Gender and education strategies. Notes about a seminar

Abstract

After the introduction by Moderator Francesco Muollo, Giulia Selmi and Silvia Leonelli present their relations, focused on the relationship between gender and education strategies. Giulia Selmi analyzes the terms defining the gender category, resulting from a negotiation between individuals and society: the underlying ideas of the gender difference ground on a performative practice, so the education system can be crucial, changing or corroborating and defending them. An education capable of offering a plurality of gender identity models ought to involve teachers, parents and juveniles to deconstruct the dominating stereotypes. Silvia Leonelli shows characteristics and history of gender pedagogy in Italy, scanning it on the base of its different paradigms: equality pedagogy („70s), willing to demonstrate that a hiatus between sex rights and prerogatives, most of all in the education field, did exist; difference pedagogy („90s), tending to point out the female kind as a well - separated precinct with its cultural dignity; pedagogy linked to gender studies, which focuses on the constructive process of identity according to various categories, including both male and female sphere and re-discussing the binary gender system dominating till now. The introduction in Italy of this last paradigm is difficult and slow, also because of formative and professional auto – segregation and of the so called “knowledge sexuation” in several sectors.