three clues so as to play a guessing game. They also had to tell why they had chosen those heroines. Four students were in charge of presenting their chosen women each meeting. This game was played as a warm-up at the beginning of each lesson. As homework, students had to recreate photos of famous women doing the types of work that were traditionally thought of as being for men. Some students dressed up as Amelia Earhart, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai or María Sharapova, while others chose to perform as women working as doctors, executives or pilots. Although some students did mention some Argentinian groundbreakers, most of the women they knew belonged to the Northern Hemisphere countries. According to Giroux (1988), educational institutions as a part of societies with uneven distribution of power are not neutral, therefore they tend to manifest and reproduce societal power imbalance. This has been so for ages and the fact that women had been erased from Argentinian history books is a strong proof of how schools bear a relationship to the wider society. Based on this observation, Silvana worked with social studies’ lesson plans and guidelines from the Argentinian Ministry of Education and created a presentation that included iconic and essential women in Argentina and in South American history such as suffragettes, writers, scientists, doctors and popular heroes. This was aimed at rescuing women that have been erased from history books, at learning about the roles these women played in our history and the impact they had on our society and at drawing connections with women around the world that played similar roles or that had similar interests. For instance, local women that fought to achieve the vote were Julieta Lanteri, Cecilia Grierson and Alfonsina Storni. As a final activity, students were asked to name three important women in their lives and choose an outstanding woman from history to write a short biography. Students created presentations and videos and shared their work through online lessons. All activities were previously modelled by the teacher and complemented with the reading of some excerpts from illustrated biographies of famous women, such as Fantastically Great Women that Changed the World (Pankhurst 2016) and She Persisted Around the World (Clinton 2018). During each online meeting, students learned about the lives and achievements of groundbreaking women in history. At the end of the project, students repeated the first activity. The objective was to check students’ progress and understand if there was a change in their notions and opinions, and if they could include more trailblazing women in history to their lists (Figures 3 and 4). They could also name important women in Argentinian history from different fields such as Julieta Lanteri (suffragette), Gabriela Sabatini (sports), María Elena Walsh (writer), Eva Perón (politics) and Juana Azurduy (independence wars) (Figure 4). By comparing names, students were able to get to know more women and to appreciate their role in history. Students reflected upon their notions and preconceptions and were able to notice their own progress and growth. This time, students left out words that could describe their physical appearance, beauty and looks or women as mainly caregivers shifting to words related to their drive, intelligence and persistence. figure 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Word cloud with words that describe women figure 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Word cloud with words that describe women figure 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Important women in history figure 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Important women in history One important challenge that emerged while working on Initiative 2 was that some students did not want to participate in activities where they felt exposed or classmates could make fun of them. As students were asked to recreate a photo of a famous woman in history, some students expressed that they felt too shy or self-conscious and did not want to dress up and be seen by their peers, as they were afraid that their classmates would laugh at them. Silvana presented different possibilities that included recreating a photo found on the internet by bringing objects that represented those groundbreaking women instead of dressing up or including members of their families in the pictures. Students felt visibly more comfortable and heard when given options to choose from. Lessons learnt The two initiatives described in this article aimed at showing how teachers could include and raise gender perspective awareness in their students in the EFL lesson through a dialogic, emancipatory and democratic approach with the use of different literary materials. Based on these initiatives, similar activities might be systematically included both in pre-service as well as in-service teacher education programmes. This way, raising teachers’ awareness of their role as educators could be underlined since teacher training by providing them with critical pedagogical practices that allow them to adopt a gender perspective in their EFL lessons. These approaches gave us the tools to create a core of activities that were all linked to the same backbone, or thematic unit, and helped them take their students through meaningful tasks that had a final and concrete outcome while fostering communication, creativity, critical thinking and higher order thinking skills. All these, coupled with authentic literary material, helped create an engaging context for learning. The dialogical nature of these initiatives and how they were carried out allowed us to revise students’ own concepts and ideas in terms of gender norms and roles while at the same time develop their linguistic skills (revision and appropriation of vocabulary). Students could notice and reflect, especially, upon