Are the boys in your class still hesitant to pick up the piccolo? Do your girls shrink from a tuba? If you're still experiencing gender stereotyping in your school, what can be done to change it?
MENC members offer excellent suggestions on how they have overcome this centuries-old issue.
- Allow the students to try ALL of the instruments - encourage them to try anything and everything.
- Teach students about all of the instrument families before they have to choose
- Have students try their top two-three choices to make sure they can make a sound on each mouthpiece.
- Simply tell students that instruments don't have gender and they can choose any instrument.
- Increase requirements for the most popular instruments. For example, MENC member Paige Miller from Louisiana has prospective percussionists play back a complicated rhythm, and there are only six spots each year for new percussionists. Once selected, they all learn bells/xylophone until Christmas. Students with the highest GPA get to play drums first.
- Be observant of physical characteristics of the students (lips, teeth, hands, arms, etc.) to help lead them to an instrument on which they'll succeed.
- Put up posters of males playing flutes and clarinets and females playing trombone and tuba and other less "traditional" instruments.
- Once they select an instrument, don't allow them to change for a pre-determined amount of time.
- Use older students to demonstrate instruments - emphasizing overcoming the traditional gender stereotyping choices.
- Teachers should familiarize themselves with stereotypes and think and teach past them. (For example, don't make a big deal of 'boys vs. girls' in any section.)
- Find ways to encourage a sense of equality between people and the instrument groupings.
Whatever methods or techniques you choose to implement, you, your students, and the program as a whole can benefit from eliminating gender stereotypes. Educators have a unique opportunity to influence the current generation by opening up dialogue that will slowly change the norms and the social make-up.
A special thank you to contributing MENC members:
Paige Miller, Leesville, Louisiana
Chuck Silloway, St. Louis, Missouri
Carolyn Kramkowski, St. Louis, Missouri
Jill Langford Boday, Graduate Thesis, Milford, Massachusetts
Additional Source:
Susan A. O' Neill, "Gender and Music", The Social Psychology of Music
©Oxford University Press, 2004
To learn more on this topic, visit the MENC Gender Research in Music Education SRIG.
Part 1 of this series - What is Gender Stereotyping?
Part 2 of this series - What do the Polls Say?
Discuss other ways you have overcome gender stereotyping in your classroom.
--Becky Spray, October 23, 2008 ©MENC: The National Association for Music Education