Gender, Race, and the Politics of Role Modelling

The Influence of Male Teachers

Wayne Martino, Goli Rezai-Rashti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415878661
• eBook ISBN: 9781136492853
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides an illuminating account of teachers' own reflections on their experiences of teaching in urban schools. It was conceived as a direct response to policy-related and media-generated concerns about male teacher shortage and offers a critique of the call for more male role models in elementary schools to address important issues regarding gender, race and the politics of representation. By including the perspectives of minority teachers and students, and by drawing on feminist, queer and anti-racist frameworks, this book rejects the familiar tendency to resort to role modelling as a basis for explaining or addressing boys' disaffection with schooling. Indeed, the authors argue, on the basis of their research in urban schools in Canada and Australia, that educational policy concerned with male teacher shortage and the plight of disadvantaged minority boys would benefit from engaging with analytic perspectives and empirical literature that takes readers beyond hegemonic discourses of role modelling. A compelling case is presented for the need to disarticulate discourses about role modelling from a politics of representation that is committed to addressing the reality of the impact of racial and structural inequalities on both minority teachers and students' participation in the education system. The book also provides insight into the persistence of gender inequality as it relates to the status of elementary school teaching as women's work.

1 Introduction

This book is based on research conducted with male and female teachers in Canada and Australia and was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) [1]. It builds on the work of King (1998) and Sargent (2001) in the U.S., as well as on research by Carrington, Francis, Skelton, and colleagues in the U.K., and engages with feminist, queer, and anti-racist frameworks to address important questions about the influence of male teachers in urban schools (see Carrington & McPhee, 2008; Carrington et al., 2007; Skelton et al., 2009; Francis, 2008; Francis et al., 2008). It also broadens the research base to include an international perspective on the influence of male teachers, which takes into consideration the debates about boys’ education, backlash, feminization of schooling, and the politics of role modelling and teacher representation on the basis of gender, sexuality, and race (Britzman, 1993; Crichlow, 1999; Lingard & Douglas, 1999). Given the existing research expressing concern about the unsubstantiated generalizations about the influence of male teachers as role models in schools, we wanted to gather more detailed data which would enable us to engage theoretically with the politics of gender and race informing debates and discourses about the call for more male role models (Cushman, 2010; Johannesson, 2004; Lahelma, 2000; Lam et al., 2010; Marsh et al., 2008; Martin & Marsh, 2005; Sokal et al., 2007). We believe that, given the sort of claims about the supposed impact of the increasing feminization of elementary schooling on boys, it was important to include the perspectives of both male and female teachers, as well as those of students.

Our starting point for our research was that, while there were funded strategies and policy initiatives targeting men as recruits to teaching, there did not appear to be any clear explanatory framework or empirical research into the influence of male teachers on student learning underpinning them (Carrington et al., 2008; Education Queensland, 2002; Francis et al., 2008; Francis, 2008; House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training, 2002; Jones, 2006, 2007; Mills et al., 2004; National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2002; Ontario College of Teachers, 2004; Pepperell & Smedley, 1998; Skelton, 2002, 2007). Our aim was to discover whether popular assumptions about the perceived influence of male role models in schools had any empirical basis. What were elementary school teachers’ and students’ perceptions of their relationships with one another and how might these be informing views of themselves as teachers and learners respectively? To what extent did the gender, sexuality, and race of the teacher matter and if so how did these identities matter or intersect in ways that might help us to understand further the politics at the heart of dominant discourses about role modelling? Our overall purpose, therefore, was to investigate whether teachers’ own gender, sexuality, and race or ethnicity mediated their perceptions or understanding of their pedagogical relations with their students. We were also interested to examine whether matching students and teachers by gender and/or race was considered to influence students’ educational experiences and if so, in what ways.

DETAILS ABOUT THE STUDY

We interviewed over 70 elementary school teachers and conducted classroom observations in 20 classrooms in Canada. Ten elementary school teachers in Australia were also interviewed. We visited teachers in four public schools and one private boys’ school in Toronto. The four public inner-city schools served a multi-racial/ethnic population, with children in three of these schools from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The boys’ school, however, was a private school located in a very affluent area of the city. We were eager to include female, minority, and queer teachers, particularly given the absence of their voices and perspectives within the context of discussions about male teacher shortage and role modelling. We also interviewed 36 students and sought their perspectives on the influence of teachers in their lives.

