Gender Issues Embedded in the Experience of Student Teaching: Being Treated Like a Sex Object

Abstract

I was fighting for attention as a teacher, as opposed to what I looked like. (Kara Quinlan, student teacher) Little research exists describing the experiences of women student teachers and the meaning of being a female learning how to teach in public secondary schools during student teaching. I interviewed 16 women from three teacher education programs in New England to learn about their experience as women student teachers and acquire insight into the gender issues embedded in women student teachers' lives. One of the most evident gender issues in this study is male high school students' harassment of female student teachers. More than half of the women interviewed spoke of being demeaned and objectified. They told stories of how the cultural habit of viewing women as sex objects affected the environment in which they began teaching. My Research Perspective I have spent almost 30 years of my student and professional life in public secondary schools and might have predicted what the respondents said. However, I was astonished at the details and intensity of their experiences. Listening to the particulars of their experience deepened my understanding of the nature of the public school context and brought realization of incidents in my own experience in public schools. I believe that student teaching is the heart and mind of teacher preparation (Haberman, 1983, p. 110) and that effective teaching depends significantly on the contexts within which teachers work (McLaughlin, Talbert, & Bascia, 1990, p. 2). Women student teachers bring their history of growing up female in American society and enter a public school context reflecting traditional androcentric beliefs (Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Sadker & Sadker, 1980). Student teachers enter a workforce with a unique history as a feminized profession (Grumet, 1988; Sugg, 1978). Historians of public school teaching define teaching, nursing, and secretarial work as feminized professions, a label suggesting that women are the dominant power in the profession. But schools are patriarchal institutions (Spender, 1982), and this system of power makes public schools inappropriate learning environments for girls and women. A patriarchal and sexist belief system has successfully socialized women to fail to see that schools do not fully serve their interests and potential (Acker, 1983; Apple, 1983, 1985); Lather, 1987; Spender, 1982; Weiler, 1988). The public school context complicates the already complex process of learning to teach. The Research Method I used in-depth interviewing techniques (Seidman, 1991), a phenomenologically based interview approach honoring the knowledge each participant generates, the version of her own life history, and the meaning she ascribes to that experience. I met each of the five women whose stories are the focus of this article three times for approximately one and a half hours. In the first interview, I asked the participant to talk about life before she came to teaching and how she came to teaching. During the second interview, I asked her to describe the details and stories of life as a student teacher, with particular attention to what it was like to student teach as a woman. In the third interview, I invited the student teacher to talk about what this experience has meant to her in light of her reconstruction of the life history context in the first interview, and the reconstruction of the student teaching experience in the second interview. Kara and Lee Kara, a 26-year-old masters level graduate student, planned to teach English. She grew up in a small New England city but left to attend a private liberal arts university in New York City. After graduation, she traveled and taught English as a second language in Japan. The immersion into Japanese culture had a powerful effect on her. She absorbed a great deal from her experience working with adults, mostly male businessmen. …