Both gender and sexuality are still tabooed concepts in Poland and consequently they take on spec... more Both gender and sexuality are still tabooed concepts in Poland and consequently they take on special significance in the local context of education. In this presentation we look into the context of the Polish EFL classroom to discuss how various gender and sexuality discourses emerge in the EFL textbooks and classroom interactions. In particular we focus on the role of teachers as (potential) mediators of classroom interactions (see Sunderland et al. 2002) as well as ‘surfacing’ of (dominant) gender ideologies and its consequences for the ongoing classroom work. We also look into students’ and teachers’ negotiations and contestations of gendered ideologies within the classroom setting. The data to be discussed in this presentation were collected for the British Council-funded project entitled “Investigating gender and sexuality in the ESL classroom: Raising publishers’, teachers’ and students’ awareness” and comprise EFL textbooks, audio-recorded classroom interactions, focus groups with teachers and students as well as interviews with the Ministry of Education textbooks reviewers. Data analysis reveals how the Polish EFL classroom tends to be constructed as a highly gendered social space where emphasized femininity and hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987) are drawn on to facilitate the process of teaching and learning. The analysis also shows heavy reliance on heteronormative discourse (high degree of heteronormativity, see Sunderland (2015)) constructed in the analyzed EFL materials and classroom interactions. In the spirit of thinking practically and looking locally (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992), tentative guidelines for language education practitioners – as regards normalizing diversity (Gray 2013) in general and the teaching of gender diversity and sexual diversity in particular as part of ELT – will be offered.
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Talks by Jane Sunderland