When a girl makes a choice…
By IOE Blog Editor, on 27 July 2023
![The opening page of the gamebook. The title reads 'A girl's life journey in one day'. A set of multicoloured stairs rise towards the top of the image. A young girl runs up them. Image permission: Wendy Wen, Yifan Chen, Yiwei Lu and Yiping Tang](https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe-student-blog/files/2023/07/a-girls-life-gamebook.png)
The title page of the gamebook. Image permission: Wendy Wen, Yifan Chen, Yiwei Lu and Yiping Tang.
27 July 2023
By Wendy Wen, Yifan Chen, Yiwei Lu and Yiping Tang, Education Studies BA
*From the 2024/2025 academic year onwards, the Education Studies BA has been renamed the Education, Society and Culture BA.
As part of our assessment in one second-year Education Studies BA module (EDPS0253: Children in Society: Anthropological, Historical and Sociological Perspectives), we created a gamebook. We were given the opportunity to produce engaging materials to show children an underrepresented aspect of their lives.
In the module, we learnt to challenge assumptions about childhood based on our own historically-situated and culturally-constituted ideologies, and we truly got to see how childhoods are wrongly universalised – not from a bird’s eye view – but from a perspective that constructs childhood ‘from below’. Such spirit inspired us to make this gamebook, which explores underrepresented gendered aspects of children’s lives.
Have you ever noticed that girls are often restrictedly described as ‘quiet’ and ‘obedient’, or have you ever had a strange feeling when someone says, ‘girls are just like that’? Do you recall from childhood that your parents made decisions for you without consultation beforehand? Our gamebook about a girl’s experience may lead you to think about these questions and the essence of a girl’s decision.