Discourse devices and teacher education. Its impact on building gender identity in school environments

Abstract

It is essential to think education as a human activity, where numerous people and areas of knowledge interrelate. The language, as a symbolic mediator, is the one that intervenes and conveys knowledge and also the formation of youth identities within educational institutions. It is necessary to stimulate, during teacher training, reflection about how the youths that inhabit the schools are traversed and transformed by multiple discourses that produce certain effects on their subjectivities. The curricular discourses are reinterpreted and materialized daily by the teaching staff in educational institutions. Also, are the teachers who select the materials that they offer to their students, many times without mediating a deep analysis on the impact that these devices cause. From the analysis of official documents, textbooks and a survey of teachers in training we seek to account and substantiate how the teachers’ speeches, and the materials they select, become linguistic performatives, collaborating with the reproduction of the dominant patriarchy. Teacher training is required to teach unlearning, deconstruct, and break the own structures of thought, rebuilding and relearning new ways of thinking and perceive the others existing. The school continues to be the institution that citizens still trust; that childhoods and youths feel included is the responsibility of the State. Paradoxically, the State makes minorities invisible through apparently liberating and inclusive discourses.