Doing gender in Arabic textbooks

Gender representation in textbooks has become increasingly significant in the framework of education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles. Indeed, while textbooks’ reforms in the last decades brought significative changes in terms of the removal of violent content, textbooks continue to portray gender stereotypes, sexism and inaccurate representations of people and societies. Textbooks often fail to recognize the range of actual roles played by men and women in society. This results in the neglection of the real advances that have been made in terms of gender equality, posing obstacles to the development of learners in their ability to positively contribute to the construction of societies. For this reason, gender has been included by UNESCO in the Global Education 2030 agenda (together with religion and culture) as one among the most critical and possibly controversial issues that may lead to stereotyping and should therefore be addressed properly to encourage diversity and respect for all in quality textbooks.

The MENA region appears as a particularly interesting setting for the study of gender topics in relation to education. Indeed, several scholars noted a significative mismatch between women’s education and economic integration of women in the region. Against the background of this ‘paradox’ (Assaad 2018) scholars are urged to investigate how female roles are constructed in textbooks and how gender stereotypical constructs are legitimized, affecting the self-conception of learners and their opportunities to equally contribute to the construction of their societies.

In this framework, the project ‘Doing gender in Arabic textbooks’ aimed at analysing gender representations and systems in textbooks used in elementary and secondary education in the MENA region. Different subject matters were considered. A first part of the project focused on the analysis of gender representations and gender social roles in Jordanian textbooks for mathematic education, adapting the method developed by the International Network for Research into Gendered Representations in Textbooks (UNESCO 2009). The subject of Islamic religious education in Jordan was also considered in the project as for the evaluation of which gender stereotypes and gendered social roles are transmitted through textbook for religious education and analyse how these textbooks are constructed as tools to educate for internal religious plurality in relation to gender issues.