Gender-diverse practitioners in early years education and care (EYEC): a cross-cultural study of Scotland, Hong Kong, and Mainland China

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses whether practitioners’ gender subjectivities influence pedagogies and practices in early years education and care (EYEC) settings and whether an increase of men’s participation can improve gender diversity in EYEC. It draws on poststructuralist theories, understanding gender as the product/outcome of the social formation of subjects and the process of subjectification. This is illustrated through accounts for how individual practitioners from Scotland, Hong Kong, and Mainland China discursively construct their gender subjectivities, in accordance with the respective cultural discourses that shape work with young children in EYEC in the three contexts. Thirty-four practitioners from 17 EYEC settings (1 male and 1 female practitioner from each setting) in the cities of Edinburgh, Hong Kong, and Tianjin were interviewed. The study finds that participant practitioners’ constructions of gender subjectivities vary within and across contexts, and gender-binary discourses are to different extents prevalent in all three contexts. This paper argues for a cross-cultural approach to gender-sensitive teacher training, to interrogate popular discourses that advocate for men to fulfil complementary roles in EYEC to women and to challenge gender binary thinking that persists in EYEC and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• early years education and care
• diversity
• cross-cultural
• gender binary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Higher National Certificate (HNC) in Early Education and Childcare.

2. High Diploma (HD) in Early Childhood Education.

3. The local kindergartens account for about 85.5% of all kindergartens in Hong Kong (Census and Statistics Department 2018).

4. Bachelor in Early Childhood Education.

5. Most Chinese male kindergarten teachers are inclined to work in public kindergartens as a result of better salaries and welfare benefits (Xu and Waniganayake 2018).

6. A ‘care’ practitioner in a Mainland Chinese kindergarten is someone whose main responsibilities include housekeeping, cleaning, serving meals, and so on – things that are regarded as more ‘caring’ than ‘educational’.