Reading The Line Spaces of the Story Completion Tasks: An Evaluation of Gender Equality Course

Year 2020, Volume: 39 Issue: 1, 267 - 282, 30.06.2020

Senem Gürkan

Abstract

Keywords

Gender, Gender stereotypes, , Creative writing, Story starters, Story completion task

Reading The Line Spaces of the Story Completion Tasks: An Evaluation of Gender Equality Course

Abstract

Drawing
on feminist methodology, this research aims at examining
the gender stereotyping of the students through their creative writing
activities. More specifically, the attempt of this paper is to reveal the
significance of gender equality courses by making comparison between university
students who took gender equality course and the ones who have not yet. This
qualitative research was built on the content analysis of the written responses
of the students to the story starter of “Cinderella”. This folk tale is
originally stereotypical. However, as the data collection technique of the
research, the non-stereotypical type of story starter of Cinderella was used as
a tool for the story completion task. The
participants of the study were 120 first grade university students from Ondokuz
Mayıs University, 62 of whom took gender equality course this semester (Group A
from Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences) and 58 of whom have not
taken this kind of a course or training yet (Group B from Faculty of
Education).The
writings of the students were analyzed under four categories such as language
use, types of the attributes assigned by the students to the characters they
used in their stories, sex roles and the completion of the studies.The
results of the study suggest that there seems to be gender stereotyping in both
groups, but weaker in Group A than Group B. 

Keywords

Gender, Gender stereotypes, Creative writing, Story starters, Story completion task

References

• Aktaş, M. (2009). “Yabancı dil öğretiminde yaratıcı yazmanın başarıya ve yazılı anlatıma etkisi”. Unpublished PhD thesis, Ankara University, Ankara.