1st Edition

Teachers, Gender and the Feminisation Debate

By Marie-Pierre Moreau Copyright 2019
    152 Pages
    by Routledge

    152 Pages
    by Routledge

    Teachers, Gender and the Feminisation Debate critically engages with the claim that teaching is a feminised profession and offers a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the way gender and power play out in the lives of male and female teachers. Informed by social constructivist, feminist theories of work and education, the book adopts a relational and intersectional approach to gender.



    Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, including national and international datasets, policy and research texts, and an original corpus of interviews conducted by the author in England and France, the book provides a timely assessment of a view of teaching as feminised. It explores the various discourses and debates about the feminisation of teaching which circulate in media and policy circles in a range of local, national and international contexts, and questions some of the claims underpinning these discourses. It also analyses the experiences of men and women who teach, looking at the way gender and power impact on their careers and private lives in the context of the feminisation debate.



    Teachers, Gender and the Feminisation Debate offers a research-informed and comprehensive account of gender issues in the teaching profession and will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, sociology and gender studies.

    List of tables



    Acknowledgements



    Chapter 1 - Introduction



    Chapter 2 - Teaching and the feminisation debate in contemporary times



    Chapter 3 - A socio-historical approach to the feminisation of the teaching profession



    Chapter 4 - Gender patterns in the teaching profession in the 21st century



    Chapter 5 - Teachers’ professional identities, career choice and gender



    Chapter 6 - Gender divides in teachers’ careers and ‘private’ lives



    Chapter 7 - Concluding comments

    Biography

    Marie-Pierre Moreau is Professor in Education at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and Chelmsford, UK. Her research is at the nexus of education, work and equality issues, with specific reference to the formation of gender-based inequalities in education and work settings. She is the author of Les Enseignants et le Genre (Presses Universitaires de France, 2011) and the editor of Inequalities in the Teaching Profession (Palgrave, 2014).

    "Marie-Pierre Moreau’s Teacher, Gender and the Feminisation Debate provides a nuanced analysis of the intersections of gender and teaching that challenges everything we thought we knew about them. By critically engaging with the discourses of teaching as "feminized", Moreau examines the power structures that shift with different teaching contexts and historical eras in the global North and South, and by doing so, she demonstrates how contributions of women teachers become (re)constructed as inferior to men’s educational achievements, in spite of the profession being marked as a ‘caring profession naturally served by women’. This book is an important work for all scholars who care about women’s and men’s contributions in formal education worldwide."

    Nancy Niemi, Author of Degrees of Difference (Routledge, 2017) and Director of Faculty Teaching Initiatives at the Poorvu Center for Teaching & Learning, Yale University, USA.