Gender history - essential, tokenistic, or insignificant? : An overview of research concerning adolescents’ attitudes towards gender history and how they affect teaching history

A disagreement may occur between Skolverket’s aim to include various perspectives in history teaching, and the realization of the subject amongst students with negative attitudes towards the gender perspective. The object of this overview is to compile and analyze the result of an information retrieval regarding adolescents’ attitudes towards gender history, and how they may affect the teaching frame. Thus, this overview can become a tool for history teachers when implementing gender history in their teaching. Useful material was found through the databases: Education Research Complete (ERC), ERIC via EBSCO, Sociological Abstracts, Google Scholar, and DiVa Portal. Each source has been reviewed and valued based on its relevance to the effects of attitudes in regards to gender history. Therefore, sources processing attitudes around feminism, gender equality, and women’s history have also been valued as useful. The result in this overview conveys both positive and negative attitudes towards feminism, gender equality, and women’s history. However, the research provides examples of how the teacher can affect how the students encounter gender history, and, therefore, also their attitudes towards the subject matter. The teacher is wise to implement a teaching with a gender perspective, which will challenge the students’ preconceived perceptions. Secondly, the research conveys the important use of a variation of historical agents for the sake of each students’ identification within gender history. Thirdly, a significant part of the used sources promotes the idea of including gender history as a vital segment of the traditional history teaching. Otherwise it would remain simply a less valued supplement. Lastly, a relationship-oriented teaching is suggested as a useful tool whilst managing the problems which may occur when teaching gender history