Constructing Men Who Teach Research Into Care and Gender As
Constructing Men Who Teach Research Into Care and Gender As
Constructing Men Who Teach Research Into Care and Gender As
School of Education, University of Sheffield, 388 Glossop Road, S10 2JA Sheffield, UK
(Received 9 February 2013; final version received 9 February 2014)
This paper argues that in order to begin loosening the ties that bind care and gender
in primary education, we need to re-examine the knowledge sought and found by
educational research about teachers. The focus is primarily on how we understand
men who teach. Through an examination of two scholarly texts – Ashley, M., and
J. Lee [2003. Women Teaching Boys: Caring and Working in the Primary School.
Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham] and King, J. [1998. Uncommon Caring: Learning from
Men Who Teach Young Children. New York: TCP] – I argue that we must be
mindful that our research can effectively produce and reiterate common-sense
understandings of men that binds them to the hegemonic masculine ideal. It is
argued that mixed-method qualitative research that untangles the layers of
context influencing the lives of men who teach is important. The paper also
suggests that the study of male teachers’ emotions, as at once individual and
social, and private and public, can disrupt the rational–emotional binary that
cements care to gender and reveal new configurations of the gender order.
Keywords: male teachers; primary teachers; gender; masculinities; identities; care;
emotions; life history; mixed-methods research
Introduction
This paper begins with, and wants to hold on to throughout, the assertion of Goodson:
‘the kind of research knowledge we generate about teachers and for teachers is crucial
in order to understand and define what sort of professionals teachers are and might
become’ (2000, 13). Goodson is here specifically arguing against teachers being
framed as technicians, ‘deliverers of prescriptions written by others’ (14), instead
seeking to ‘sponsor the teacher’s voice’ as a counter-cultural stand against the
‘power/knowledge … held by politicians and administrators’ (17). Educational
research constructs and can legitimate visions of the teacher, and as such needs to be
the object of investigation and critique itself; we need to continually consider the foun-
dations that research inquiries and conclusions are based on, since these processes are
both framed by and come to re-generate dominant discourses in academia and everyday
life. I will argue here, via an examination of two scholarly works about teachers, care
and gender, that such re-consideration can lead to a revision of ideas and alternative
possibilities for future research.
A foundation of teachers’ professional identities, as well as their contemporary
working conditions, is gender (Dillabough 2005). As such it is a feature of teachers’
*Email: mjpulsford1@sheffield.ac.uk
lives and work that needs to be considered in research with them. But problematising
the knowledge we seek about gender (as so about teachers) is vital: how is knowledge
about teachers’ (gendered) identities and working lives produced and interpreted? It is
useful here to consider that there are contradictory knowledges about masculinities, and
gender more generally, produced and propagated by science, in ‘common sense’, and in
a kind of intuitive, individual ‘knowing’ (Connell 2005, 4). This contestation over the
systems of knowledge around gender reflects conflicting discourses in (as well as
within) academia and ‘everyday life’. This is because gender itself is bound within
specific political and historical contexts (Connell 2005, 4) and hence – following the
line of argument above about the definitional power of research – we could say that
the way we research men and masculinities will reflect the way we currently see,
and delineate the possibilities enabled for us to see, men and masculinities.
The need that this expresses, to be critical of what and how we know, will be taken
up as a central point of consideration throughout this paper: my main aim is to continue
questioning the types of knowledge we produce, and seek, regarding men who teach. In
doing this I will endeavour to illustrate that what may appear unproblematic in our
understandings of men and male teachers, and the issues related to them, can tend to
reflect ‘masculinist social epistemologies’ and as such ‘bear the ideological convictions
of the socially dominant’ (Francis 2010, 479); in effectively reiterating common-sense
understandings of men, the gender order remains intact. It is my argument that in order
to loosen the ties that bind care and (female) gender in primary education – an historical
and political construction underscored by notions of the inferior, unintelligent, woman
‘naturally’ suited to child-rearing (Steedman 1985) – we need to re-examine the knowl-
edge sought and found about teachers. The focus in this paper will be on men who teach
since I believe that if we can begin to see men in alternative ways, it may open new
ways for women to be represented too.
discourses, objects, spaces and artefacts) and which – most pertinently here – thinks
hard about how ‘our research methods tend to enact as well as to describe the thing
being researched, without always recognising the implication of their own interference’
(Fenwick and Edwards 2010, 145).
