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Abstract
Book ban attempts are increasingly happening in United States schools, as people frequently associated with the Christian Right try to limit students’ access to diverse and representative literature that they perceive as dangerous and contradictory to their beliefs (Pickering, 2023; Miller et al., 2023). Even without these efforts, the literary canon is already primarily white and male, with one study of classroom libraries finding almost twice as many depictions of male characters as female characters (Crisp et al., 2016). Given that representation in literature can be helpful to the self-efficacy of minority or marginalized students, the combination of the biased literary canon and censorship attempts presents a significant problem for United States education (Gurin et al., 2008). Christian schools provide a key site of investigation for this issue, not only due to the connection between the Christian Right and book ban attempts, but also because there are around four million students who attend Christian-affiliated schools in the United States (NCES). The correlation between Christian nationalism, which has strong ties to Evangelical Christianity, and gender traditionalism would seem to lead to Christian schools having less representative literature that is more in line with traditional gender roles, but this has not been verified in prior research (Whitehead & Perry, 2019). This research seeks to illuminate in what ways Christian and public school literature curricula differ in regards to gender representation, address what this difference means for the values and gender ideals that they promote, and understand if Christian schools actually demonstrate less representation in literature based on the promotion of gender traditionalism within Christianity. I will do this by analyzing the gender representation in literature curriculum and recommendations for grades nine and ten from the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) by looking at authorship, characters, and content. Additionally, documents from these education systems, including expected student outcomes, statements of faith, and standards, will be analyzed through comparative qualitative coding in order to contextualize the curricular content within the portrayed beliefs of the systems regarding education and its purpose. Results show slightly more representation of female authorship in the CCSS exemplars in comparison the the ACSI recommended curriculum and significantly more female characters within the CCSS exemplars, as well as finding a focus on academics and career as outcomes in the CCSS’s documents in comparison to a focus on religiosity and values within the ACSI.