Seventh Graders and Sexism

In Lisa Espinosa's chapter of Rethinking Popular Culture and Media titled "Seventh Graders and Sexism", she discusses her experiences with sexism and gender stereotypes in the classroom. In her early childhood, Espinosa realized early the double standard that existed for boys and girls. She was puzzled as to why boys were taught to be strong and independent while the girls were encouraged to be nice, do chores and cook. Though Espinosa's realization dealt with the familial expectations of gender, it is also reflective of the media's portrayal of gender roles, such as in the Disney films we have been watching. Espinosa realized that given her realization of this double standard, it was her duty to integrate these problems in hopes of solving them, into her own classroom. Espinosa ultimately argues that these issues are vast and sometimes insurmountable, but it is possible through small acts in our own spheres of influence.

Espinosa discusses that she at first planned on creating a unit on these issues later into the year, once she had built a culture and climate amongst her students. She was shocked at how early she felt she was forced to begin the unit, when in the first weeks of schools, she was constantly seeing problematic gender stereotypes being portrayed in her own classroom. Daily, she would see students using homophobic slurs, rivalry between girls, or girl students saying their future goals are "to find a guy to take care of me".

Espinosa continues her chapter by introducing the ways she was able to discuss these topics with her students. In doing her research, she realized a main roadblock to discussing these issues with students was a lack of age appropriate texts, and she found her self often having to 'dumb down' college level texts for her students to understand. Once she found the right resources, she was able to teach students about the ways in which we learn how to act. One activity that did this was where she had to pieces of chart paper, where students were asked to write down the ways in which society tells them to "Act like a man" or to "Be ladylike". This intro to gender norms and roles was effective in her experience, and she was able to use it as a building block to continue her work in her classroom.

The final activity she describes is when her students made collages about the ways gender stereotypes are reinforced or countered in the media, all by using magazine images. The students soon realized that it was difficult to complete the counter narrative collages, as most images reinforced the problematic norms the students learned about.

Though the chapter seems to end on a negative note in describing the difficulty of combating sexism, she leaves the reader and her students with glimmers of hope. When a student stated that sexism will "never end", Espinosa reflectively writes that "I understood in some ways my student was right: The problem was too big... but we could make things better, and that we could start with our classroom."