Ashley and Lee’s (2003) Women Teaching Boys: Caring and Working in the
Primary Classroom and King’s (1998) Uncommon Caring: Learning from Men Who
Teach Young Children both revolve around gender and care in primary and early
years education, and both seek to debunk prevalent claims about male teachers in
these settings. For example, Ashley and Lee build a case ‘against the conception of
primary teaching as mothering’, and hence seek to break down what they see as the
prime factor underlying the ‘more male role models’ discourse. King’s work too
focuses on gender roles in primary education, asking ‘What happens when teachers
who are male teach in domains that are thought to be female?’ (1998, 26). He suggests
that men who teach are ‘at risk’ when they care: either they risk being seen as ‘unna-
tural’ and feminine, at risk of accusations of sexualising the act of care, or at risk
because we disrupt the ‘economy that traps female teachers in an early education sweat-
shop’ (King 1998, 138). King is frustrated by the ‘circular’ debates he has with his par-
ticipants though, around how discourses of gender are tied with both care and sexuality
and implicated in the organisation and understanding of teaching (29). Ashley and Lee
seek to address such problems by transcending the gendered discourses of care in teach-
ing by introducing a model of the ‘androgynous’ teacher. King’s frustration and Ashley
and Lee’s solution are examined in more depth below.
Despite Ashley and Lee’s Women Teaching Boys being the more recent publication,
I begin with it as it opens the terrain (of research into gender, care and teacher profes-
sionalism) for exploration throughout the rest of the paper. Furthermore, King’s
Uncommon Caring is presented second as it provides a useful contrasting argument
to Ashley and Lee’s conclusions, which then leads us into a lengthier methodological
discussion.
oneself and those we teach. It is therefore coded as masculine, even if it does avoid
extreme ‘pathological’ gender behaviours. Ashley and Lee’s model thus resonates
with a (gendered) notion of the neo-liberal professional founded in European political
philosophy, which Dillabough (1999) was amongst the first to explore. Contemporary
models of professionalism are constructed on Kantian and Cartesian philosophies of the
rational, instrumental individual in which men ‘stand as legitimate representatives of
the public sphere’ (Dillabough 1999, 377). Therefore, women, as traditional occupiers
of the private sphere, are ‘constructed symbolically as that which stands in opposition to
rationality’ (Dillabough 1999, 377), where women must separate the subjective, rela-
tional and social attachments from the ‘self’ if they are to achieve public status on a
par with men. Legitimate knowledge and professionalism stem from reason and from
within a detached ‘self’, and women are unable to readily access such knowledge
due to their lack of reason (Bolton 2005). Hence, knowledge of a social, relational
and subjective manner is simultaneously attached to women and disparaged, whilst
men are barred from and forced to reject knowing in this way. Modern, professional
identity is a way of cleaving the genders into binary positions and placing traits associ-
ated with masculinity as hierarchically superior (Dillabough 1999).
In developing a ‘managerial’ model of how teachers do, and should, care, Ashley
and Lee have created a vision of the professional teacher which serves to elevate qual-
ities coded as male, such as control, rationality and strategic knowledge, to a superior
plain. I suggest that this works counter to their intention to argue that more men should
be encouraged into primary teaching because ‘caring about’ can be ‘androgynous’.
Since if, in this model, caring about means management and control (of oneself and
one’s class), and as those are associated with maleness, then don’t we actually need
more male primary teachers ‘doing’ their (hegemonic) male selves in schools? And
doesn’t this mean women should be more like their male counterparts, and if not
then aren’t they letting the profession down?
