Gender and the Cultural Construction of Teaching

Abstract

Sari Knopp Biklen's book School Work: Gender and the Cultural Construction of Teaching is concerned with gaining insight into the complexities and challenges facing contemporary women elementary school teachers. To understand these complexities, Biklen has compared and contrasted her contemporary evidence with data gained from two quite different sources, namely, archival and historical records from the nineteenth century and popular fiction from the 1950s. These diffuse sources provide rich and readable evidence to help us understand how teacher culture and school culture are produced, reproduced, and structurally embedded in the institutional patterns and discourses that characterize schools and the relationships that develop between teachers and teachers, teachers and pupils, and teachers and parents. Until recently the experiences and stories of elementary school teachers in general, and women teachers in particular, have been left untold because, in the eyes of some, their stories lacked the drama and sense of importance of their counterparts in secondary schools. The book fills a much neglected gap and details the professional and personal challenges faced by a group of women undertaking their work in a public school in a middle-class community populated predominantly by professionals and academics, but that had many children bused in from poorer neighborhoods. Reading School Work provided me with the opportunity to reflect on my own life as a teacher in primary (elementary) schools in Queensland, Australia, as well as on the experiences of some of the teachers I have worked with in various capacities in Australia (as a consultant, researcher, practice teaching supervisor, and so on). It made me ask the following questions: are there continuities in the experiences of women who are elementary teachers that are generalizable? How well did the experiences