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Gender Lessons learned from School Books
I have the sneaking suspicion that there are more and more aggressive and stereotypical gender-norm affirming messages in today's German EFL books than in the ones we had in my school days. You may say that I am only saying that because I have only vague and fond memories, but I checked. I couldn't find examples similar to the ones I fond in today's EFL books anywhere in the eighties editions I have at home.
While working with the new editions during the last half year, I found gems like these:1. In the noughties edition of Green Line A1 for learners in their first year there's a dialogue on various school activities and the plans people are making for the weekend. It's a very short dialogue and briefly runs down the various activities the school offers, their times and places, and then includes an exchange along the lines of:
"Oh yes, we could go to a concert, there's this band I like, called FourYou..."
"Oh, not a boy band, Donna! Ask another girl to come with you, I want to play ball in the park with my friends instead."
2. Also in the noughties edition of Green Line A4, there is a dialogue entitled "Football for girls?" in which two girls debate whether a team for girls would be a good thing to have at their school. One argues that girls "are just not as good as boys" and therefore a football team for girls would not be a good idea, but then acknowledges that it might be a good idea to try out a team, anyway, and see who shows up. In the end, she still says that boy's football is better because of their butts. Because girls cannot like football for the sake of the sport, they must like it for the sake of the players.
3. In the 2001 edition of Camden Town 4, the book for the Realschule, we have the usual national stereotype text in the first unit. What's typical for US America (fast food and chewing gum), what's typical for Great Britain (queuing and tea), what's typical for Germany (according to my student, who had to think about this for a couple of minutes, it's "Potatoes.")? That sort of thing. Our protagonists eat in a fast food restaurant, discuss national stereotypes (fast food is apparently super different in Great Britain's McD's), and then they decide what to do with their afternoons, leading to this exchange:
"We could go shopping!"
"Ugh, Shopping is a girl's disease!"
4. Another one from the Green Line series, this time A6. They have an excerpt from Nick Hornby's "Slam". Not a bad idea as such - there is a learner's edition that goes with it which they could read after reading the excerpt, and it's in a series on "Growing up". My problem? Slam offers the teen father's perspective on a teen pregnancy. While it's a good thing that there is someone who writes a book about teenage fatherhood in the first place, in A6 this appears to be the only text on teen pregnancies after a lengthy unit on the perils of alcohol intake and drugs. Also, there's the casual transphobia, among a lot of things that made me uneasy about Slam.
So, you might think this are really minor things, but usually, people make very careful decisions on what is supposed to be included in those very short recorded dialogues and why.
So why is it so vital to remind today's EFL learners of what is proper behaviour for their gender in their English classes? Why do ten-year-old kids need to learn that it's embarrassing for boys to like boy bands? Why do fourteen-year-olds have to be told that shopping is for girls and that it's highly unlikely that girls can be good at football and should look at butts instead?
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Do you have to teach those, and if so, can you replace the texts or add your own? Like with an adapted version of this: http://www.kickitout.org/441.php for the football one?
Anyway, this makes me want to write a letter to Mister Ernst Klett persönlich right now. Definitely worse than the books we had.
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Incidentally, did you also learn English with these:
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I'm that old.
And I can understand about the lack of time that prevents one from creating one's own teaching materials. You probably have enough on your plate without it.
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I'm not sure how bad it's going to be - right now I'd have the time, but I'm not sure how bad it's going to be later on, and while it's possible to skip individual texts and use other texts to teach the things the text is meant to, it's hard to find texts that cover everything.
I'm not sure how many horribly bad texts there are in the books, these are only the things I picked up by accident, and I'm kinda scared of a more thorough review.
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I think there even was a lesson where Colin Scott goes to London to watch Arsenal against Liverpool. I can't remember if Linda is allowed to come along, but she sure doesn't faint at Kevin Keegan's hair.
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They didn't go to football games, but they did fly a kite on a memorable occasion, went hiking in Scotland and organised a trip to the seaside. It's creepy, but I can still recite some of those inane first texts we had to read in the first book.
In retrospect, I would have loved them to go to a football game, although that might have happened in the later books I never read - though I had already had decidedly enough of football player hair when I became a learner of Englisch after taking to collecting the worldcup stickers in the Hanutas when I was three and decorating every flat surface I could find with them.
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That's my response.
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