Ashley and Lee do begin to engage with these issues, noting that their androgynous
teacher might represent a ‘slight shift to the masculine’ (2003, 30). Yet whilst they
rightly see the operation of gender as ‘difficult to ignore’ in the process of professiona-
lisation they are advocating (26), their search to avoid this is where we encounter pro-
blems. By aiming to redefine care by foregrounding ‘caring about’ ahead of ‘caring
for’, Ashley and Lee’s argument results in an elevation of pedagogical principles and
behaviours which are indeed associated with professionalism and ‘high status’ but
that are also, as even the authors note (22), inextricably tied with maleness. But teachers
are not able to transcend their gendered identities (see the following discussion of
King’s book). Thus, their managerial and professional ethic of care gives strength to
hegemonic discursive regimes to maintain gender inequality.
This is because the type of caring that women are associated with (caring for) is con-
signed to unprofessionalism, an act that effectively bars women teachers’ authentic
access to the so-called ‘high status’ caring, because they are women. Meanwhile, for
men, primary schools would perhaps be seen as amenable places since they would
be able to utilise this professional caring discourse un-problematically, as it tallies
with expectations of men. Yet these expectations are enabled by normative discourses;
men would be more firmly defined in relation to hegemonic masculine traits of reason,
control and knowledge. Therefore, this research can be said to reproduce common
understandings of men, despite the suggestion that it ‘challenges much of the accepted
wisdom about boys and men’ (Ashley and Lee 2003, sleeve notes). Given too that no
men were interviewed as part of their research, this seems an especially bold claim.
220 M. Pulsford
Ashley and Lee also state that primary teaching is a profession ‘divided between
those [teachers] … who are content with the status quo, and those who would seek,
either for themselves or for primary teaching as a whole, enhanced professional
status’ (26). The authors thus frame professionalism (effectively, in this view, mascu-
line ‘rationality’ over feminine ‘irrationality’) as a choice for the individual to make. In
this neo-liberal construction, responsibility for one’s social position rests on one’s own
shoulders; discourses of gender and care that define and encase men and women, as
further cemented by constructions of professionalism, are their individual problems
to deal with (see, for example, Rich 2001 and Warin 2013 for analyses of the link
between gender, professionalism and neo-liberal ideologies). Furthermore, (rational)
choice and individualism underpin the gender dichotomy whereby a masculinised
view of the world (as detachable from the self) is supported as obvious and
unproblematic.
Choosing which gender discourses to adopt follows a logic of gender as multiple
and fluid (Butler 1990) and of discourse as a resource to use in our makings of our
selves. But this does not account for one’s embodied gender, the sex we are born
with and the reality that ‘individuals … experience gender as integral to their sense
of social identity’ (Francis 2002, 44). As a man, I cannot choose to ‘do’ caring (cf.
O’Connor 2008) in a caring for, ‘feminine’, way in a classroom without social and insti-
tutional pressures questioning, controlling and modifying my acts (Sargent 2001; Haase
2008; Francis 2008; Mills, Haase, and Charlton 2008). Hence utilising the logic of post-
structuralist theory, as inflected by discourses of the individual and choice-making neo-
liberal citizen by Ashley and Lee, cannot account for how I negotiate these issues in my
‘real’ life. My ‘selfhood is routinely entangled with identities that are definitively
embodied … ; embodiment is not optional’ (Jenkins 2008, 72–73). The gender identity
work we do is inextricably part of the contextual and interactional setting (the discur-
sive environment), yet it is also anchored to the materiality of our social, embodied and
empirical selves.
