Unmasking the Institutionalization of Gender-based Violence in Ontario’s Kindergarten Education Program: The Hidden Effects of Play-based Learning

In this dissertation, I use a critical feminist theoretical perspective and methodology to examine the hidden gendered effects of Ontario’s kindergarten education reform. Ontario’s new kindergarten education program is considered to be unique within the Canadian context as it mandates full-day play-based learning for four- and five-year-old children. Informed by child development and neoliberal ruling relations, children’s work in kindergarten is to involve attaining developmental milestones and learning academic skills through play. However, play at school is rife with unequal gendered power dynamics. Through an institutional ethnography (Smith, 1987) carried out in two Toronto kindergarten classrooms, I explicate how curricular policy standards and expectations coordinate children’s work in play in ways that inadvertently perpetuate heteronormative gendered binaries and hierarchies in kindergarten. I argue that the positioning of play as children’s work in contemporary kindergarten curricula, and the privileging of the learning of male-centered productive skills and knowledge in this work, reproduced a gender division of labour whereby girls undertook the hidden labour of navigating violence perpetrated to police access to the play environment and its valuable resources. This study extends current conceptions of school-related gender-based violence, bringing attention to structural and epistemic forms of gender-based violence carried out through the institution of kindergarten education that, in turn, facilitate material forms of gender-based violence in the kindergarten classroom.

Department dc:contributor.department

Social Justice Education

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Prioletta, Jessica

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Heller, Monica

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/101224

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/101224