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…

This paper reports on research examining how male pre-service primary school teachers negotiate masculinities during their time within majority-female spaces. Four white undergraduate pre-service teachers in the North of England, UK, who were training to teach children aged 5-11 years were recruited. Interviews took place pre-and-post their…

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…

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…

The purpose of this article is to examine how the discourse of childhood innocence masks the ways in which sexual violence by boys against girls is perpetrated in kindergarten. Findings from a year-long ethnographic study conducted in two Canadian kindergarten classrooms show that narrow understandings of gender and sexuality in childhood obscure…

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…

Boys have been identified as the main perpetrators of school violence and bullying, evoking debates on masculinities. However, boys are not always the active producers of violence. This article examines the ways in which primary school boys who otherwise denounce violence explain their participation in it. The data draw from a more extensive…

In a global context where children are increasingly exposed to hostile humour in cartoons like Adventure Time and Spongebob Squarepants, it is not surprising that we see this play out in school settings. More concerning, however, is how teachers can misuse their position of power to wield such forms of humour against students who dare to question…

The teaching of young children (aged between 5 and 9) or Foundation Phase (FP) as it is known in South Africa, is highly gendered and is labeled a 'woman's' job. Globally there have been calls to lessen the gender disparity within the profession by increasing the participation of men. However, apprehensions about men teaching young children can…

This study explored male teachers' perceptions of their roles in early childhood education and their beliefs about their own professional development in shaping their careers. Although the participants' experiences are strongly influenced by strict gender roles in China, they appear to be consistent with the experiences of men across the globe.…

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…

This study draws on focus group discussions to explore how 12- to 14-year-old boys in a low economic township primary school in South Africa construct their hegemonic identity as "real boys" in the school playground during break. Addressing masculinity and boys' investment in power is now a major research development in the country,…

In this article, we draw on data from focus group discussions to examine the ways in which some young boys in a South African township primary school construct and negotiate hegemonic masculinity through bullying, and other forms of violence, within the school. Deviating from the simplistic victim-bully binary, we draw from critical masculinity…

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…

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…