Ashley and Lee’s book risks reinforcing notions of men and women as different
and unequal, doing so through a theoretical focus that does not account for the actu-
alities of lives lived by ‘real acting individuals in particular settings’ (Seidman 2013,
210). There are some fundamental questions that I take from my reading of their
book: in what ways can we avoid glossing how ‘real’ social actors comprehend them-
selves and their worlds? How can we avoid reifying and neutralising social scientific
knowledge and discourse, using them as categories to innocuously classify the social
world? In what ways do we deal with the capacity of social research to produce rea-
lities (Law 2004)? I will engage with these questions in the latter sections of the
paper, providing examples of research into the lives of men that has sought to
address such issues.
Uncommon caring
King’s work on Uncommon Caring (1998) began because the question Why are there
so few men in elementary teaching? resurfaced ‘over and over’ for him, first as an
elementary teacher and later as a teacher mentor (26) during his subsequent roles as
college teacher and professor in the USA. He characterises his professional and per-
sonal journey, including his ‘coming out as gay’, as one involving ‘layers of identity
formation and conflict’ (King 1998, 26), a thread that runs through his analysis of
the discussions he has with his male participants.
Gender and Education 221
King’s research included nine ‘active participants’, including King himself whose
‘role shifted from researcher to participant’ (28). These men were all Kindergarten to
Grade 3 (K-3) teachers in Florida ranging in age and teaching experience. He inter-
viewed the men up to four times, invited them to ‘write something about their teaching
lives’ (some of which feature as chapters in the book), and later conducted focus groups
with the men, discussing common themes from the interviews and writings (28–29).
King notes that ‘as the study progressed, the interactions among participants narrowed
the focus of our work to an examination of gender roles in primary education’ (26). This
focus is at the centre of my analysis of his work: what sort of data do we generate, and
what conclusions can we reach, when we specifically hone in on the issue of gender
with participants? To what extent does asking participants to view their experiences
through the lens of gender lead to a reification of gender discourses and the binding
of (in this case) men to masculine ways of being? Before developing these thoughts
further it is worth examining King’s key conclusions since they provide a useful
research-based comparison to Ashley and Lee’s (2003) argument.
Uncommon Caring (1998) examines the ‘culturally constructed factors such as atti-
tudes towards caring, gender-coded behaviour, and sexual orientations’ (3) as issues
relevant in addressing gender roles in primary education. King argues that care is
axiomatic in elementary teaching (138), and that both men and women can do so effec-
tively; biological sex has little to do with one’s capability here (139). Yet ‘socially con-
structed gender roles and their effective deployment are teaching’ (King 1998, 139),
meaning that a caring act cannot be straightforwardly completed as if ‘teacher’ and
‘the one caring’ are ungendered entities, since gender is inseparable from the teacher
self and hence any caring act. This contrasts with Ashley and Lee’s (2003) argument
– founded on similar anti-essentialist principles – which sees ‘androgyny’ as a viable
way of enacting a ‘professional’ caring role. Without reference to detailed research
with teachers, their conclusions fall short, and studies such as King’s illuminate the dif-
ficulties (perhaps especially for men due to the obviousness of their difference) in
avoiding reference to gender: ‘men who teach in the primary grades are frequently
unable to leave gender signification out of the caring equation’ (1998, 75; see also
Sargent 2001; Vogt 2002; Bolton 2005). This is a beneficial insight. Nevertheless, it
is important to examine King’s conclusions in terms of his methodology: what did
his male teachers tell him, and could that be a function of the way he asked?
discourses of manliness: they act in ‘defiance’ of gender rules, resisting, for example,
the mantle of disciplinarian; they see teaching as a ‘competition’ between colleagues,
use a ‘logical, functional rationale’ and describe ‘a logical array of decisions’ about
action (90); they take risks and do not ‘bow to authority’; one respondent stated that
‘men want to deal in reality, not deal with the psychological’ (92); they say they
take responsibility, are autonomous and individualistic; and they see ‘talk about
relationships’ as unproductive, in contrast to ‘goal-directed talk’ (97). Thus, King
found that when men talked about their work in terms of gender they sought to describe
caring actions in utilitarian, rational, concrete ways and exemplified hegemonic mascu-
line attitudes such as competition, individualism, defiance, risk taking and
responsibility.
