Designing Gender-Inclusive Didactic Fairy Tales: An Empirical Investigation of 54 Original Tale Texts
Keywords:
Didactic fairy tales, Gender inclusiveness, Gender stereotypes, Voyant tool, Content analysisAbstract
To avoid the unwitting transmission of rigid male and female role models in their early approaches to shared reading, educators and teachers must be provided with the right resources to recognize and correct gender biases and stereotypes, which can go unnoticed, latently supported through the “hidden curriculum.” The best scenario is when an educator or teacher designs tales for children, promoting counter-narratives against the trivialization of what it means to be “male” or “female.” Through content analysis, we analyzed the texts of 54 original inclusive fairy tales, by referring to a checklist created to identify and filter gendered details, conveyed through lexical categories (mainly verbs and adjectives), to statistically assess the level of stereotyping. The survey results show the importance of integrating the promotion of gender equality through the careful selection, if not the writing, of inclusive narratives in school settings.
References
Ashby, M. S. & Wittmaier, B. C. (1978). Attitude changes in children about exposure to stories about women in traditional and nontraditional occupations. Journal of Educational Psychology, 70(6), 945–949. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.70.6.945
Ashmore, R. D. & Del Boca, F. K. (1979). Sex stereotypes and implicit personality theory: Toward a cognitive-social psychological conceptualization. Sex Roles, 5(2), 219–248. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00287932
Bar-Tal, D. (1989). Delegitimization: The extreme case of stereotyping and prejudice. In D. Bar-Tal, C. Graumann, A. W. Kruglanski, & W. Stroebe (Eds.). Stereotyping and prejudice: Changing conceptions (pp. 169–182). New York: Springer-Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3582-8_8
Basow, S. (2004). The hidden curriculum: Gender in the classroom. In M. A. Paludi (Ed.). Praeger guide to the psychology of gender (pp. 117–131). Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Publishing Group. https://doi.org/10.5040/9798216000129.ch-006
Bellassai, S. (2005). La mascolinità post-tradizionale. In E. Ruspini (Ed.). Donne e uomini che cambiano. Relazioni di genere, identità sessuali e mutamento sociale (pp. 123–146). Milano: Guerini.
Bellassai, S. (2004). La mascolinità contemporanea. Roma: Carocci.
Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. New York: Doubleday.
Berk, L. E. (2003). Child development. London: Pearson Education, Inc.
Bian, L., Leslie, S., & Cimpian, A. (2017). Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests. Science, 355(6323), 389–391. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah6524
Blumberg, R. (2008). The invisible obstacle to educational equality: Gender bias in textbooks. Prospects, 38(3), 345–361. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-009-9086-1
Blumberg, R. L. (2014). Eliminating gender bias in textbooks: pushing for policy reforms that promote gender equity in education. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232452
Blumberg, R. L. (2007). Gender bias textbooks: A hidden obstacle on the road to gender equality in education. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001555/155509e.pdf
Brown, C. S., Alabi, B. O., Huynh, V. W., & Masten, C. L. (2011). Ethnicity and gender in late childhood and early adolescence: Group identity and awareness of bias. Developmental Psychology, 47(2), 463–471. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021819
Burgess, D. & Borgida, E. (1999). Who women are, who women should be: Descriptive and prescriptive gender stereotyping in sex discrimination. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 5(3), 665–692. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8971.5.3.665
Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2007). Research methods in education. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203029053
Dunnigan, L. (1980). Analyse des stéréotypes masculins et féminins dans les manuels scolaires au Québec.
Golombok, S. & Fivush, R. (1994). Gender development. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6807(200007)37:4<394::AID-PITS14>3.0.CO;2-9
Hamilton, M., Anderson, D., Broaddus, M., & Young, K. (2006). Gender stereotyping and under-representation of female characters in 200 popular children’s picture books: A twenty-first century update. Sex Roles, 55(11-12), 757–765. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-006-9128-6
Jackson, C. (2002). ‘Laddishness’ as a self-worth protection strategy. Gender and Education, 14(1), 37–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250120098870
Kellner, D. & Share, J. (2005). Toward critical media literacy: Core concepts, debates, organizations, and policy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26(3), 369–386. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596300500200169
King, E. (2020). Fostering toddlers’ social emotional competence: Considerations of teachers’ emotional language by child gender. Early Childhood Development and Care, 191(16), 2494–2507. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2020.1718670
Koepke, M. & Harkins, D. (2008). Conflict in the classroom: Gender differences in the teacher-child relationship. Early Education and Development, 19(6), 843–864. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409280802516108
Kollmayer, M., Schober, B., & Spiel, C. (2016). Gender stereotypes in education: Development, consequences, and interventions. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15(4), 361–377. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2016.1193483
Kortenhaus, C. M. & Demarest, J. (1993). Gender role stereotyping in children’s literature: An update. Sex Roles, 28(3/4), 219–232. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00299282
Michel, A. (1986). Down with stereotypes! Eliminating sexism from children’s literature and school textbooks. Paris: UNESCO.
Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, gender and society. London: Temple Smith.
OECD (2020). Over the rainbow? The road to LGBTI inclusion. https://doi.org/10.1787/8d2fd1a8-en
Robinson, K. H. (2014). Building respectful relationships early: educating children on gender variance and sexual diversity. a response to Damien Riggs. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 14(1), 81–87. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2014.14.1.81
Schneider, D. J. (2004). The psychology of stereotyping. New York: Guilford Press.
Sette, S., Spinrad, T., & Baumgartner, E. (2013). Links among Italian preschoolers’ socioemotional competence, teacher-child relationship quality, and peer acceptance. Early Education & Development, 24(6), 851–864. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2013.744684
Su, Q., Wang, Q., Zhang, L., & Zhang, S. (2021). A Review of Gender Stereotypes in Education. In C. Kahl & N. Fatima (Eds.). Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Public Relations and Social Sciences (ICPRSS 2021) (pp. 779–783). Atlantis Press. https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211020.256
Tiedemann, J. (2002). Teachers’ gender stereotypes as determinants of teacher perceptions in elementary school mathematics. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 50(1), 49–62. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020518104346
Trepanier-Street, M. L. & Romatowski, J. A. (1999). The influence of children’s literature on gender role perceptions: A reexamination. Early Childhood Education Journal, 26(3), 155–159. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022977317864
Turner-Bowker, D. (1996). Gender stereotyped descriptors in children’s picture books: Does “curious Jane” exist in literature?. Sex Roles, 35(7/8), 461–488. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01544132
Valente, J. (2011). d/Deaf and d/Dumb: A portrait of a deaf kid as young superhero. New York: Peter Lang.
World Federation of Teachers’ Unions (1983). A study of the portrayal of women and men in school textbooks and children’s literature in France.
Younger, M. & Warrington, M. (1996). Differential achievement of girls and boys at GCSE: Some observations from the perspective of one school. British journal of Sociology of Education, 17(3), 299–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142569960170304
Zemore, S. E., Fiske, S. T., & Kim, H. J. (2000). Gender stereotypes and the dynamics of social interaction. In T. Eckes & H. M. Trautner (Eds.). The developmental social psychology of gender (pp. 207–242). London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410605245
Zipes, J. (1999). Hans Christian Andersen and the discourse of the dominated. In J. Zipes (Ed.). When dreams come true: Classical fairy tales and their traditions (pp. 80–110). London: Routledge.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Diana Olivieri, Barbara Palleschi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Formazione & insegnamento is distributed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
For further details, please refer to our Repository & Archiving Policy, as well as our Copyright & Licensing Terms.
