Toward Literacies of Gender

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: Division B Roundtable Session

Abstract

Students receive a hidden curriculum (Anyon 1980) regarding gender in their everyday lives in schools. Much of this remains codified through specific structures upheld in schools, such as classroom literature focused on normative expressions of gender, school policies on gender-specific dress, classroom practices of grouping by gender (Thorne 1993), and a productive silence (Mazzei 2011) around gender. By avoiding active conversations about how these expectations of gender expression shape students’ lives, we set students up to sort through societal pressures on their own, keeping this hidden curriculum intact.

This essay seeks to explore how creating intentional learning spaces to cultivate literacy about gender and expectations of gender performance is paramount to shifting educational paradigms for cis- and gender-fluid youth.

Author

• Allyson Dean, University of Oregon