Gender in the Classroom

Foundations, Skills, Methods, and Strategies Across the Curriculum

David Sadker, Ellen S. Silber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138153646
• eBook ISBN: 9781136783302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What's missing from your teacher education program? According to research studies, one glaring omission is gender. Tomorrow's teachers receive little instruction or training on the tremendous impact of gender in the classroom. Just how does gender influence teaching, the curriculum, and the lives of teachers and students in the classroom? This unique book has been designed to answer these questions. Gender in the Classroom is intended to be used across the teacher education curriculum--from subject-specific methods courses to foundations, from educational psychology to student teaching. It can be adopted for an entire program, or several instructors can adopt it jointly, or a single instructor can adopt it as one of several or a supplementary text for a course. A comprehensive Instructor's Manual provides information and materials for teacher educators who adopt the text. Each chapter offers practical information and skills about gender and sex differences, curriculum, and specific teaching methods. Written in a lively style, the text features a number of interactive activities to engage and instruct the reader. The chapters follow a common format designed to invite student interest and action. Each is built around Essential Equity Questions that focus on pertinent gender-related questions and issues in a specific subject area: *the role of women in education--intersections of the teaching profession, feminism, and teachers as activists for social change; *gender differences in cognitive ability, attitudes, and behavior;*how to teach and implement Title IX;*how to observe classrooms to "see" gender bias;*social studies education; *English/language arts methods; *science education; and*mathematics and technology education.Interactions in each chapter engage students in activities to promote understanding. Each Interaction is linked to one or more specific INTASC standards. In the last chapter, the emphasis is on applying many of the skills learned previously--it gives student teachers and their supervisors several tools they can use for analyzing classroom teaching and detecting gender bias. This chapter also includes a culminating activity for identifying and correcting curricular bias. In fact, many of the techniques in this text can be applied to uncover and correct not only gender bias, but racial, ethnic, and cultural bias as well.The Instructor's Manual [978-0-8058-5475-6] is now available electronically (please contact our customer service department to request a copy).

1

Strong Women Teachers: Their Struggles and Strategies for Gender Equity

Theresa McCormick
Iowa State University

This chapter provides you with some tools for inquiring into how the history of women in the teaching profession is linked with their increasing political and social activism during the 20th century. It provides a conceptual framework to guide you in the study of teachers as activists and change agents. The chapter contains questions about the exploitation of female teachers and about the struggles and methods they used to overcome this exploitation. You will discover the intersections of the teaching profession, feminism, and the 20th century women's movement and how they interacted to improve female teachers’ lives in the classroom and their lives as citizens.

Most educational foundations (and Introduction to Education) courses, and many introductory textbooks used in these classes, offer very little information to the prospective teacher about the role of women in education. This chapter is intended to correct that serious omission. In this chapter, I discuss some of the contributions of female teachers to the field of education, teachers’ efforts to expand their rights as workers, the barriers they overcame, and their struggle for agency inside and outside the workplace. This chapter provides preservice teachers an opportunity for an in-depth exploration of the convergence of the teaching profession, feminism, and the exploitation of female teachers in the 20th century.

This chapter has three essential equity questions (EEQs), and each EEQ has a section called What We Know, which briefly discusses relevant research. Also, each EEQ has several Interactions, identified with the INTASC principle(s) they reflect, as well as an Authentic Assessment. At the end of the chapter, you will find resources, including online resources, and references.

Essential Equity Questions

• Essential Equity Question 1.1: What are the salient social, cultural, political, and economic factors that affected female teachers in the 20th century?
• Essential Equity Question 1.2: What strategies did female teachers use and what roles did they play to respond to social, cultural, political, and economic barriers?
• Essential Equity Question 1.3: How did feminist ideology and the contemporary women's movement inform and influence female teachers in their efforts to achieve workplace equity?

ESSENTIAL EQUITY QUESTION 1.1:
WHAT ARE THE SALIENT SOCIAL, CULTURAL, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC FACTORS THAT AFFECTED FEMALE TEACHERS IN THE 20TH CENTURY?

