The 2020 Norwegian national curriculum for primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary education includes a "competence aim" after Year 7 that expects pupils to be able to "investigate how gender, gender roles, and sexuality are presented in music and dance in the public sphere and create expressions that challenge…

Through language, children participate actively in the construction of meanings around sexuality, which is governed unequally according to gender. This article examines the articulation of the social constructions of sexuality and gender with the pictorial and narrative representations of boys and girls from 9 to 11 years of age from four public…

This article presents results from qualitative research on children's dominant gender discourses in kindergarten and the influence of the socio-pedagogical aspects of kindergarten culture, transmitted via teachers' gender discourses and personal epistemologies, on the construction of children's gender discourses and identities. The main questions…

The past two decades has seen widespread academic and public concern about boys' academic achievement and the emergence of discourses that identify girls as academic 'winners' in the primary classroom; however, this article aims to problematise these trends. Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in a primary school classroom in London, this…

Gender-typical characteristics are associated with popularity and acceptance, suggesting that gender typicality is an important component of how adolescents are perceived by peers. The current study addressed the contributions of self- and peer-perceived gender typicality in predicting popularity and liking among same- and other-sex peers.…

This article reports on a survey of 332 Year 3 students from 14 Australian schools. We are interested in exploring Year 3 primary school student aspirations and what this data shows us about any societal changes, or not. This study is timely as it reports on contemporary data within an Australian educational context marked by significant…

Children's adherence to gender stereotypes can be detrimental, yet interventions to tackle stereotyping have achieved mixed success. Few studies have examined interventions developed collaboratively by educators and researchers, and the impact of interventions that focus on increasing perceived similarities between genders has yet to be tested.…

Given the growing interest and representation of superheroes in comics and other media, we are interested in the ways young people read superhero texts and how those readings influence their conceptualisations of gender within and outside educational spaces. In this article we explore students' responses to (re)presentations of gender in superhero…

The current study examined the roles of gender, and gender-role orientation in young adolescents' empathetic concern. In addition, this study aimed to explore the contribution of Theory of Mind in participants' empathetic concern. Finally, this study examined whether gender and gender-role orientation were implicated in emerging adolescents'…

In South Africa there are few male teachers in the Foundation Phase (FP) of schooling, where children are aged between five and nine. FP teaching is traditionally considered to be a 'woman's job' and essentialist gender discourses play a central role in impeding men's participation in the profession. These discourses are based on polarised…

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether gender traits have any influence on the awareness of cultural codes, the motivation of playing online games, and the degrees of commitment for primary school upper graders. Of 390 students surveyed in Taiwan, a total of 364 questionnaires were returned with 356 being considered valid. The main…

Gender-normative discursive representations in textbooks could have deleterious impacts on pupils' gender identity development. This study sets out to explore the discursive construction of femininity and masculinity in anthology textbooks for primary education and scrutinize children's sense-making of gender-normative discourses. Grounded in a…

Women's representation in leadership positions is still low because there is still an opinion that women are not worthy of being leaders and only men are worthy of being leaders. This condition proves women's low participation in leadership roles because the patriarchal culture still strongly influences people's perspective. This paper aims to…

Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and Nathan Hale's graphic novel set "Rapunzel's Revenge" (2008) and "Calamity Jack" (2010) features fractured fairy tales that take up the issue of 'the damsel in distress,' questioning and complicating traditional gender roles in fairy tales. Throughout both graphic novels Rapunzel's character…

This paper sets out to investigate how children make sense of and negotiate non-traditional gender discourses promoted through the feminist version of the fairytale of Snow White. The research was based on work with 120 pupils aged 9-11 years old in 2 Athenian primary schools. The data were collected through semi-structured group interviews. The…