Reading The Line Spaces of the Story Completion Tasks: An Evaluation of Gender Equality Course

Abstract

Drawing on feminist methodology, this research aims at examining the gender stereotyping of the students through their creative writing activities. More specifically, the attempt of this paper is to reveal the significance of gender equality courses by making comparison between university students who took gender equality course and the ones who have not yet. This qualitative research was built on the content analysis of the written responses of the students to the story starter of “Cinderella”. This folk tale is originally stereotypical. However, as the data collection technique of the research, the non-stereotypical type of story starter of Cinderella was used as a tool for the story completion task. The participants of the study were 120 first grade university students from Ondokuz Mayis University, 62 of whom took gender equality course this semester (Group A from Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences) and 58 of whom have not taken this kind of a course or training yet (Group B from Faculty of Education). The writings of the students were analyzed under four categories such as language use, types of the attributes assigned by the students to the characters they used in their stories, sex roles and the completion of the studies. The results of the study suggest that there seems to be gender stereotyping in both groups, but weaker in Group A than Group B.