A Lesson on Sex Roles

Abstract

This paper analyses a lesson on sex roles which took place in a seventh‐grade classroom (12–13 year olds) as part of a humanities course in an Australian coeducational secondary school. It shows how routine instructional practices can combine with conventional knowledge and theorising to confirm notions of inequality rather than challenge them. The use of sex role theory, with its embedded biological assumptions, and the initiation‐reply‐evaluation format which ensures that the teacher is in control of the lesson topic and procedure, combine to produce a lesson in which what the pupils hear is a confirmation of the fact that women and men are not equal. The teacher's intention to teach a lesson about equality is thus undermined by his own theorising and his teaching technology. The analysis is undertaken to show the ways in which unwary teachers can sustain inequitable gender relations even when this is contrary to their intentions.

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