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Teachers Are Mothers: Can Men Teach Young Children?

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Book cover Gender and Childhood Sexuality in Primary School

Part of the book series: Perspectives on Children and Young People ((PCYP))

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the question of whether men can teach young children by drawing on both the perspectives of teachers and children. By relying on normative and essentialist accounts of gender and an understanding of children as needing love and protection (and therefore vulnerable), teaching discourses work to reproduce children’s powerlessness, exclude men, whilst inscribing women’s authority by reserving teaching as a feminine profession through the symbolic construction of the teacher as a loving mother. Within this approach, women are assumed to be best suited to teach young children operating on a rigid categorisation of gender. In contrast, the chapter shows how children negotiate, accommodate and contest the assumed relationship between women and care, breaking down the fixity of gender. The chapter draws attention to the paradoxical space between teaching discourses that seek to maintain versions of children as gender/sexually innocent and the importance of addressing children as active agents in the social construction of gender and sexuality in the early years of primary schooling.

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  1. School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

    Deevia Bhana

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  1. Deevia Bhana
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Correspondence to Deevia Bhana .

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Bhana, D. (2016). Teachers Are Mothers: Can Men Teach Young Children?. In: Gender and Childhood Sexuality in Primary School. Perspectives on Children and Young People. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2239-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2239-5_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-2238-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-2239-5

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