Chapter 6: Conclusions
6.2 Suggestions
Suggestions for Educators
Gender equality has been an important issue for education in Taiwan for a couple of years. But most of the females in Taiwan still do not enjoy the same rights as males. Females are minority in the society and used to be obedient to what they have been taught. Reading books about female protagonists in Newbery award winning books can encourage girls in our society to be braver and equip them with much wisdom.
Educators should also provide support during the reading process to help the students understanding growing-up process of the protagonists as well as connecting the growing experience of the students themselves. Links between heroines in the books with the female readers could promote gender identification and help the readers to gain role models and have a chance to take new look on themselves and the people around them. On other hand, supporting characters analyzed in this study could help male readers to find their competitors with the same gender and learn how to get along with the opposite gender.
It is also important for the educators to guide the students to be critical to what they read. They could first ask the students to find paragraphs or descriptions with female stereotype. A discussion could then be conducted to verify the findings.
Students could also express their own opinions among these descriptions and give suggestions for modifications based on a more gender equity basis. Also, there could be role plays of the fictions. Playing one or two of the scenes in the stories could help students to share the feelings and experiences undertaken by the main characters and helped them to consider the roles they are playing in the scene as well as the roles they are in daily life.
Another classroom practice is to reverse the genders of individuals. For example, Karana, the tough girl in Island of the Blue Dolphins, could be a boy.
Educators could guide the students to think would there be any difference if Karana
was a boy. Would the story be the same? Or would it be completely different?
Students could express their opinions in different groups according to their genders.
Have them think from the point of view of the opposite gender. Male students could think what would they do if they happen to be the female protagonist and female students could imagine themselves as the male companions.
Gender roles are changing from decade to decade. Educators should keep in mind that the awareness of the harm caused by stereotyped reading materials have been risen in the scholarly community, and among some authors, but it does not fully recognized by the society. The findings, data summaries and literary elements in this study might be useful for educators planning to use YA Literature as a tool of gender education. Educators could use information from this study to make a good choice for educating students to respect different genders.
Besides, the discussion of literary work contained the context of the story which include time period and culture. Discussions in classroom could include how women survive in different cultures and similarities and differences between contemporary society and the time period in the novel.
Suggestions for Further Research
Further research could be varied with different strands including continuing work on gender portrayal in children’s literature, and study of other award winning books. The following were some suggestions for further research.
1. The first suggestion would be a research to incorporate the same methodology with similar samples featuring male main character. Depictions of male protagonists could be analyzed and cross-referenced with female portrayal to establish a broader pattern of gender behavior in Newbery books. Besides, it is also notable that the preference of male writers, as revealed from this study, focuses mainly on
depiction of the same gender. Analysis of male protagonist could make gender study of the Newbery books more completed. It is also helpful to teachers when trying to make curriculum decisions and help them to find study materials that are free from stereotypical portrayal and language to their students.
2. Further research might explore the unexamined but potentially significant data on book themes. Themes of Newbery books could be examined from different perspectives. Themes could be varied according to the gender of protagonist. In this case, the researcher might be able to figure out the difference of themes in books featuring with female protagonists and male protagonists. Also, themes might be different from decade to decade. A longitudinal research could be conducted to find out tendency of themes in different decade. Beside, the researchers could also analyze themes of the awarded books and try to find out the most popular themes in the awarding books. This could be very helpful for writers and publishers of children’s literature when they intend to write or publish books free from gender bias with various and interesting themes.
3. Moreover, since the current study was based on the assumption that
children’s literature had a positive influence on children’s attitude and perception toward gender construction, further studies could be made to test the assumption that attitudes and perceptions toward gender constructions are developed after reading the children’s books containing portrayals of genders free from gender bias or stereotypical descriptions and languages.
4. The other area of future research could focus on the mother-daughter relationship of the female protagonists and look more deeply into this relationship. In conducting the research, the researcher found that daughters were influenced deeply by their mothers, either being dead or alive. Dead mothers, like the mothers who are alive, play a significant part in the novels. These absent characters are just as present
as the other characters in the books. Another interesting study could focus on the image of fathers being present but without any function to the development of the protagonist. Dead mothers play more important roles than presented fathers who are actually absent in the growing-up process of the main characters.
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