WHAT WE KNOW

Sexism and Racism are Structural and Systemic. That women dominate as classroom teachers—yet gender equity has not received much attention in teacher education programs (Pryor & Mader, 1998)—is testament to the historic devaluation of females in the teaching profession and a blindness to the gender and racial bias in the social, economic, and political structure of schools.

We know that teachers tend to blame themselves when things go wrong in the classroom. “One's inability to see the problem as structural and systemic often leads to worker self-doubt and self-blame,” according to Maguire (1993) and Acker (1992) (cited in Carter, 2002, p. 30). Carter (2002) said, “It is to the institution's benefit to orchestrate such individuation of workplace difficulties. If workers see the problem as their own fault, they are less likely to ask the institution to respond to making structural changes” (p. 30).

Schools are patriarchal structures that segregate jobs by sex. The following sections illustrate the structural and systemic gendering of roles in schools according to the “traditional belief that gender differentiation is natural in our culture” (Carter, 2002, p. 30). Teachers are predominantly female (75%), and administrators are still predominantly male. Only 10% of superintendents are women, and about 35% of school principals are women (National Center for Education Statistics, 2000). These figures reflect the gendered history and structure of the teaching profession, one that provides a fertile ground for the exploitation of female teachers.

Low Wages for Female Teachers: Part of HIStory and HERstory. In a current article, “Teachers Avert Strike, Agree to Work for Free,” the problem of teacher pay was made bold (PEN Weekly, 2003). In an effort to stem cuts in education spending and health benefits, Portland teachers agreed to a contract that includes, among other concessions, working free for 10 days. This current problem of inadequate pay for public school teachers is a nationwide epidemic. Although it is indeed troubling, there is much history behind this story. Let's take a look at the historical context of teachers’ pay.

Ryan and Cooper (2001) and Sadker and Sadker (2003) skillfully placed the history of low wages for teachers within the context of cultural, social, and economic milieus of the 19th century. During the early 19th century, a common attitude was that teachers were men who could not hold a regular job, were strange or weird, or, on the other hand, were women who had nothing else of importance to do. Men continued to dominate the teaching profession until the middle of the 19th century. As Sadker and Sadker (2003) said, “Teaching was a gendered career, and it was gendered ‘male.’ Although a few women taught at home in dame schools, the first women to become teachers in regular school settings, earning a public salary, were viewed as gender trespassers” (p. 313).

In spite of the perception that teachers should be men, a major shift in the gender makeup of the teaching force came about with the establishment of the common school. This coincides with the time when more women than men became elementary school teachers. There were many reasons for this shift, which included the following points about the gendered wage structure for teachers. In the early years of the common school movement, there was a dramatic increase in the number of schools and that naturally increased the demand for more teachers to fill these salaried positions. Because women could be paid much less than men at this time, their hiring was an expedient measure that flaunted then-current sentiments against women in the workforce. As Sadker and Sadker (2003) said, “… the demand for more and inexpensive teachers created by common schools made the hiring of women teachers inevitable” (p. 314).

Webb, Metha, and Jordan (2000) gave us more insight into how teaching came to be seen as primarily a job for women. They tell the fascinating story of Catherine Beecher (1800–1878), founder of the Western Institute for Women and the Hartford Female Seminary. She was a vocal proponent of the common school. Beecher saw her task as focusing the attention of the nation on the need for a corps of female teachers to staff the common schools. Her efforts on behalf of the common school were a force in its acceptance, and her work on behalf of women pointed to a new American consensus concerning female roles (Cremin, 1982, cited in Webb, Metha, & Jordan, 2000, pp. 179–180).

Another source of the exploitation of female teachers is rooted in the ideology of a culture that viewed women as moral mothers. An ideology of strict traditional male and female sex roles in the family became the model for the teaching profession. We know that by the turn of the 20th century, the teaching profession was becoming increasingly feminized. See Redding Sugg's book (1978) on the feminization of American education in which the term motherteacher is used to describe teachers.

Spinster was another label pinned on teachers. Sadker and Sadker (2003) indicated that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, unmarried women were hired so often “that teaching and spinsterhood became synonymous” (p. 314). Single women were preferred for teaching jobs because they were assumed not to have a struggle of loyalties between “‘serving’ both husband and employer” (p. 314).