More specifically, we interviewed 74 teachers in Toronto schools—41 male teachers, 33 female teachers. Of these 74 teachers, 20 were visible minorities. We made contact with individual teachers, known to us as researchers, who then put us into contact with other interested participants, which resulted in a snowballing effect. The first stage of the research involved undertaking semi-structured interviews with teachers. Each teacher agreed to be interviewed. Pseudonyms were given to all participants. The interviews lasted approximately 60 minutes. The participants were asked questions pertaining to:

(i) their decision to become an elementary school teacher;

(ii) perceptions and expectations that parents/students/female teachers have of male elementary school teachers;

(iii) the challenges faced in their teaching;

(iv) the perceived impact or influence that they had on students;

(v) whether gender, sexuality, race, or ethnicity impacted or had any bearing on their teaching or experience as a teacher;

(vi) their understanding of being a role model.

By interviewing both male and female teachers, and by also including a focus on minority perspectives, our sampling strategy was intended to generate analytic perspectives that addressed the complexities and contradictory dimensions of the dynamics of gender, race, and sexuality, as they pertained to teachers’ own understanding of their pedagogical relationships with children in schools. In this sense, our research needs to be understood as a direct response to policy-related and public-generated discourses about male teacher shortage, which rely on simplistic and unproblematized notions of role modelling, as a basis for establishing certain truths about the influence of male teachers (see Carrington & McPhee, 2008; Thornton & Bricheno, 2006).

The second stage of the research involved undertaking classroom observations of the teachers and students. One full day was spent in each of the teachers’ classrooms. The focus was on recording details about the teacher’s interactions with students and their approach to classroom management, in light of the previously stated research questions. At the end of the day, up to 50 minutes was spent with the teacher talking about his or her approach to teaching and the specific lessons observed throughout the day. Notes were taken during these sessions and written up as part of the overall observational analysis of each teacher’s pedagogical approach in the classroom. As Patton (2002) indicates, the purpose of observational analysis is to take the researcher into the setting and to enable considerable depth and detail of the phenomenon under investigation to be documented (p. 22). Our purpose was to get “close enough to the people and situation being studied to personally understand in depth the details of what goes on” (see Patton, 2002, p. 28).

The third stage of the research involved talking informally with students in schools and conducting focus group interviews. We interviewed 12 boys from the private, single-sex school (one of whom was a visible minority), and 24 students (nine girls, all of whom were visible minorities and 15 boys, ten of whom were visible minorities) attending one multi-racial/ethnic public school. The students were asked questions related to:

(i) what they thought made a good teacher;

(ii) whether they considered their teachers to be role models;

(iii) what motivated them to learn at school;

(iv) what their teacher did in the classroom to help them to learn;

(v) whether they preferred a male or female teacher;

(vi) whether the gender of the teacher made a difference to their learning in school.

SOME METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

While we included a fairly large sample of teachers, our concern was not so much to generalize across a population, but to generate a series of case studies that were capable of yielding more nuanced and critical insights into the influence of male and female teachers than those afforded by the common-sense understandings of role modelling informing policy and media-inspired discussions about male teacher shortage (see Ashley, 2003; Carrington & McPhee, 2008; Carrington et al., 2007; Francis, 2008; Pepperell & Smedley, 1998; Skelton, 2002, 2003; Thornton & Bricheno, 2006 for a critique of such positions). Each case study enabled attention to be devoted to thick description and detail about specific teachers and their contexts (Keddie & Mills, 2007) and, hence, contributed to a more in-depth understanding of the phenomenon (or question) under consideration—that is, the limits of race and gender-based role modelling as a basis for explaining teacher influence. For example, Patton (2002) argues that individual cases “selected purposefully … permit inquiry into and understanding of a phenomenon in depth” (p. 46). He further adds that “the logic and power of purposeful sampling derive from the emphasis on in-depth understanding. This leads to selecting information-rich cases for study in depth” (p. 46).

