Study On Children’s Gender-role Identification And Teachers’ Intervention In Role Play

Gender-role socialization is an important part of young children’s socialization; and earlychildhood is critical phase of gender-role socialization. Gender-role identification will encounter numerousobstacles if they won’t be conducted and developed properly at this period, hence it will make against thedevelopment of body and mind, even affect the happiness of all one’s life.Currently, androgyny education theory which was proposed by Bem is very popular ingender-role education filed. Androgyny theory considers individual can have male and female mental traits,such as interests, fancies, abilities, needs, and character. The final purpose of androgyny education is totrain individual who have commonness and personality of male and female at the same time.Thus, androgyny personality is considered to be an optimal psychology mode.In order to carry out androgyny education, you must know the situation of children’s gender-roleidentification. First, the situation of young children’s sex identification was examined by interview; then,the characteristic of young children’s gender-role identification was also studied by observation andinterview. At the same time, the researcher made an interview with teachers and observed their behavior inplay guiding to study what role did the teachers’ gender-role consciousness and intervene play in children’srole play.The results show that:(1) Sex identification of children in middle-class, top class and preschoolclass have met the precondition of androgyny education.(2) Young children’s gender-role identification inrole play represents obvious gender role stereotypes at the aspect of the role selection and the words anddeeds in play.(3) The teachers’ gender-role consciousness was consistent with traditional socialexpectation, so they can’t recognize gender-role difference and its value, their intervention often was alsouseless, even they brought their gender role consciousness to young children’s play unconsciously.(4)Under the direction of androgyny theory, the teachers’ intervene to role selection and behavior of childrenin play became more effective.Finally, the factors that affect young children’s gender-role identification in role play werediscussed. The researcher suggested that the teachers should break through gender-role restriction and build up correct gender concept, carry androgyny education into execution by the way of role play.