Smith and Vaughn (2000) asserted, “Although women took over the nation's classrooms, males were increasingly in charge of the ever bureaucratized schools, seen as too complex to be run by a woman whose mission was to tend the nation's youth” (p. 8). The commonly accepted conception of male and female roles in schools were those based on the traditional family—“managed by the male patriarch and nurtured by the selfless female” (p. 8). The schoolteacher was expected to do the same things as the homemaker, such as teaching traditional values and morals to children.

Many people saw teaching as a natural vocation for females (Hoffman, 1981). In the early 20th century, the female teacher was particularly valued for her role in socializing immigrants into the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) dominant culture. These rigid sex-role expectations and practices in schools laid the foundation for exploitation based on pay inequity. School districts all over the United States established inequitable pay scales for male and female teachers. Even though female teachers’ salaries were lower, female teachers usually had more responsibilities, “especially when it came to mothering students. They washed students’ hair, cleaned buildings, and sewed” (Smith & Vaughn, 2000, p. 8).

As the pattern of feminization of teaching became entrenched, female teacher's salaries were lower than males’(even though they basically did the same tasks), and the prestige of the teaching profession plummeted. On top of this indignity, women teachers’ social and personal lives were more restricted than men's. One teacher remembers that social activities for female teachers, such as dancing, dating, and card playing, were often prohibited (Vaughn-Roberson, 1993, cited in Smith and Vaughn, 2000).

Systemic Control of Female Teachers. Examples of the administrative control of female teachers’ personal lives abound in records of school contracts in the early 20th century. Illustrative of the requirement that female teachers be “controlled” and be paragons of morality for children are these selected parts of a North Carolina contract in the 1920s:

I promise not to go out with any young man except as it may be necessary to stimulate Sunday School work.

I promise not to fall in love, to become engaged or secretly married.

I promise to remember that I owe a duty to the town people who are paying my wages, that I owe respect to the school board and the superintendent that hired me, and that I shall at all times consider myself the willing servant of the school board and the townspeople. (Knicker & Naylor, 1981, p. 20)

Other areas in female teachers’ lives that were “controlled” by patriarchal structures in schools involved work and family life, pregnancy, and child care. All aspects of women's lives linked to their reproductive cycle became fertile ground for exploitation in schools—institutions that were, and still are, set up according to a masculine model of work. The female teacher, but not the male teacher, was expected to carry the double load of mothering and housekeeping, as well as the duties of teaching. Carter (2002) stated, “demands of the workplace, forced women to assimilate to a male work model or drop out of the paid labor force altogether” (p. 2).

Another form of exploitation of female teachers occurred because teaching had become known as “women's work.” Women teachers were seen as”careerless” and “semiprofessional,” which translated into lower pay than the earnings of “true, elite professionals” (i.e., males in professional careers in medicine and law, who had heavy workloads and huge uninterrupted time commitments). Female teachers were, and still are in many cases, in positions that are “structured without the possibility of promotion. … Advancement meant becoming an administrator and leaving teaching … teaching is structured to accommodate the in-and-out patterns of women's employment” (Biklen, 1995, p. 26). Although some people may view this flexible structure of the teaching profession as desirable for balancing work and family, this structure plays a large part in the overall devaluation by society of teaching and its low salaries.

Sari Knopp Biklen (1995) interviewed contemporary female teachers who described the difficulties and some successful methods of balancing their work as teachers and their lives as wives and mothers. These current cases are amazing and inspiring considering the past history of women teachers being...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Strong Women Teachers: Their Struggles and Strategies for Gender Equity
• 2 Gender Differences in Cognitive Ability, Attitudes, and Behavior
• 3 Teachers, Students, and Title IX: A Promise for Fairness
• 4 Citizenship Education for the 21st Century—A Gender Inclusive Approach to Social Studies
• 5 A Gender-Inclusive Approach to English/Language Arts Methods: Literacy With a Critical Lens
• 6 A Gender Inclusive Approach to Science Education
• 7 Gender Equity Intersects With Mathematics and Technology: Problem-Solving Education for Changing Times
• 8 Practical Strategies for Detecting and Correcting Gender 259 Bias in Your Classroom
• Appendix: Guide to INTASC Principles Reflected in Chapter Interactions
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index