Gender Inequality In Algerian Schools

As one of the most vital foundations of any community, education should maintain pace with the urges of its society and the challenges of the outer world as well. It can be used as a tool to empower the individual who starts as a learner and ends up as a citizen since it is supposed to generate, reflect, and direct social change. In fact, education is established as one key agency of socialization, and its institutions, teachers, and teaching materials as socializing agents. Referring to textbooks as the core of teaching materials in the Algerian schools, our focus will be on their potential as either mirrors of traditional social agendas or as tools for social change.

In fact, the textbook under a quality education policy is an educational

Also, the government has taken many steps since the ‘Beijing Declaration’ to ensure changes to be made. Within modern Algeria, women are guaranteed equal access to education, employment, health, and the judicial system -at least by the force of the law. It currently aspires for a strong civil society whose aim is to advocate equal human rights for both females and males. Accordingly, we ask the same question about the Algerian society that Jassey had about the Japanese one, whether “gender equality and inequality in Japan have been presented in textbooks in ways that reflect the changes in Japanese society” (Jassey, 1998, p. 87). Since textbooks mirror their society’s beliefs and practices, we expect that the Algerian textbook would reflect the current policies of the state and would be used as a tool for social

In fact, I have identified six dialogues and analyzed them both quantitatively and qualitatively. So, I excluded from this research the other dialogues where the interlocutors had the same sex or an unidentified one. The dialogues are named according to the names of the participants, and ordered according to the one who initiates the discourse. In order to find out the amount of talk spoken by each character, male or female, I have identified the length of their utterances by counting the number of words uttered. The article ‘a’ or ‘the’ would be considered a word, and the forms like ‘I’m’ or ‘don’t’ as one word. Then, I have counted also the number of their utterances. An utterance is defined as any sentence starting with a capital letter and finishes with a full stop. Finally, the length average of characters’ utterances was counted by dividing the number of words uttered on the number of utterances. Then, the total percentages of male and female characters’ amount of talk were calculated. For qualitative analysis, mixed gender conversations were analyzed using IRF Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) model. As Healy (2009, p. 96) has explained, “a conversation consists of exchanges; exchanges are made up of moves and moves are made up of acts. The structure of the exchange is: initiation,