Gender Approach Issue in Students´ Research Papers

Abstract

The issue of gender is a challenging one for researchers working in different scientific fields. In this paper, we analyzed approaches to gender issues in research papers in the field of Andragogy. The paper presents the results of the analysis of students’ final research papers – defended at the Chair of Andragogy, Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. The aim of the analysis was to determine whether, how and in what context these papers open and treat gender issues. The study included the following tasks: 1. To identify how many of the analyzed students’ research papers are directly focused on the exploration of gender issues; 2. To identify courses in andragogy curriculum to which these papers belong; 3. To identify the way in which gender issues are tackled when the topic belongs to other and different subject of the research; 4. To identify how the methodological procedure addresses the issue of gender; 5. To identify how the analysis of research results and recommendations of the research approaches the problem of gender. The subject of analysis of our paper were not final papers of students who particularly deal with gender in their research; only six of the 72 papers could be classified as belonging to that category. 52 papers which presented research of different phenomena in adult education introduce the problem of sex and set up the research problem in the context of gender with more or less success. The purpose of this paper was to detect weaknesses in the treatment of gender issues, to consider the possible causes and recommend ways for intervention to prevent adult education from being a generator of gender stereotypes.