The ‘exceptional male teacher’ and the ‘vulnerable male student’: constructions of men and masculinities in vocational education and training in Estonia

ABSTRACT

This article takes a critical perspective on the construction of men and masculinities in vocational education and training (VET). We focus on ways in which key stakeholders in VET – teachers, heads of schools and VET experts – conceptualise men as educators and learners in VET, drawing on the case of Estonia. We identified two related discourses produced by the stakeholders which we labelled as ‘the exceptional male teacher’ and ‘the vulnerable male student’, which draw on and support the broader discourse of ‘feminisation of education’ prevalent in many Western societies. Treating men as exceptional, vulnerable and deserving special attention in VET leaves unchallenged and reproduces male privilege and endorses traditional ways of doing masculinity in this context. Such an institutional environment produced by the VET stakeholders may not be conducive to the emergence of more egalitarian masculinities in VET schools. More broadly, these two discourses on men in VET have important implications for gendered power relations and possibilities to advance gender equality in VET and in the labour market.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocational education and training
• gender
• men
• masculinities
• Estonia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See for example Haasler and Gottschall (2015) .

2. For example, Estonia has the largest gender pay gap in the EU – 25.3% (Eurostat 2016).

3. For an overview of the development of the Estonian VET system in the post-Soviet context, see Ümarik and Goodson (2018).

4. The project, known by the acronym SIHT, was carried out in 2014–2015 jointly by the Estonian Women’s Associations Roundtable and the Estonian Women’s Studies and Resource Centre. The project aimed to integrate the gender perspective into teacher training and further education and to raise gender awareness of educational professionals. The project was funded by Norwegian Grants 2009–2014 programme Mainstreaming Gender Equality and Promoting Work-Life Balance.

5. In 2016, women made up 64% of all university graduates (Statistics Estonia 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council [IUT18-2].