What is it possible to conclude from this? King notes that the men ‘systematically
devalued women’s teaching and nonteaching behaviours to establish themselves as
different, and women as other’ (105). These men who teach are, it seems, constantly
engaged in struggling to find and define their own male identities, and do so by deni-
grating their female colleagues. It could be seen as necessary for them to do this since it
establishes their non-female nature which is in question as a primary teacher. I wonder
if these men utilise a hegemonic masculinity in order to legitimate their right to devalue
their female colleagues. It is not that they find it desirable to denigrate the women they
work with; rather, because they need a basis on which to reject their own ‘female’ ways
of being, it is necessary to do so – a kind of complete rejection so as not to leave room
for question. To justify doing this they manoeuvre themselves into a position within the
established gender order from which it appears acceptable for them to pass judgement:
that of the hegemonic male. As discussed above, masculine-coded traits have come to
correspond with the (gender-neutralised) professional, public self, and this lends further
weight of justification to those able to adopt those (not really neutral) behaviours and
attitudes. This line of argument reflects the type of work that Schrock and Schwalbe
(2009) call for, examining how men’s practices create and reproduce gender inequality
or, more precisely, the dominance of males. And whilst this is an important locus of
research, we ought to step back and ask about how we generate such data. Thinking
closely about King’s work can help here.
nature of social actors as examined through their lives and in their own voices, since we
can reify hegemonic discourses about teachers and gender if we fail to do so. What
methodological paths might there be amongst the normative tendencies that have
been examined? A summary of my argument and some associated directions for
future research are presented below.
Methodological avenues
I have made a case that we ought to, constantly and critically, consider how we generate
data about gender from/with social actors. The core and ever-present issue to address is
how we engage with people’s ‘truths’ when their (and our) ‘truths’ are embedded in
power relations. Coupled with that are the difficulties arising as we conceptualise gender
(and identities more widely) as performed in varying and contingent ways. A way of
approaching research that encompasses rather than ignores these troublesome issues is, I
suggest, to seek narrow and deep sets of data which focus on the subjective, material, embo-
died and complex experiences of social life. This is about expanding the understanding of
‘male teachers’ lived masculinities developed over a life time’ to enhance the much larger
research literature on male teachers’ masculinities in the workplace (Jupp 2013, 416). This
endeavour to see the complexity of lives and the layers of meaning attached to any research
foci by any one participant, through grounding our inquiries in the sense or order imposed
(or not) by them, is vital. Embracing and aiming to re-present the complexity and possible
contradictions of a life is a way of addressing the difficulty we come across when partici-
pants’ ‘truths’ reflect that which is imposed by hegemonic definitions of ‘normal’ (as in
men ‘doing’ rationality or competitiveness), and also hopes to mitigate against academic
discourses imposing those definitions or creating research situations where they are inevi-
tably elicited from participants.
This perspective has roots in Dorothy Smith’s writing about ‘standpoint feminism’
(Smith 1992). For research to begin from a categorical point of view (i.e. participants
seen in terms of their gender, or indeed in relation to an issue associated with that category,
such as ‘care’) is to begin in discourse that pre-defines that category. Beginning one’s
inquiry there is to assist the operation that claims ‘a piece of the actual for the relations
of ruling, of which that discourse … is part’ and thereby reproducing a normative vision
of the world (1992, 90). Smith strives for a sociological method of inquiry that begins
with the ‘real-life’ participant and works up to social relations, rather than vice versa:
Inquiry starts with the knower who is actually located; she is active; she is at work; she is
connected with particular other people in various ways; she thinks, laughs, desires,
sorrows, sings, curses, loves just here; she reads here; she watches television. Activities,
feelings, experiences, hook her into extended social relations linking her activities to those
of other people and in ways beyond her knowing. Whereas a standpoint beginning in text-
mediated discourse begins with the concepts or schema of that discourse and turns
towards the actual to find its object, the standpoint of women never leaves the actual.
