Gender, Race, and the Politics of Role Modelling: The Influence of Male Teachers

This book provides an illuminating account of teachers' own reflections on their experiences of teaching in urban schools. It was conceived as a direct response to policy-related and media-generated concerns about male teacher shortage and offers a critique of the call for more male roles in elementary schools to address important issues regarding gender, race and the politics of representation. By including the perspectives of minority teachers and students, and by drawing on feminist, queer and anti-racist frameworks, this book rejects the familiar tendency to resort to role modeling as a basis for explaining or addressing boys' disaffection with schooling. Indeed, the authors argue, on the basis of their research in urban schools in Toronto and Australia, that educational policy concerned with male teacher shortage and the plight of poor, disaffected minority boys would benefit from engaging with analytic perspectives and empirical literature which move beyond the singularity of gender and race as a basis for entertaining an urban school reform agenda that emphasizes the transformative potential of the male teacher as a role model. Presented within is a compelling case for the need to disarticulate discourses about role modeling from a politics of representation that is committed to addressing the reality of the impact of racial and structural inequalities on both minority teachers and students' participation in the education system. This book also provides insight into the persistence of gender inequality as it relates to the status of elementary school teaching as women's work.

Wayne-Martino is Professor of Education in the Faculty of Education at The University of Western Ontario, Canada Goli Rezai-Rashti is Professor of Education in the Faculty of Education at The University of Western Ontario, Canada.