How gender fair are primary school mathematics textbooks?

EJER, Eskişehir, Türkiye, 10 - 13 Eylül 2020, ss.684-686

Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
Basıldığı Şehir: Eskişehir
Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
Sayfa Sayıları: ss.684-686
Erzincan Binali Yıldırım Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır

Özet

Education is one of the most important tools to achieve gender equality. In Turkey, the Principles of Turkish National

Education provides fourteen principles. One of them involves the role of generality and equality, and indicates that

‘Education institutions are open for everyone, regardless of language, race, gender, disability and religion. No privileges

can be granted in education to any person, family, group or class’ (Basic Law of National Education, 1973). Unfortunately,

the reality in Turkish education is not as the case mentioned in laws and it has some gender equality problems.

According to Sayılan (2012), if one of the factors that create gender inequality in education is the problem of access, the

other one is how and to what extent those who have the opportunity to access benefit from education. Therefore, the

content of gender inequality observed in education should be revealed.

Textbooks contribute to socialisation by presenting dominant patterns of gender relations and gendered behaviours

(Blakemore, Berenbaum & Liben, 2009) which they will carry with them into adult life (Leach, 2003). In Turkey, textbooks

have a special place in educational system, as they are almost the main knowledge sources (Altun, 2013), and offered

without of charge by the government. Besides, they are the most frequently used materials in classrooms (Kılıç & Seven,

2007). Therefore, textbooks also play a critical role in presenting gender stereotypes by internalizing patriarchal ideology

(Esen, 2007).

Based on textbook analysis conducted in Turkey, it was revealed that textbooks convey very strong messages about

what means of being a women and man. Studies related with gender equality in textbooks are mostly focused on verbal

subjects, (Demirel, 2010; Çubukçu & Sivaslıgil, 2007; Yıldız, 2013) especially Turkish (Kükrer & Kıbrıs, 2017; Esen & Bağlı,

2002) however, very few research conducted on mathematics textbooks (İncikabı & Ulusoy, 2019; Özdemir & Karaboğa,

2019). Considering mathematical knowledge as culture free and pure rational knowledge (Tang, Chen, & Zhang, 2010)

may be one of the reason for low interest in gender equality issues in mathematics textbook. Nevertheless, sociology

of knowledge asserts that “knowledge” can not be regarded as only knowledge since it is also shaped by social practices

(Tang et al. 2010), such as gender stereotypes. In this sense, it is thought that it would be important to analyse mathematics

textbooks to eliminate gender inequality and stereotypes.

The present study aimed to investigate gender portrayals in the texts of primary school mathematics textbooks. To

investigate whether these books are fair with respect to gender, the following broader questions were addressed in this

study :

1. How are the frequencies of female and male characters in mathematics books?

2. How are activities, parental roles and occupations of female and male characters in mathematics books?

3. How are female and male characters’ composition of groups or dyads in mathematics books?

4. How are the locations (indoors/outdoors) of female and male characters in mathematics books?

5. How are the frequencies of famous people and characters’ gender in mathematics books?

EJERCongress 2020 Bildiri Özetleri Kitabı / EJERCongress 2020 Abstracts

685

Yöntem

This study was designed as a basic qualitative research. Merriam and Tisdell (2016) mention three data collection strategies

in qualitative research. These are interviewing, observing and documents and artifacts. According to Yıldırım and

Şimşek (2002), documents can be visual (video, film, fotograph, picture etc.) or textual materials (book, journal, newspaper

etc.) related with research question. In this study, documents constitute the main data sources. Content analysis

was used to analyse these documents by establishing basic descriptive categories and codes early on for coding.

It was selected a total of four mathematics books for the each year of the primary education. It was compiled the sample

of the study as follows: The books included were approved by the Ministry of National Education and published for the

use in 2019-2020 school year in Turkey. In this regard, MHG Yayıncılık (Kayhan-Atalay, Özyıldırım-Gümüş, Yaman, Özer,

Şengil-Akar, 2018) (first grade), Ministry of National Education Textbooks (Apladı, Canbaz-Kırıkcıoğlu, Cerit, 2019) (second

grade), Ministry of National Education Textbooks (Genç, Güleç, Şahin, Taşcı, 2019) (third grade), Ata Yayıncılık

(Özçelik, 2018) (fourth grade) mathematics books were investigated whether they are gender fair.

In this study, to determine codes for the texts (all questions, explanations, exercises and solutions), it was adapted the

classification used by Piatek-Jimenez, Madison and Przybyla-Kuchek (2014) and Moser and Hannover (2014). In order

to minimise the number of unknown code, the pictures surrounding the text were used for clarification of the characters

if it was needed. The categories determined for analysing the texts were presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Codes and Categories Used in Analysing of Data