A Study On Gender Issues In The Interaction Of Primary School Classroom From The Perspective Of Educational Equality

With the popularization and implementation of the Scientific Approach of Development and Socialist Harmonious Society, educational equality is gradually becoming the basic guarantee to promote the development of education. The National Program for Medium-and Long-Term Educational Reform and Development (2010-2012) sets clear rules about what to research on educational equality:the strategic thinking, the intermittent goals and the major actions of educational equality should be further promoted. In the macro domain, by means of legislation, government investment, elementary education development, etc., our government has basically established a whole set of measures to ensure educational equality on the institutional level, greatly improving regional and ethnic educational development and narrowing down class differences. However, the concept of educational equality should be implemented not only on the institutional level, but also in the lowest social class, the classroom being the most micro unit to realize educational equality. In the classroom, the problems of educational differentiation and inequality are still severe. Taking a general view of the present educational situation, classroom instructions, especially teacher-student interaction, have explicit and implicit problems due to teachers’lack of social gender awareness and lack of concepts of gender equality.Based on feminist pedagogy and gender theory, this thesis views classroom interaction and the relationship between teacher and students, utilizing the method of classroom research to survey gender issues in classroom education, which lies in the micro domain of educational equality and which this thesis attempts to reveal. This thesis is a case study of an elementary school in Shandong Province. By means of classroom recordings in different classrooms of five grades and by interviewing part of the teachers and students, this thesis comes to the finding that there are gender differences in the fields of classroom interaction patterns, interaction content, teacher feedback and evaluation; besides, there are differences in the ways boy and girl students perform and behave when participating in the classroom. Teacher, as one of the important others in the developmental process of student socialization, plays a very significant role in students’ gender socialization and gender role shaping, so the differences in classroom interaction and teacher attitudes will have different effects on the character formation and behavior shaping of boy and girl students. On the basis of previous research on gender equality, this thesis takes gender equality in classroom interaction as the research orientation. It briefly analyzes social, institutional and personal reasons accounting for the differences, and it discusses the various effects those differences have on the socialization development and educational equality of boy and girl students. Finally the thesis carries out beneficial discussions and gives constructive advice on the construction of the classroom of gender equality from the aspects of school institutional construction, teachers’ team construction and establishment of equal gender curriculums. The thesis has double significance in both theory and practice.