What are white progressive masculinities? Counternarratives and contradictions of committed white male teachers in inner-city schools

Abstract

This life history reflection aims to constitute, generate, and proliferate complex progressive masculinities for male teachers and advance notions of progressive masculinities writ large in education and elsewhere. This reflection, working with life story interviews of white male teachers in US inner-city schools, positions this research within the researcher's life history. Informed by existing literatures on male teachers emphasising crisis-shortage and gender workplace issues, this reflection expands these literatures by developing life narrative concepts that replace static masculinities with narrativised identifications, lived counternarratives, and contradictory progressive masculinities. Key to respondents' progressive masculinities, this life history reflection provides four lived counternarratives including respondents' illegal drug use, process spirituality, alternative media, and critical politics. Through these counternarratives, respondents' contradictory progressive masculinities emerge as bifurcated phenomena that reify privileges yet drive respondents, precariously situated between nihilistic impotency and political potential, towards passively conjugated alliances with subaltern others.

Keywords:

• male teachers
• masculinity
• teacher identity
• teacher professionalism
• and life history

Notes

All respondents' names are pseudonyms. Place names, with the exception of respondents' schools, are actual place names.

Respondents' racial identifications are studied in other articles (Jupp and Slattery 2010, 2012). Other racial groups' progressive masculinities are an important topic not developed here. For an interesting understanding of contradictory Chicano activist identities, see Luis Urrieta's (2009) study for a starting point. Urrieta (2009), working with counternarratives and contradictions, uncovers similar tensions found here between Chicano activists as upwardly yet ostensibly ‘with the people.’

The purpose of the peers of colour was to help the researcher reflect on the findings in systematically bringing in the ‘perspective’ of non-white peers. It is important to note that peers of colour did substantially influence the findings. For example, the researcher, early in the research process, shared narratives of teaching as white male teachers' ‘subversive activity.’ Because of peers' of colour incredulity before this narrative pattern (combined with insufficient support in data), this pattern and others grouped around it were dropped. Yet one example of peers' influence, this example demonstrates that analysis and findings received significant influence. Nonetheless, I am currently producing a separate article relating to peers' of colour contradictory perspectives. One peer of colour, a Mexican-American female teacher, insisted on a race-evasive ‘color blind’ position throughout the interview process. The other peer of colour, a male Mexican-American graduate student, predominantly represented the position of critical race theory. It becomes possible, nonetheless, to see that, even within ostensibly ‘same’ groups, there are multiple narrativised identifications. There was, it follows, no singular ‘peers of color’ perspective but instead complex identifications, especially in light of the Hispanic female teacher who insisted on race-evasive position which, in critical race literatures, corresponds with white privilege.