Introduction
Children learn to take up gender as an element of their personal and social selves, and they do so, among other things, through learning the discourse practices in which all people are positioned as either male or female. Children develop an emotional commitment to their gender as early as 2 years of age and when they arrive in preschool, many of them already act, speak and behave according to conventional images of gender—though the contents of these images vary considerably according to culture, historical period, social class, ethnicity, age, and individual circumstances. Images of gender also vary in the lifetime of any individual, and as the individual moves from one context to another. Yet classrooms can be sites where a specific gender order is made to seem intractable: a binary and hierarchical order between girls and boys, and a shifting array of hegemonic or marginalized positions within each gender group. Classrooms may also be sites where students discover ways...
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Nielsen, H.B., Davies, B. (2008). Discourse and the Construction of Gendered Identities in Education. In: Hornberger, N.H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_69
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