New masculinities and children’s literaturea study of its use in the language clasroom

Abstract

This paper tries to shed light on some gender issues in literature in the language classroom with a special focus on equality. Schools’ resources that reflect on positive males’ behaviour is very limited in young learners’ education and we ought to consider that children’s attitudes are formed at very early stages. It is of paramount importance, then, to endow teachers with all the necessary tools to select unbiased stories which contribute to children’s human flourishing. In this sense, we have analysed popular LGTBQ+ tales as well as gender-variant male books to assess the level of diversity and acceptance of new masculinities.