After reading others blogs it sounds like this was a great presentation. I unfortunately had to miss it however for a great reason, to witness the birth of my niece! However for my hidden curriculum paper I am going to discuss gender bias in the classroom therefore it would have been very useful to have seen this presentation! Therefore, I was wondering if anyone who did the presentation could give me a little review of what was mentionned in the presentation!
From reading I have already done I believe that gender bias is quite an issue in the classroom. However, a lot of the time it is unintentional and just something we are not really aware of. For example, when we have boys and girls line up at the door separately, or we shrug things off because 'boys will be boys', we are doing these things without realizing what we are instilling in our students. I think like Eric mentionned we do pay more attention to boys often because they are 'usually' the ones who cause more problems in class. However we need to find a way to deal with that issue so that we aren't stereotyping boys or leaving the girls out because boys are drawing more attention.
From my reading there are many things we could be paying attention to such as authors of literature and what that literature is about (the dominant characters and stereotypes), asking questions and helping equally boys and girls, having them work in mixed groups, watching gendered vocabulary that we use, and having everyone do similar tasks (not having boys do competitive things and girls doing quiet individual things).
I think it is very hard not to think about stereotypes and gender differences when teaching as well as other things. All of these things have been instilled in us from school, tv, media, our friends, everywhere! It's hard not to believe that most girls like shopping and most boys like sports because that is usually true!! What we need to realize is that not everyone fits into these categories nor should there even be categories. We need to treat everyone as individuals and not as a specific gender but just as a person.
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Sometimes I wonder if we go too far with our concerns over gender. We absolutely don't want to give girls the impression that they can't be doctors just because of their gender, or that boys can't be nurses because of theirs, but I don't see a problem with complimenting a girl on her beautiful long hair just because it isn't likely that a boy have long hair. That being said, if I ever had a boy in my class that did have long hair I would probably compliment him on it too! We definitely don't want to make matters worse but we also don't want to become so careful that we can't celebrate the differences either. Girls need to know why it's great to be a girl because that's what they are and they can't change that. Boys need the same. I think we can do both; celebrating differences but not making them more severe.
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