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The concept of gender stereotypes permeates the lives of youth in the United States. This article provides background information and rationale for incorporating gender stereotype analysis into family and consumer sciences (FCS) coursework. The critical analysis of gender stereotypes includes numerous activities and assessments that encourage students to identify and challenge stereotypes that have an impact on children and adolescents. Each lesson incorporates opportunities to apply the concepts of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity. Literacy strategies and experiential learning approaches involve students as active learners. This paper suggests analysis of numerous mediums such as toy marketing and advertisements to well-known Disney characters. The curriculum also encourages students to analyze high-school rituals and expectations such as dress codes, policies, and classroom gender roles.
Adolescents are bombarded daily with gender stereotypes from mass media, institutionalized school rituals, and peer pressure. The messages can have a profound influence on their emerging sense of identities. Schools, more specifically family and consumer sciences (FCS) classrooms, are the ideal place to discuss rigid gender stereotypes in teens' lives and strategies for challenging them. In the public discourse of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, one needs to recognize the important role of schools as social institutions for change. As noted by Wilkinson and Pearson (2009), it is important to understand schools as normative contexts that shape adolescents' wellbeing because of the central role schools and peers play in the lives of developing adolescents.
As stated by Connell (1996), the K-12 school system is a weighty institution, a major employer, and a key means of transmitting culture among generations. It has direct control over its gender regimes and it can set standards, pose questions, and supply knowledge for other spheres of life. School systems and rituals seem to ascribe more power than is required or mandated to it per public policy and regulation. As adolescents' sense of identity and sexuality emerge, schools are critical social contexts in which dominant gender beliefs are played out.
As an undergraduate Women's Studies minor, I was aware of the gender stereotypes in mainstream American culture but it was not until I was a full-time FCS high school teacher that I began to have these important conversations with students. Many of the gender roles that we are...