Demystifying Gender‐Value‐Laden English Materials Used for Indonesian Senior High Schools: Multimodal Analysis and Teachers' Voices

ABSTRACT The present critical multimodal discourse study examines gendered textual and visual elements in English textbooks used for Indonesian senior high school students that play a salient role as a resource of learning materials and a value‐laden curriculum artifact. We also incorporate the perspectives of English teachers through semistructured interviews to broaden our insights on gender issues and notice their suggestions. The aspects of social practices were adopted for in‐depth analysis, including characters, actions, times, how the characters undertake the actions, how the characters' appearances are portrayed, attributes or equipment accompanying the action, and location. The findings indicate that gender inequality persists in the textbooks with respect to personality (women are emotionally unstable), interests (physically demanding pursuits are identically male, while females are often depicted engaging in less physically strenuous activities), and social roles (women are represented in domestic settings while most professional roles are male‐dominated). Regarding occupational roles, it is interesting to find that several discourses tend to be gender‐specific in terms of employment level (like a hierarchical structure in which women are positioned in subordinate roles relative to men). Further, the teachers' views denote several suggestions and recommendations on learning materials to address gender imbalance. This empirical evidence may serve as a suggestion for curriculum developers and textbook writers to provide language learning materials appropriate to the curriculum objectives. Extending multimodal analysis to different age groups or educational contexts and conducting longitudinal studies to examine changes in students' perceptions are suggested for future studies.