The knowing subject is always located in a particular spatial and temporal site, a particular
configuration of the everyday/everynight world. Inquiry is directed towards exploring and
explicating what she does not know – the social relations and organisation pervading her
world but invisible in it. (1992, 91)
discourses about men. It also opens up a route to connect the personal and the social
without bypassing or belittling actual lived lives; real male research participants’ bio-
graphical experiences, emotions and activities need to be taken as the fundamental
basis of an analysis into social relations, a first step in a critical examination of the con-
ditions upon which those exist and are maintained. It is here that life history narrative
approaches become pertinent since they can weave together ‘the wholeness of lives’
(Cole 2009, 573, citing Bateson), exploring people’s varied experiences and interpret-
ations as located within, and generative of, social–cultural–historical practices. They
can highlight the contradictory, evolving and improvised nature of lives (Cole 2009,
573), and through this ‘messiness’ explore how material-discursive assemblages con-
figure and make viable certain becomings for, in this case, men.
A raft of research can be cited to exemplify life history and narrative research
approaches with men. There is, for example, the work by Mills, Haase, and Charlton
(2008), Newman (2010), Foster and Newman (2005) and Smedley (2007) that
explore the challenges, in relation to gender, of learning to become a primary school
teacher. These authors explore intersecting themes including identity, difference, sexu-
ality and social class through narrative research that is ‘grounded in the study of the
particular’ (Kohler Riessman 2008, cited in Newman 2010, 51). Other research has
used similar approaches to examine the complex, contingent, fluid and performed
nature of masculinity. Here, for example, the work of Francis (2008), Martino
(2008) and Warin (2006) is relevant as they seek a fine-grained understanding of ‘mas-
culinities as historically specific and evolving configurations of practice’ (Martino
2008, 577). Warin (2006) notes that the identity of one nursery teacher, ‘Ian’, is charac-
terised by a ‘dissonance’ between competing aspects of masculinity, and she examines
this through attempting ‘to capture the nitty gritty, lived experience, of the process by
which hegemonic masculinity operates and achieves ascendancy’ (528) . That such
detailed, in-depth research using narratives of experience can provide understandings
of dominance, subversion and resistance informs Jupp’s (2013) work with the ‘lived
counternarratives’ of white male teachers in US inner-city schools. By being open to
hearing and re-presenting stories that ‘counter “official” and “hegemonic” narratives
of everyday life’ (Peters and Lankshear 1996, cited in Jupp 2013, 413), such alternative
versions may enter into discourses about men who teach, and might also be employed
in the (re)shaping of other male teachers’ stories.
This brings us to Goodson’s call for researchers to develop ‘genealogies of context’
using life history methods (2000). The aim here is to work with and for the teacher
through the development of insight based on their experiences and the researcher’s
goal to pursue ‘glimpses of structure’. This is a collaborative enterprise since ‘each
sees the world through a different prism of practice and thought’ (20), allowing both
to more fully engage with, and fill in for the other, the wider and/or more specific
context. This provides a method for Smith’s (1992) vision of grounding research
about ‘invisible’ social relations and organisation in the actualities of (an) everyday/
every night life, and echoes C. Wright-Mills’ call for sociologists to turn, for the indi-
vidual, personal troubles into social issues (Jenkins 2008; Seidman 2013). Thus, it is
possible to see a theoretical, methodological and morally responsible mode of social
inquiry which is based in the material lives of participants, seeks knowledges from
the as-lived-in world and endeavours to work with and for those people, and others,
by critiquing the opaque assemblages of ideas and things entwined in the interpretations
they share with us. This has the enablement of social transformation as its goal, to be
226 M. Pulsford
would be produced if we asked men who teach to articulate care in relation to their work
in a variety of different ways, in different spaces and at different times. What does ‘care’
look and feel like in the context of a teaching week? How do personal life and biogra-
phical experiences seep into their perspectives on care in the classroom in different and
perhaps unexpected ways? To me it seems likely that this would generate a greatly
nuanced picture of how male teachers intend to and are able to enact ‘care’ within
the material-discursive boundaries of their lives. It would therefore lay the foundation
for a nuanced critique of gender and care.