In addition, Creswell (2007) argues that “we use qualitative research to develop theories when partial or inadequate theories exist for certain populations and samples or existing theories do not adequately capture the complexity of the problem we are explaining” (p. 40). As Stake (2000) states: “Case studies are of value for refining theory and suggesting complexities for further investigation, as well as helping to establish the limits of generalizability” (p. 448). These methodological considerations relate specifically to our concern regarding the limits of dominant discourses about teachers as role models in terms of their capacity to reduce teacher influence to a simplistic account of gender and racial affiliation with a student.

However, we realize that our own positions and political affiliations as a gay, White man and a minority, Middle Eastern, heterosexual, Muslim woman influence both our engagement with theory and how we are using it to “self-consciously underplay hegemonic voices”, which constitutes a commitment to “relentlessly creating textual room for counter hegemonic discourses” (Fine & Weis, 1998, p. 281). Such experiences have involved being subjected to othering on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality in our role as teachers in schools and within the academy (Kumashiro, 2000). These experiences have influenced our desire to embrace anti-racist and feminist, queer theoretical frameworks that illuminate the contradictory aspects of our privileged positions as professors within the academy and our minority status vis-à-vis the hegemony of institutionalized racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. In this regard, our experiences have informed both our engagement with theory and our methodological concern to include the voices of minority teachers and students in an attempt “to be sensitive to vulnerable populations” (Creswell, 2007, p. 44), without being unreflective about our own position as insiders/outsiders to our participants (see Weis & Fine, 2000). Thus, we are conscious of how an anti-racist and queer feminist theoretical lens informs both our analytic approach and our concerns about the limits of a fundamental politics that is organized around invoking either the singularity of race or gender as an identity category in an effort to explain teacher influence in terms of role modelling.

REFLECTIONS ON THE USE OF THEORY AND THE POLITICS OF ROLE MODELLING

These concerns about the discursive framing of the problematic of male teacher shortage in elementary schools led us to a consideration of the strategic use of theory in our own research and its significance for working at the limits of existing regimes of thought governing the politics of role modelling at the heart of such debates. In this sense, we were drawn to the critical scholarship on role modelling offered by feminist, queer theorists, such as Britzman (1993), and anti-racist theorists, such as Crichlow (1999), who draw attention to the political effects of such a disciplinary regime in terms of its capacity for enforcing normalization and rigid categorization. Crichlow, for example, highlights that role modelling functions to “ensure identifications rigidly along lines of race, sex, or any other presumption of essentialized differences” (p. 240), while Britzman draws attention to theories of sex-role socialization as an inscriptive practice or regime for essentializing and fixing teachers’ bodies in terms of their gender, race, and sexuality:

In other words, sex role socialization theory, because it is so firmly grounded in traditions of essentialism and its push to present identity as stable, cannot offer teachers and students insight into either the deep emotional investments to living traditional roles, or the deep conflict that emerges when one attempts to live these roles. Moreover, sex role socialization theory cannot explain the conflicts and pleasures of those who define themselves differently. (p. 35)

In addition, James (2000) argues that:

the conceptualization and practices of role modelling are part of a hegemonic system in which educators inadvertently participate. [It is one] that encourages young people to conform to prevailing values, role expectations and beliefs about the education system. Role models are expected to collude with the education system to produce uncritical students who will have no sense of the complexity and contradiction of the racial construction of identities, their relationship to the histories of colonialism and social structures, and as Britzman (1998, p. 39) writes, ‘their own proximity to the histories and experiences of racism and sexism’. (p. 92)

Such critical insights are confirmed empirically by research undertaken by Brown (2009) in the U.S., who claims that such an “approach to addressing the needs of African American male students grossly over-generalizes the complexity of their educational experiences and identities” (p. 432).

