Attitudes towards gender stereotypes and the opportunities for raising awarness of gender equality in fine arts instruction

Textbooks and other professional literature in the field of fine arts, despite increasing knowledge of women artists nowadays, continue to leave out their artworks. Female artists are still treated superficially, described as imitators or followers of male artists. The number of their works in collections, where they are presented along with masterly male artists, is supposedly still significantly smaller. Based on my experience and a review of professional literature for Slovenian secondary schools, there are no noticeable improvements regarding equal treatment of artists of both sexes. The school books present a subjective and distorted reality that evokes the idea that most scholars and cultural figures are central European men. In the case of exclusion of women from textbooks and other professional literature, students are excluded from virtually half of humanity. As a result, students may have a diminished view of the contribution of female creators to the field of fine arts. The problem is that students trust in what textbooks have to say and can therefore deepen harmful gender stereotypes. In the empirical part, by means of survey questionnaires, we therefore investigated, what highschool students currently know about female artists and determined the causes of such a situation. We examined the student's attitudes towards the presented issues by having a lesson with them that included the issues of gender stereotypes and errasure of female artists from the history of fine arts. The lesson also contained a art assignment in wich students explored gender stereotypes in everyday life. The study included 50 students of two first year classes from a secondary school in the southeastern region of Slovenia. The findings of the research can be helpful in addressing issues and raising awareness of gender equality in secondary school fine arts instruction