Abstract

Gender education has been and still is a major issue in Albanian schools at all levels. This paper examines how gender and various issues related to it (gender roles, gender identity, gender discrimination, etc.) are treated in the textbooks of social and humanistic disciplines in Albanian elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as the role that teachers of these disciplines play in conveying such issues in the classroom. The paper reflects the author’s twenty-year long experience as a high school teacher of social disciplines. Text analysis at the elementary, middle, and high levels of Albanian schools is used as a method to determine the presence and treatment of gender issues in various textbooks. I will argue that teaching methodologies are important as they aim at the development of the critical and creative thinking skills of the students, to problem solving and making decisions in real life, in the construction of understanding themselves and the others, social roles within the group, and between groups of different cultural backgrounds. The purpose of this paper is to present some of the methods that enable teachers to improve the interaction of students with textbooks, for a critical analysis and study strategy and the perfection of their work through several successful methods used during the process of teaching/learning.