Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Early Childhood Education Journal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-019-00969-x “The Mouse Looks Like a Boy”: Young Children’s Talk About Gender Across Human and Nonhuman Characters in Picture Books Thomas M. Hill Jr. 1  · Katrina Bartow Jacobs 1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Abstract Recent study on gender representation in children’s literature has focused on the representations themselves, while there is less research regarding how children talk about these depictions in texts. Our work, a qualitative study of how kindergarten- aged children discuss gender during picture book read-alouds, examined how children drew on the social binary of boy/girl as they made sense of the human and non-human characters’ identities. The study looked at how children responded to ques- tions about gender across both ambiguously-gendered characters and texts where gender norms were deliberately questioned. The fndings expressed in this paper provide insight into how students’ previous experiences, along with classroom norms and text choice, infuence student response. Specifcally, we found that children drew on similar social norms and gendered expectations across all character types, demonstrating the importance of these societal categories on their comprehension of texts and on their sense-making of their lives and classrooms. The paper ends with implications for early childhood educa- tors in allowing for more diverse representations when selecting texts and deliberate listening to student conversations to recognize how young learners perceive gender and identity. Keywords Gender · Identity · Picture books · Read alouds · Diversity Introduction “There’s no such thing as a girl thing or a boy thing.” -Janine, 1 Age 5 The above quote was uttered by a kindergartner during a discussion of which toys are appropriate for children to play with. These words echo the sentiment spoken by many children in early elementary settings: that individuals can participate in whatever activities they choose, dress how- ever they feel comfortable, and identify in ways that they feel authentic to themselves. Despite these expressions of equity and inclusion, the reality is that, under the surface, students’ perceptions and actions demonstrate a real and maintained systemic adherence to gender binaries (boy/ girl, male/female). While children often know what they are ‘supposed to’ say, school spaces often maintain the gender norms of either/or identities—in bathrooms, classrooms, and hallways—to the detriment of children whose identities do not match these expectations (Drake et al. 2003). In many spaces, society embraces a wider range of gendered identi- ties, how individuals present and describe their own sense of gender; therefore it is critical that the feld of early childhood education also openly embrace these contexts in order to make schools safe and inclusive to all students. For many years, the use of the term ‘gender’ was synony- mous with biological sex (Francis and Paechter 2015); this trend created a widely-accepted social understanding that there are boy things and girl things, and that all students must fall into one of those categories, or boxes. Through socialization through media and home life experiences, young children enter school spaces with this binary in mind. The choices that educators make during day-to-day activities such as play and instruction, can lead to either maintain this view of gender, or push towards a more nuanced understand- ing of identity. As one of the goals of early childhood educa- tion is to support students’ developing social and emotional * Thomas M. Hill Jr. tmh95@pitt.edu Katrina Bartow Jacobs kbjacobs@pitt.edu 1 Department of Instruction and Learning, University of Pittsburgh, School of Education, Pittsburgh, USA 1 All names in this article are pseudonyms.