Conference Program

Primary school textbooks are among the most pervasive vehicles for transmitting gender stereotypes to young children and play a crucial role in the early construction of gendered expectations and identities (Biemmi, 2010; 2015; Blumberg, 2008; Corsini & Scierri, 2016; Gooden & Gooden, 2001). Recent archaeological scholarship has increasingly demonstrated that prehistoric subsistence systems were far more flexible than the traditional male-hunter/female-gatherer dichotomy suggests (Patou-Mathis, 2020). Prehistory, the core historical content of third grade in the Italian curriculum, represents a paradigmatic case: it is the first historical horizon children encounter systematically, and at the same time the terrain where a binary division of gender roles becomes naturalized through a narrative that presents itself as scientifically grounded while concealing its ideological character. The "Man the Hunter" paradigm, consolidated in 1960s anthropology (Lee & DeVore, 1968) and subsequently challenged by feminist anthropology and gender archaeology (Gero & Conkey, 1991) and today widely refuted by paleontological and archaeological research, continues to structure the prehistoric imaginary conveyed by Italian school textbooks, with potentially significant consequences for the gender socialization of school-age children. This contribution presents a multimodal analysis of a sample of history textbooks for third grade from Italian publishers. The analysis operates on two levels: the textual plane, examining discursive strategies of role attribution, the use of the generic masculine as a synecdoche for the species, and the presence or absence of female agency; and the iconographic plane, examining the visual grammar of illustrations and the distribution of roles, spaces, and postures assigned to male and female figures (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Jewitt, 2013). The data document recurring patterns across publishers. On the iconographic level, male figures dominate quantitatively and are systematically associated with open space, action, tool use, and hunting; female figures appear predominantly in enclosed spaces, in passive or caregiving postures. A particularly revealing indicator concerns the positioning of children within scenes: across all publishers analyzed, young children are placed alongside female figures and within caregiving spaces, never in hunting or action scenes — a pattern that implicitly conveys a model of male development as progressive distancing from the female sphere toward open space and risk. A further significant finding emerges from the analysis of text-image relationships: in several cases the written text adopts inclusive or cautious formulations, while the illustrations contradict this openness, reproducing the stereotyped division. This systematic gap suggests that iconographic bias operates independently and more effectively than textual bias in shaping readers' imaginaries. The contribution discusses the implications of these patterns for a democratic school: a curriculum that presents gender inequality as inscribed in the dawn of humanity functions as a device for the historical legitimation of contemporary stereotypes. Such an analysis must therefore also serve as a pedagogical invitation for teachers to engage in critical self-reflection on their own implicit gender stereotypes, recognizing how these assumptions may shape classroom practices, expectations, and interactions in ways that either reproduce inequality.