Learning to be a primary school teacher: reading one man’s story

Abstract

Few men choose to become primary school teachers. Those who do move into a world often thought of as feminized and contend with a publicly‐voiced rhetoric which simultaneously idealizes and demonizes them. This paper turns a spotlight on one student’s stories of being a man and a student primary school teacher. It considers how he negotiates the assumptions made about him as a gendered individual challenged by the task of learning to be a teacher. It has not been the norm for women to research men. The author sets out from a different place as a woman writing about a man. The paper argues that the emotional investment and paradox in this man’s narratives cannot be understood without recourse to developing understandings of masculinity and difference, learnt through language which maintains or challenges inequalities and which interrelates with social and cultural contexts which have histories.