Gender Implication Analysis and Children's Interpretation in Primary School Chinese Teaching Materials

Tuesday, 8 July 2025: 09:40
Location: SJES028 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Oral Presentation
Wantong ZHU, Capital Normal University, China
Based on the importance of gender issues in textbooks and the particularity of Chinese textbooks, this study analyzes the unified Chinese textbooks for primary schools according to the feminist text criticism theory, aiming at horizontal comparison of different items and analysis of a single item, and analyzing the gender discourse of textbook texts and its impact on children's gender socialization.

This study conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 primary school children on topics related to gender awareness and textbook text interpretation, and conducted participatory observations on primary school Chinese courses of different grades to analyze children's interpretation of textbook texts, analyze the role of textbooks in the formation of children's gender concepts, and outline the cause system of children's gender concepts. At the same time, this study conducted semi-structured interviews with 6 parents and 3 primary school teachers to analyze the external factors affecting children's gender socialization, so as to explore the influence of textbook text, as one of the factors affecting children's socialization, on children's gender socialization.

At the level of the research results, the analysis of the gender meaning of the textbook texts shows that the gender stereotypes in the textbooks have different degrees of limitation on the roles of both sexes. The female characters in the texts show the characteristics of "dislocation" and "voice loss" under the patriarchy, while the male characters show the characteristics of "heroism" and "stigmatization". It is true that textbook texts have an impact on children's gender socialization. However, as subjects of textbook learning, children will interpret and constructively interpret textbook texts based on existing gender concepts. Instead of negatively internalizing all gender information from the outside world, they have a sense of questioning and criticism.