relegated and denigrated, and as such are closed off as ways of understanding the lives
of real social actors; this is the particular perspective of Seidler (2007) regarding men,
who he sees as being enabled to avoid their feelings by such discourses. Thus, it is
argued that research in academia constructs rather than reflects social realities; it has a
hand in producing men, and anchoring them to ‘masculine’ (rational, detached) ways
of being. I suggest that seeking their emotional responses to their work and lives can
go some way towards countering this, and undercutting the rational–emotional binary
implicit in gender and care discourses.
This point is also made by Hanlon (2012) in his work on masculinities and care in
Ireland, which provides a good example of how research can focus on the emotional
aspects of everyday life and in doing so explore the social and political contingencies
present – in this case the ‘failed neo-liberal project in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’ (214).
His work uses men’s narratives to describe how care is bound to feelings of inferiority,
anxiety and fear, yet shows that it can be transformative of masculinities too – hence
Hanlon’s research is able to offer alternative representations of men, and ponder new
trajectories for masculinity and care.
Although not focusing on men, research into the emotions associated with and
negotiated around care in teaching has recently been examined (see, for example,
Isenbarger and Zembylas 2006; Oplatka 2007; O’Connor 2008; Taggart 2011;
Mackenzie 2012). This is an important yet under-researched area for research (Isenbar-
ger and Zembylas 2006), and perhaps especially so in terms of men who teach: What
are men’s experiences of the emotional labour demanded in caring relationships with
their pupils? This and related questions have pertinence in summarising my argument
since I want to suggest that loosening the ties that bind discourses of gender and care
cannot be effected if we remain at a level of abstraction to examine it: pervasive, hege-
monic discourses constrain wider expectations of gender and care, but how do those
tally with teachers’ actual lived, felt experience of the issues? If we are unable to see
the emotions implicated in men’s working and personal lives, could we ever see
them as caring in ‘non-masculine’ ways?
Using a variety of collaborative methods to collect contextualised data over time
about male teacher’s ‘embodied emotionality’ can reveal ways in which established
truths about masculinity and men can be undone (Hall, Hockey, and Robinson 2007,
545); seeking to comprehend the emotional aspects of male teacher’s caring can take
us past the stereotypes of men who teach. This has consequences beyond shifting the
load off of those men who encounter pressure to conform to the ‘imagined male
teacher’ ideal (Mills, Haase, and Charlton 2008); such normalising models of men
also come to influence how boys, girls and female colleagues are understood and under-
stand themselves in relation to men. Disrupting this may reveal, and encourage others to
imagine, how the gender order can be reconfigured. Furthermore, such research can
trouble ‘hegemonic masculinist constructions’ of professionalism in education
(Osgood 2010, 131) through acknowledging and understanding the lived experiences
of doing emotional labour; by ‘considering autobiographical subjectivities it is possible
to dismantle and reconceptualise the notion of professionalism’ (Osgood 2010, 131).
I suggest that understanding male teachers’ emotional labour in relation to care of
their pupils is an important future direction for research in teaching. The centrality of
emotion in lives and their liminal status between the individual and the social means
we can open a new space to explore men, teaching and care that avoids dualistic con-
ceptions of ‘agency’ and ‘structure’. This means we may come closer to understanding
men who teach as subjects formed and re-formed within the discourses encircling them,
Gender and Education 229
as well as understanding them as grounded and embodied people living everyday lives,
maintaining real-life relationships and using everyday resources in apparently unre-
markable places to do work that requires emotionally charged decisions. We might
find emotion work being done by men who teach that helps us reconceive what care
means in teaching and for men. What genealogies of context can be built about male
teachers’ caring acts?
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