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" Children's Construction of Meanings on Gender Appropriateness of Social Roles in a Preschool Setting in Saudi Arabia "
Khoja, Nazeeha Samir
Ghosh, Ratna
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1056152
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| Doc. No
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TL55269
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| Main Entry
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Khoja, Nazeeha Samir
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| Title & Author
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Children's Construction of Meanings on Gender Appropriateness of Social Roles in a Preschool Setting in Saudi Arabia\ Khoja, Nazeeha SamirGhosh, Ratna
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| College
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McGill University (Canada)
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| Date
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2019
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| Note
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231 p.
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| Abstract
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While the subject of the construction of identities and children's play has been widely explored in the West, particularly within the English-speaking academic discourse (Blaise, 2005; Davies, 1989a, 1989b, 1992; Dyson, 1989, 1997; Kendrick, 2005; MacNaughton, 2005; Paley, 1984), there is little research about how identities are constructed and perceived across childhood in Middle Eastern cultures, especially in Saudi Arabia. Over a period of five months, I observed and participated in narratives told and enacted by nine preschool children in their everyday fantasy play practices during "free play" time in two corners, the playing-house and building-blocks corners, in a preschool setting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. My research questions interrogated the ways a group of children engaged in unstructured fantasy play to negotiate and enact social roles and examined the narratives children reproduced and/or produced about their understandings of their social roles as boys or girls. Adopting a sensory ethnography to guide my methodological approach has offered me various routes to understanding my experience in the field and attending to children's ways of knowing about their gendered selves. I entered the field as a participant observer and collected data by producing descriptive and reflective notes, recording children's play narratives, and utilizing the aid of visuals. Drawing from concepts such as the Zone of Proximal Development and appropriation in sociocultural theory and multiplicity and discourse in poststructural theory, I read and interpreted my data to produce knowledge that pertained to children's ways of constructing meanings in relation to the gender appropriateness of various social roles. In my interpretations and discussions of my understanding of children's construction of gendered meanings in their fantasy play, three themes have emerged from the data: I argue that in their active engagement of constructing meanings about their gendered selves and social roles, the children appropriated from available cultural materials to perpetuate the gender binary discourse, following which I elucidate how the children disguised the unfamiliar and silenced the norm to produce new meanings and, lastly, the data reveals that the children in this study drew from class and age discourses as a strategy for exercising power. This study argues that the children had actively engaged in reproducing the norm to seek recognition and avoid the failure of deviating from the recognizable category. The children simultaneously engaged in subtle ways of disrupting the gender roles and social norms. In spite of the children's active engagement in multiple discursive practices, data reveals that their ongoing construction of what femininities and masculinities entail is substantially shaped by the dominant ideology in a given discourse which is bound by time and place.
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| Descriptor
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Early childhood education
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Educational psychology
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Gender studies
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Middle Eastern studies
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Ghosh, Ratna
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McGill University (Canada)
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