Describe the process of gender socialization and identify specific ways in which teachers and schools contribute to the process

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

From kindergarten through college, schools operate as a gendered institution. Teachers provide important messages about gender through both the formal content of classroom assignments and informal interactions with students. During the early years of a child's schooling, teachers' influence is very powerful? many children spend more hours per day with their teachers than they do with their own parents. According to some researchers, the quantity and quality of teacher-student interactions often vary between the education of girls and that of boys. One of the messages that teachers may communicate to students is that boys are more important than girls. Research shows that unintentional gender bias occurs in virtually all educational settings. Gender bias consists of showing favoritism toward one gender over the other. Researchers consistently find that teachers devote more time, effort, and attention to boys than to girls. Males receive more praise for their contributions and are called on more frequently in class, even when they do not volunteer. Very often, boys receive attention because they call out in class, demand help, and sometimes engage in disruptive behavior. Teachers who do not negatively sanction such behavior may unintentionally encourage it. The content of teacher-student interactions is very important. Education professors Myra and David Sadker identified four types of teacher comments: praise, acceptance, remediation, and criticism. Teacher-student interactions influence not only students' learning but also their self-esteem.

A comprehensive study of gender bias in schools suggest that girls' self-esteem is undermined in school through such experiences as: (1) a relative lack of attention from teachers, (2) sexual harassment by male peers, (3) the stereotyping and invisibility of females in textbooks, especially in science and math texts, and (4) test bias based on assumptions about the relative importance of quantitative and visual-spatial ability, as compared with verbal ability, where girls typically excel. Teachers also influence how students treat one another during school hours. Many teachers use sex segregation as a way to organize students, resulting in unnecessary competition between females and males. Competition based on gender often reinforces existing misconceptions about the skills and attributes of boys and girls and may contribute to overt and subtle discrimination in the classroom and beyond. The effect of gender bias is particularly problematic if teachers take a "boys will be boys" attitude when boys and young men make derogatory remarks or demonstrate aggressive behavior against girls and young women. When girls complain of sexual harassment—unwanted sexual advances, requests for sexual favors or other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature—their concerns are sometimes overlooked or downplayed by teachers and school administrators.