Gender, sex, and heteronormativity in high school statistics textbooks

摘要

Textbooks have a long history of explicitly and implicitly supporting heteronormative ideologies and effectively erasing marginalized populations, such as people who identify as queer, by exclusion. Students view textbooks as an authority over content and spend large portions of in and out of class time interacting with their textbooks. Because high school statistics teachers feel inadequately prepared to teach statistics, they tend to rely heavily on textbooks to drive instruction. In this study, with a theoretical framework of queer theory and critical mathematics, I used qualitative methods to code three high school statistics textbooks based on their representations of gender, sex, and sexuality. Themes related to the maintenance of heteronormative power structures were deconstructed using Fairclough's (1992) three-dimensional framework for critical discourse analysis. I found that binary gender identities are often conflated with identities related to sex, gender roles are rigidly defined, and relationships are defined as mostly heterosexual. The results of this study have implications for publishers, researchers, and educators in understanding the relationship between gender complexity and curricular resources.