how certain types of work (house chores, for example) or roles (who can propose to whom) were culturally or socially associated with one gender, and that there was no rule behind such association other than preconceptions, stereotypes and social constructions that have been produced and reproduced for years. Students and teachers could also read and learn about important and groundbreaking women who changed history, led the way for future generations and now serve as role models for both girls and boys around the world. Conclusion We aimed at achieving a pedagogical approach built upon gender perspective, dialogue, social justice and critical pedagogy with the goal of providing students with the possibility to rethink, question and challenge different beliefs and practices, so as to envision both fairer and more inclusive societies and schooling practices through the identification and dismantling of unequal relationships, preconceptions and stereotypes. Carrying out gendered perspective initiatives that promote equality in the EFL lesson broadens the scope of possibilities to all students. Schools participate as active sociocultural agents for the construction of identities and the reproduction of stereotypes and inequalities. Therefore, the teaching of gender equality as a content in the EFL lesson should begin in our classrooms and continue growing outside the school walls towards building safer, supportive and non-discriminatory societies. Both teachers and students will profit from this and learn more about themselves, their rights and their own possibilities of being, disregarding their gender. Modelling activities that engage students and teachers in critical pedagogy practices could serve as a catalyst to action by enacting dialogic and democratic school practices aimed at eroding unequal norms, discourse and power relationships, fostering critical thinking in the students and bringing about social change and equal representation. The authors Silvana Accardo is an EFL teacher and English Department Coordinator at Instituto Casa de Jesús in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She holds a diploma in Comprehensive Sexuality Education from Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Her main interests are pedagogy and teacher education. Email: silvana.accardo@gmail.com Romina Mangini is a teacher educator with the Instituto Superior en Lenguas Vivas ‘Juan Ramón Fernández’ in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her main interests are teaching young children, children’s literature and teacher education. Email: mangini.romina@gmail.com References Banegas ,  D . 2020 . ‘Comprehensive Sexual Education and English language teaching: an endeavour from southern Argentina’ . Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching . Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2020.1737704 (accessed on 20 June 2020 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Banegas ,  D. , L.   Jacovkis and A.   Romiti. 2020 . ‘A gender perspective in initial English language teacher education: An Argentinian experience’ . Sexuality and Culture 24 / 1 : 1 – 22 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Browne ,  A . 1986 . Piggybook . London : Walker Books Ltd . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Brun ,  G. and P.   Cossu, 2019 . ESI en la Formación de los Nuevos Docentes: Intervenciones Didácticas en el profesorado de Inglés . Buenos Aires : Segundas Jornadas Educativas Encender . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Clinton ,  C . 2018 . She Persisted Around the World . New York : Penguin Putnam Inc . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Consejo Federal de Educación . 2008 . Lineamientos Curriculares para la Educación Sexual Integral. Programa Nacional de Educación Sexual Integral. Ley Nº 26.150 . Available at https://www.argentina.gob.ar/sites/default/files/lineamientos_0.pdf (accessed on 20 June 2020 ). Freire ,  P . 1970 . Pedagogy of the Oppressed . New York : Continuum Publishing Company . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Giroux ,  H. A . 1988 . Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning . Granby, Mass. : Bergin & Garvey . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Hanks ,  J . 2017 . Exploratory Practice in Language Teaching. Puzzling About Principles and Practices . London : Palgrave Macmillan . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC hooks ,  B . 2003 . Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope . New York : Routledge . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ley Nº 26,150 / 2006 . Programa Nacional de Educación Sexual Integral . Available at http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/120000–124999/121222/norma.htm (accessed on 15 June 2020 ). Morgade ,  G . 2017 . Educación Sexual Integral con Perspectiva de Género . Buenos Aires : Homo Sapiens . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Pankhurst ,  K . 2016 . Fantastically Great Women who Changed the World . London : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC UNESCO . 2018 . Why Comprehensive Sexuality Education is Important . Available at https://en.unesco.org/news/why-comprehensive-sexuality-education-important (accessed on 2 October 2020 ). Velasco ,  L . 2016 . Informe sobre Educación Sexual Integral en CABA . Available at https://lauravelasco.com.ar/2016-informe-sobre-educacion-sexual-integral-a-10-anos-de-la-sancion-de-la-ley-a-nivel-nacional-y-en-la-ciudad-de-buenos-aires/ (accessed on 25 June 2020 ). © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Initiatives in primary school for the inclusion of gender perspective
JO - ELT Journal
DO - 10.1093/elt/ccaa082
DA - 2021-04-12
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/initiatives-in-primary-school-for-the-inclusion-of-gender-perspective-L434u35SDF
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -