From "Gender Issues" to Gender as a Problem. To Investigate and Intervene the School from New Critical Displacements

Abstract

In the last fifteen years, normative advances in gender matters have reconfigured Argentine institutions. In school, particularly, these transformations are expressed in the curricular dimension, but above all in the universe of social and educational relationships. The article presents the results of a research project whose objective was to survey the gender discourses that take place in three public schools in the center and periphery of the city of La Plata (Argentina). What do students, teachers and head teachers talk about when they talk about gender; what meanings this concept embodies, and what tensions it introduces -or rubric- in the school culture, were some of the questions that guided the field process. We worked from a theoretical-political approach to communication/education/gender, and a qualitative methodology that combined semi-structured interviews and action-research techniques in the classroom, not only to identify these discourses, but to critically analyze them together with the students. Gender as an educational issue was directly associated with the Integral Sexual Education Law. It was glimpsed a difficulty (resistance) in adults to think and disarticulate the inequalities that the institution nests; in contrast to the student body that functions as a catalyst for micro-transformations, cultural and cognitive.