Challenging traditional gender roles in the Arab classroom through transaction with literature

Abstract

This study is situated within a male-dominated Palestinian-Israeli reality rife with issues of gender privilege. With a purpose to disrupt the status quo in my language classroom and positively affect students’ beliefs towards gender injustices, I, as a teacher researcher, designed a unit on gender issues including a book set that would challenge such reality. Framed by transactional theory, the study offered an array of literacy engagements that encouraged students to critically transact with the texts and question the context. This article describes students’ transaction with the third book in the unit, Piggybook (Browne, 1986). Using students’ oral and written reader responses, it attempts to explore whether students’ transaction with the text reflected any emerging transformation or manifested unchanged views towards traditional gender roles.