You and I are different, but that doesn't make you better. A study on gender stereotypes among high school students

Abstract

Interest in learning about the ways in which children and adolescents are resolving their differences in school contexts has grown considerably in the last five years, especially when the concern for responding to bullying behaviors is focused on the gender category. However, there are some behaviors that, without being considered atypical, are creating a type of relationship that conceals a form of violence and reinforces traditional stereotypes.

With the aim of contributing to the construction of knowledge and alternatives, I propose to show what ideas students in the last year of Upper Secondary Education have about behaviors, attitudes, activities and gender geography and how this determines coexistence agreements. I am interested in highlighting those ideas that come from their family environment and that, from early childhood to adolescence, they have been reproducing in daily life as they are part of institutionalized practices. In addition, I start from the idea that primary learning provides human beings with the experiences that guide their social interactions. Based on the information gathered through direct and participant observation in classrooms, in the school hallways, in the development of some activities and with the information derived from some interviews, I recognized some factors that are intervening in: 1) the type of relationships they establish based on their gender and; 2) the way in which they appropriate school spaces to reproduce some practices of control, domination and power based on this social construction. This is understandable, at least among the student population at the high school level, if we consider that the majority behave according to the stereotypes learned in the family environment and only some have started a process of reflection triggering their capacity for agency to modify their immediate reality in the school context.