Gender and Education: The delimitation of spaces and construction of stereotypes

Abstract

This theoretical essay demonstrates the way in which gender stereotypes are constructed through teaching practices, and the social relations instituted by the construction of knowledge, as well as the challenges for education in the 21st Century. It is based on the assumption that the majority of differences between men and women are socially constructed, and that the individual only adapts to the dominant models in order to be prepared to play the roles delegated to them by society. Education institutions therefore have an important part to play in this process. On the other hand, it is necessary to ask the question, like Marx (2007), ‘who educates the educators?’ After all, in the teaching-learning process, the citizen who is socialized in a certain way tends to reproduce the features that characterize the society in which the self is constructed. Words are powerful signs that influence the construction of the social world and the way we live in it, therefore discourse is an important component of an individual’s personality. It is believed that the starting point is to begin the debate and to disseminate it, so that it becomes possible for increasing numbers of people to question the relations established, places occupied, and even the places to which one would like others fit.