TITLE Examining the Effectiveness of Entering the Story World of Characters Portraying Diverse Gender Roles.

as a Social Process; Response to Literature Research suggests that literacy practices are a key site for the construction of gender in society and that widening the range of discourses available to both boys and girls is important to expanding the possibilities for how they construct their definitions of masculinity and femininity. A study compared children's responses to picture storybooks that portray characters in nontraditional gender roles before dramatization and after dramatization of the stories. It is part of a larger study that investigates the ways children's gender identity influences their construction of meaning in peer-led literature discussion groups as they discuss books in which the characters portray nontraditional roles and/or traits, as well as investigating how transmediation sustains or transforms participants ' awareness of gender identities. Research was conducted in a third-grade classroom in a K-6 rural midwestern elementary school (