Conclusion

Abstract

The contributions grouped in this volume highlight the persistence in the teaching profession of inequalities based on a range of identity markers, including gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, social class and nationality, and how these continue to frame individuals’ chances to become a teacher and, for practising teachers, their ongoing experiences. This work, broadly informed by social constructivist, feminist and post-colonial theories (for example, Bhabha, 1990; Burr, 1995; Francis and Skelton, 2001; Hall, 2000), shows that, despite a prevailing conception of teaching as an inclusive and egalitarian profession, it can be a position difficult to access and a positional identity difficult to perform for some. Yet these contributions simultaneously acknowledge that teaching offers employment opportunities to groups which can legitimately be described as dominated and that, while teachers’ experiences and discourses of teacher professionalism are, for example, gendered, raced and classed, the precise patterns of domination do vary across institutional and societal contexts. This observation has significant theoretical and political implications. The variability of (in)equality patterns across contexts questions the view that they are inevitable and, thus, opens a space to imagine alternative futures. In addition, many of the contributions in this volume highlight how teachers from dominated groups still manage to resist and subvert the dominant arrangements in place, even though this often comes at a price (for example, when one has to produce ‘acceptable’ accounts of their private lives which are seen by others as compatible with being a teacher).