Representations and Perspectives of Gender Equality in EFL: Learning Among Moroccan Educators and Students
Hmad Benaissa
Education has an impact on constructing gender, power relations, and cultural identities. Textbooks can promote gender disparities or encourage equality and equity. Educators and learners redefine gender roles through various perspectives that consider the educational discourse a potential mode of resistance and identity forming. The educational materials the instructors and learners use can impact gender identification in classrooms. Education could be a generator that reproduces gender inequalities or creates new realities that give women more opportunities for access and success in the public sphere. The theoretical background of the study confirms that educational institutions are included in the apparatus that shapes human lifestyles; education can produce or reproduce social principles and norms. It proves that learning English as a foreign language could shape students’ thoughts about gender equality and socio-cultural beliefs. It shows that social education constructs teachers’ and students’ meanings and values that resist or perpetuate patriarchal ideas. This study adopts the mixed approach using both quantitative and qualitative methods besides content analysis. Gate Way to English 2 is chosen non-randomly as a representative of the textbooks that are used in teaching English as a foreign language and designed for second-year Moroccan baccalaureate learners. Content analysis and the findings show that gender roles are represented negatively in Gate Way to English 2. Teachers’ awareness of the gender gap in education leads them to call for equality in representing gender within textbooks. The learners adopt their educators’ vision and ideas associated with gender even when they oppose the textbook content. Textbooks should be altered to spread ideas that go hand in hand with the speedy development of Moroccan society.