Pedagogical discourses of gender, peace, and equality: Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards

Abstract

This article discusses a feminist critical discourse analysis research project of award-winning books of the Jane Addams Peace Association. Children's books carry societal messages that are gendered, raced, and classed, with awardwinning books carrying an additional message of exceptionality as they are viewed as deserving of attention. Thus, the discourses they circulate are important points of analysis. This research, using data from the Jane Addams Children's Book Awards (focusing on books for older children -young adult literature), takes a feminist antimilitarist perspective to explore the sociocultural implications of children's literature for education and learning. I examine research with respect to award-winning literature, define my theoretical framework of feminist antimilitarism, explain my methodology of feminist discourse analysis, and detail my findings. I conclude that the awards as a whole function pedagogically to define conflict in ways that privilege colonial discourses, with women represented in essentialist ways and inequality perceived as absent in the contemporary West.