Male Teachers as Cultural Workers in the Lives of Children, Families, and Communities

Session Submission Type: Symposium

Abstract

The presenters share the challenges to being involved in children’s lives as a calling: they consider this work as part of their life purpose. Their narratives detail interactions between the teacher and the day-to-day lives of students, parents, peers and supervisors while sharing what it takes to survive as a man in what is still perceived, even in our so-called post-modern world, as women’s work. In the bigger scheme of things, male teachers serve as cultural workers with their female peers to educate not only our children, but our community and eventually ourselves about gender roles in our society, in addition to encouraging healthy and constructive role models during the first years of schooling.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Teacher as Researcher

Chair

• Lemuel W. Watson, Northern Illinois University

Papers

• Becoming, Being, and Unbecoming Early Childhood Educator: Male Existence in the Lives of Young Children - Will Parnell, Portland State University

• A Tale of Collective Achievement - Darrell C. Hucks, Keene State College

• A New Perspective on the Lack of Men in Education - Shaun Johnson, Towson University

• The Teacher with the Beard: A Nurturing Male Helps Children Overcome Bias - Jeffrey M. Daitsman, National-Louis University

• Calling My “Maleness” Into Question - Robert Michael Capuozzo, The University of Alaska - Anchorage

• Feeling Special and Feeling Lousy - Patrick J. Lewis, University of Regina

Discussants

• Cole Reilly, Towson University

• Nathaniel Uriah Weber, Russian Hill School