For Families & Educators

Lesson plans

More lesson plans are on the way. Let us know which books you'd like to teach.

The Word List shows every gendered word our books swap and what it becomes for each gender, with an example from the books. It's a ready-made source for the "translating gendered words" activity: which words have no equal (fellow, manly), which pairs aren't equal (master and mistress), and how the non-binary forms were chosen.

Using Repaper in the classroom

• Every cast is a link. Choose genders on a book's page, then use Copy Link to share exactly that version with students.
• Compare casts side by side. The compare view lines up two casts paragraph by paragraph and highlights every word that changed. Try the original and flipped Velveteen Rabbit.
• Show the gendered words. In the reader, "Show gendered words" colors each word by the character it refers to.
• Count the cast. Each book page charts the characters and the gendered words by gender, and the charts update as you change the cast.
• Listen. The reader can read any cast aloud using your device's voices.

The Gender Literacy Framework

The Repaper Press Gender Literacy Framework looks at gender in a story from seven perspectives. Each story is compared with itself: are its male and female characters treated consistently?

1. The World

Does the story treat prejudice as normal? (See the four kinds of story worlds below.)

2. The Cast

How many characters of each gender are there, how prominent are they (primary, supporting, minor, or only mentioned), and how much of the story's attention do they get?

3. The Roles

Are characters female only when the role seems to "need" a woman? Do the characterizations follow stereotypes?

4. The Relationships

Do female characters relate to each other, or only to male characters? Is care two-way, or does it flow in one direction?

5. The Plot Goals

Whose goals drive the story? Do supporting characters want anything for themselves?

6. The Writing (or Filming)

Are some words saved for one gender, like calling a girl "feisty" or "shrill" and a boy "boisterous"?

7. The Creators

What in the author's life and times might have shaped the story?

Bonus: Your own lens

What do we bring to our reading? Gender-shuffling often reveals assumptions that live in the reader, not the text.

Four kinds of story worlds

Every story creates its own world. The first and possibly most important question about it is whether it treats prejudice as normal. Story worlds fall into four broad kinds, depending on how much prejudice they contain and how openly they comment on it.

	Low commentary	High commentary
High prejudice	Prejudiced Prejudice is there and nobody questions it. Most older stories.	Interrogative Prejudice is included on purpose, to examine and criticize it.
Low prejudice	Visionary No prejudice, and no fuss about it. The world as it could be.	Smug Little prejudice, but the story keeps pointing out how fair it's being.

Prejudice can be explicit (said outright) or implicit (like an all-male cast in a world that surely had women in it), and both count. Only explicit commentary counts as commentary. A story world is judged by the impression it makes on an uncritical reader, whatever the author intended.

• Prejudiced worlds are the most common, though rarely on purpose: authors fictionalize the world they live in, the water they swim in. Stories full of prejudice can still be wise and well loved, but in spite of the inequality, not because of it.
• Interrogative worlds are crucial for exposing and understanding prejudice, but commentary alone doesn't justify including it. When prejudice is exaggerated, or used as a shortcut to make a villain more villainous or a hero more of an underdog, the story can end up making it seem more normal.
• Smug worlds seem harmless, but describing a prejudice by its negative space still keeps its shape. A child who had never met the prejudice could reverse-engineer it from the commentary. In Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Rey tells Finn, "I know how to run without you holding my hand." Nobody in that egalitarian galaxy doubts her, so the line is really a wink to the audience about a stereotype from our world. In Moana (2016), Maui teases, "If you wear a dress and have an animal sidekick, you're a princess," though nobody on Motunui questions a daughter becoming chief. Two quick tests: does anyone in the story hold the prejudice? And could someone who had never met the prejudice work it out from the line?
• Visionary worlds show how the world could be, and they make equality normal.

Across popular culture, stories tend to move from prejudiced to interrogative, then smug, and finally visionary. Repaper Press is an experiment in skipping straight to the visionary: the classics you love, in a world where anyone can be anyone.

Reading with younger children

• Choose a cast before you start, and read it as if it's the only version. There's no need to announce what's been changed.
• If they notice, keep it simple. "Is the knight a girl?" "In this story, she is." Follow their curiosity rather than turning it into a lesson.
• Talk about the story itself: the adventure, the friendships, the jokes. That's the point.
• Try different casts on different nights. The Shuffle button on each book's page makes a new cast every time.
• Notice your own reactions. The discussion questions in our lesson plans and the afterwords in our ebooks are written for grown-ups too.

Talking about pronouns

Repaper offers she, he, they, and the newer pronouns xe, ze and ne for any character, plus the impersonal it and one, which suit toys, animals and odd cases. Using a pronoun for a character is a low-stakes way to practice. Keep conversations about characters, and never put children on the spot to share their own gender identity.