Gender equality perception among secondary students at an international school in Spain.

The thesis focuses on the way the secondary students of an international British curriculum school in Spain portray gender equality. It analyses the themes emerging from a focus group discussion with a close consideration of the concepts of gender, gender equality, and gender mainstreaming. A crucial element underpinning the research is the concept of children’s voices, as the study aims at creating space for those voices to be expressed and heard. This paper addresses various notions constituting inextricable parts of the identified themes: the notions of fairness, responsibility, control, and heteronormativity. I argue that this kind of research is a necessity due to insufficient consideration of children’s voices in policy-making processes in education. I denounce the paucity of adults’ knowledge of school children’s needs and opinions. This paper aims at understanding how students define gender equality, how they associate it with the notions of responsibility, control and fairness, and how my assumptions, as an adult and as a teacher, differ from the perception of secondary students in question