Gendered Citizenship: A Post-structural and Critical Analysis of the Citizenship Curriculum Regarding Gender

Abstract

This study aims to analyze primary school students’ experiences from a gender-based perspective throughout the primary school curriculum taking the curriculum as a phenomenological construct and an apparatus to reproduce orthodoxies in a diverse context in the Southern region of Turkey. Via utilizing a multi-phase embedded case study, this research included the qualitative data that obtained from 4th grade textbooks and 11 schools, including site visits, classroom observations, and semi-structured interviews with 27 teachers, 10 managers, and 10 counselors. Thick data were subjected to inductive qualitative analysis and triangulated for trustworthiness. Findings revealed the gendered character of citizenship and the reproduction of gender roles through formal education, in which boys had more space to act flexible and free compared to girls. Findings also manifested the intersections of class, ethnicity, and nationality with gender, leading to girls’ diverse experiences from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. In addition, the existence of resistance was also apparent in a few participants’ discourses through which education could be defined as a ‘praxis’ rather than ‘reproduction.’