Men managing, not teaching Foundation Phase: teachers, masculinity and the early years of primary schooling

Abstract

In this article we argue that eliminating the divisions of labour between men and women could work towards counteracting gender inequality within professions. Globally women are over-represented in the teaching of young children in the early years of primary school, or Foundation Phase (FP), as it is known in South Africa. We are concerned to go beyond essentialist understandings of gender by exploring how male and female primary school teachers at five selected schools in South Africa are sometimes complicit in reproducing men as managers. Men tend to be positioned within dominant notions of masculinity which serve to reproduce masculine power in the realm of school management whilst FP teaching is characterised as “women’s work”. Teachers of both genders are complicit in safeguarding the FP as a nurturing female domain, whilst reproducing gendered binaries and unequal relations of power. We argue that there is a need to create alternate masculinities that leave behind rigid notions of appropriate gender performances and address current social challenges such as violence, health and gender transformation in South Africa.