Education Commons^™

A Collaborative Autoethnography On Challenging Sociohistorical Constructions Of Gender In Teacher Education, Marie-Helene Brunet, Mark Currie

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

In early 2019, we developed a workshop that examines changing representations of masculinities and femininities through advertisements from today and from 30 years ago. We employ a pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999) and challenge participants—whether students, teacher candidates, or seasoned educators—to historicize and critique how they co-construct sociohistorical representations and performativity of gender (Butler, 1990). Our hopes are that participants begin deconstructing how and which understandings of gender became normalized to them, as well as how they perpetuate or disrupt “masculinities” and “femininities”. Through regular debriefing, we realized that we do not merely facilitate but also actively participate in each …