Using a three-article format, this study investigates the potential of integrating social studies instruction with critical literacy practices to challenge and/or expand elementary students' perception of gender. Given that stereotypical gender norms and roles uphold systemic inequity and injustice, challenging these perceptions in elementary classrooms is essential. This dissertation examines how an online instructional unit in social studies and critical literacy practices shapes student thinking about gender norms and roles and women's history and rights and challenges their own implicit beliefs. To investigate the impact of integrating social studies and critical literacy practices, I designed and field tested a unit intended to help students think critically about gender. Although this study was originally designed for in-person learning, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I taught this unit online to 18 students from across the United States and Canada. This unit included social studies through a focus on history, civics, and justice, and utilized critical literacy practices such as interactive read-alouds, text-pairing, and restorying. Data sources were student pre- and post- interviews, observations of the lessons, and parent surveys. Each study draws from the implementation of this unit in different ways, which I describe below. The first article focuses on student perceptions of gender norms and roles both before and after participation in the unit plan. This study examines both students' implicit and explicit beliefs about gender, especially gender stereotypes. After engaging in the unit, students demonstrated shifts in their explicit thinking about gender. Specifically, students were more able to identify gender stereotypes in both texts and reality, describe consequences of stereotypes, and participate in a student-led activism project intended to challenge stereotypes in others. Students also became more likely to share ways in which they personally challenged gender stereotypes through their interests and/or appearances. Students also demonstrated shifts in their implicit thinking during writing activities by creating more complex characters who were less limited by stereotypical gender norms and roles.The second article investigates the extent to which the unit impacted student perceptions regarding women's history and women's rights. The findings of this study demonstrate that students' initial perceptions of women's contributions tended to be limited to stereotypical roles centered on caretaking. They also demonstrated a general belief that gender-based inequity has existed only in the past. After participating in the intervention, students were far more likely to describe women in counterstereotypical roles related to careers and activism, and to recognize contemporary, on-going gender inequity. Overall, students were more able to identify and critically discuss systems of gender-based oppression and inequity. The third article is practitioner-focused and investigates how teachers can pair critical literacy practices to understand and investigate their own implicit gender stereotypes. Specifically, this article provides a description of a lesson that introduces implicit stereotypes through an interactive read-alouds, the allows students to examine and challenge their own thinking through a restorying activity. Results of this study indicate that pairing critical literacy practices can help students better understand implicit stereotypes, reflect on their own implicit stereotypes, and write narratives that challenge implicit stereotypes. This article describes practical ways for teachers to implement paired critical literacy practices in their own classrooms and offers steps for expanding the described lesson to help students investigate implicit thinking about further marginalized identities.
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