Through the power of his coffee mug: Negotiating a gendered, professional identity in primary school

Abstract

Men who enter primary school teaching may encounter favored treatment and status. This can manifest in extraordinary privileges, exemptions from supervision, as well as accelerated promotion. However, the same societies and institutions that privilege male primary teachers may treat them with deep suspicion. Men who choose to teach young children may be perceived as gendered outsiders, embodiments of otherness. As a result, male primary teachers often have short careers in the classroom as they are promoted up or pressured out. This paper presents the case study of a male primary school teacher who has negotiated the gendered paradox of male primary teaching and stayed in the classroom. A post-structuralist perspective on gender is applied to the central research question: how does a male primary school teacher manage the intersection of doing the job and "doing gender?" Data was collected through a series of interviews. A modified grounded theory analysis was applied to the resulting data. Findings include the importance of negotiation and timing to establishing and maintaining a successful gendered professional teaching space. © Common Ground, Christopher Charles Deneen.