As an English Teacher, I have taught a unit of work on the topic of Gender Representation in  Year 10 English. It followed the socio-cultural stance as the learning environment centred around class debates and discussions where students had opportunities to express their opinions and simultaneously explore other people’s perspectives. These perspectives were sometimes through a fictional character and at other times a real person who is represented through the media. Some of the fictional characters explored were Mary Maloney in Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl, Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series, and Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Students reflected and evaluated upon the impact of these characters on readers with regard to the topic of Gender Representation. Students were encouraged to adopt and understand these different  perspectives of  both characters and real people. This was challenging for this group.

Quite a few of these students were very single minded – quite common amongst teenagers!  As the teacher, I selected the texts as the students did have enough experience in book selection to select quality relevant texts for the unit. They did have opportunities to suggest, discuss and analysis some other texts of their choice which dealt with the topic – this included anything relevant to them from news articles to games to film. It was a unit that encouraged heaps of student response and students were very engaged. I am sure some of those students were only temporarily changed in perspective – the unit did not work miracles by any means. However, it did open up their world to thinking more carefully about other people’s values and opinions and using critical thinking skills.