Furthermore, Crichlow (1999) also draws attention to the politics of role modelling “as an illusionary vehicle of reform and equity” in terms of its capacity to eschew the broader significance and impact of structural inequalities related to gender, social class, and race relations:

Role model discourse works well because it obscures a context of inequality that refuses to change: ‘Capitalism and patriarchal structures prevent us all from succeeding, no matter how many role models or heroes we acquire. Success cannot be attained by everyone: it depends on access to social, economic and political resources’. (p. 243)

Connell (1995) further highlights the problems with the limits of sex-role socialization, as a regime of knowledge/power relations:

In sex role theory, action (the role enactment) is linked to a structure defined by biological difference, the dichotomy of male and female— not to a structure defined by social relations. This leads to categoricalism, the reduction of gender to two homogenous categories, betrayed by the persistent blurring of sex differences within sex roles. Sex roles are defined as reciprocal; polarization is a necessary part of the concept. This leads to a misperception of social reality, exaggerating differences between men and women, while obscuring the structures of race, class, and sexuality. It is telling that discussions of ‘the male sex role’ have mostly ignored gay men and have little to say about race and ethnicity. (p. 27)

While we write more about the politics of role modelling and representation in the next chapter, our concern here is to highlight the disciplinary and regulatory function of knowledge/power relations that inform dominant conceptions of male teacher influence. We draw on Connell (1995) and other theorists, such as Hall (1996) and McCarthy (1998), to foreground the limits of a science of masculinity and race, in terms of its capacity to mobilize knowledge/power relations around assertions of gender and race differences, framed in terms of role modelling and sex-role socialization, and how it is used as a basis for defining the intelligibility of discourses about the influence of male teachers in urban schools (p. 4). Race-role modelling, for example, continues to be based on genetics and biological essentialism, and relates to theoretical concerns expressed by Hall (1996) regarding the

unwelcome fact that a great deal of black politics, constructed, addressed and developed directly in relation to questions of race and ethnicity, has been predicated on the assumption that categories of gender and sexuality would stay the same and remain fixed and secure. (p. 445)

As Hall (1996 as cited in Yon, 1999b) further elaborates: “When one looks at race, one sees that although it represents itself as an essentialized notion, given genetics and biology, it really is no such thing … it is in fact, culturally, politically and socially defined” (p. 94). It is in this capacity that race becomes easily inserted into a disciplinary apparatus of role modelling in which the male teacher body is rendered intelligible as a stable referent within a system of knowledge/power relations for instantiating particular identificatory relations with students, defined in terms of both ethnic and gender affiliation.

Given these conceptual limits, what is needed, we argue, is an analytic framework that is capable of making sense of the crisis of male teacher shortage which moves beyond the limits of sex and race-role modelling as a regime of truth. Feminist theorists such as Segal (1990), for example, stress that theoretical perspectives which invoke sex-role modelling are limited in their capacity to account for the ‘complex dynamics of gender identity’:

Sex role theory fails to explain either the passion or the pain of rigid adherence to dominant gender stereotypes of some, resilient resistance to them on the part of others, or confused or contradictory combinations of the two in yet others. (p. 69)

Britzman (1993) further asserts that invoking role models needs to be understood as part of an overall commitment to examining “one’s own investments in maintaining stereotypic appearances and naturalizing heterosexuality” (p. 40). In fact, she claims that at the core of debates about teachers as role models the normative force of gender and race, as stable and fixed categories, is very much at play (see Mills et al., 2004). Thus, what is highlighted is the extent to which discourses about teachers as idealized role models fail to address the damaging effects of reducing the formation of gender identity to the category of sex-role stereotyping, irrespective of other factors related to race, ethnicity, and social class (Britzman, 1993, p. 2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Male Teacher Shortage and the Politics of Representation
• 3. Black Teachers’ Narratives about Role Modelling and Representation
• 4. Beyond Race-Role Modelling: Black Male Teachers as Organic Intellectuals
• 5. The Question of Male Privilege
• 6. The Scourge of Repressive Female Authority
• 7. The Case of Male Bonding and the Demonization of Female Teachers
• 8. The Lure of Hegemonic Masculinity for Male Elementary School Teachers
• 9. The Politics of Multiculturalism, Representation, and Role Modelling in a Multi-Racial Muslim School Community
• 10. Do the Gender and Race of the Teachers Really Matter?: Students’ Perspectives on Role Modelling
• 11. Conclusion: Towards a Social Imaginary Beyond Role Modelling
• Notes
• About the Authors
• References
• Index