History of exclusion: Queer representations in Israeli textbooks

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Thurseday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: New and emerging directions in research on SOGIE issues in education

Proposal

Climate research provides with insight that resources and support, including reading materials related to sexual orientation and gender identity has dramatic effects on the LGBT students experience (Pizmony-Levy, Shilo & Rogel 2016). LGBT youth which is taught within school curriculums that provide resources and support with these topics, report to have a higher sense of security and belonging and are less prone to be absent from class. This is in contrast to LGBT youth that attend school curriculums that have no support and resources regarding these issues. This paper will present a research, first of its kind, that examined thoroughly and empirically the queer representations in history textbooks for high-school in Israeli educational system. The research compares between queer and heterosexual cisgender representations of gender and sexuality in the same textbooks. The research considers as well the pedagogical context of sex and gender content, and how queer representation in particular has been integrated in textbooks.

The current research examined how much queer representations have been displayed in the history textbooks, and what were the meanings that were given to those representations and in which context. In order, we examined all 36 history textbooks that were approved by the Israeli Ministry of Education for high-school students in hebrew; we created a protocol for a systematic analyzation of the textbooks. On the basis of the familiar method of research of textbooks (Meyer, Bromley & Ramirez 2010). The structure of the protocol was influenced from the research tool that was report committee for examining gender stereotypes in textbooks in the Israeli Educational System (Ministry of Education 2002, 14), that include: (a) quantitative analyzation of the book’s content (b) qualitative analyzation of the content and its visualization.

The prominent findings of the research indicate a sufficient sub representation of queer representations in history textbooks, in contrast to the majority of heterosexual cisgender representations. The quantitative analysation of the books contents, indicates, in contrary to what can be assumed, topics regarding: “love, gender, family and relationships“ appear in all history textbooks. This sub representation is manifested in the quantitative and qualitative level. Hence, the queer representations, almost barely exist in the textbooks, thus displayed as marginal and preserves the unequal status of the LGBT community.

Author

• Avner Rogel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Magnus Hirschfeld Institute - IGY