‘I have neither his voice nor body’: upper secondary schoolteacher students experiencing gendered division of labor

ABSTRACT

For this study, Swedish upper secondary schoolteacher students were interviewed about their experiences and perceptions of teacher work in light of the traditional gendered division of labor in teaching. While female teaching has been signified by caring work, male teaching has been signified by distant teacher-pupil relations and the use of bodily resources to discipline pupils. In this study, both genders expressed feeling comforted when teacher practice corresponded to the traditional gendered division of labor and experiencing unease when it did not. Women expressed shortcomings in their ability to perform authoritative work because of their lack of male bodily resources. This subordination has been understood as symbolic violence, processed by a gendered habitus that structures women to prefer a special type of teacher work. Despite a small female majority in the profession and in teacher education, male domination still permeates the professional properties of the upper secondary schoolteacher work.

KEYWORDS:

• authoritative work
• gendered division of labor
• habitus
• profession
• symbolic violence
• upper secondary schoolteacher

Introduction

Even though teaching in general is considered a feminized profession (Braun 2015; Drudy 2008), teachers in the higher segments of the Swedish school system (upper secondary school, pupils 16–19 years old) have historically been dominated by men and have traditionally had higher professional and social status, higher salary, and both higher and longer education and stronger links to the academic system than teachers working in the lower segments (Erixon Arreman and Weiner 2007; Johansson 1993; Nilsson-Lindström and Beach 2013).

However, today women actually comprise 52% of the teachers working in Swedish upper secondary schools (Swedish National Agency of Education 2019) and 54% of the beginner upper secondary schoolteacher students (Swedish Higher Education Authority 2019). Thus, statistically, the upper secondary schoolteacher has transformed into something more of a gender-neutral profession. But is that also the case from a social and cultural perspective?

This question is urgent to answer because of the lack of research studying how a growing proportion of female teachers in an educational sector traditionally formed and dominated by men and masculinity affects perceptions of what it means to be and what it takes to be a professional upper secondary schoolteacher.

It is not hard to imagine gendered stereotypical images of teachers that follow more general societal gender patterns and that ‘contribute to reproduce, rather than change, the traditional gender patterns and the subordination of women’ (Gannerud 2001, 66). In general, perceptions of teaching in pre and primary school contexts, where there is a stronger gender imbalance against men (95% in pre-school and 75% in primary and secondary school (Swedish National Agency of Education 2019)) are saturated with the image of an emotionally committed female teacher ‘that are seen to be better suited to working with younger children because they are more nurturing’ (Carrington 2002, 289; see also Hjalmarsson and Löfdahl 2014). For the older pupils the image is rather of a subject-oriented and dominant male schoolmaster with natural authority and sharp social distance to his pupils (see Hjalmarsson and Löfdahl 2014). Both types relate to a gendered ‘cultural script’ (see Acker 1995; Lahelma et al. 2014) and are understandable in relation to what Bourdieu (2001[1998]) describes as ‘gendered habitus’ and as something ‘recognized as an embodiment of structure’ (Nash 1999, 176).

The aim of this text is to understand how this ‘script’ or ‘habitus’ corresponds to properties acknowledged as fundamental to practicing the upper secondary schoolteacher profession. More specifically this study investigated how upper secondary schoolteacher students experience gender-related standards of the profession and how that affects their imagined ability to practice the upper secondary schoolteacher profession.

Gender and the upper secondary teacher profession

Different questions concerning the lack of men teaching younger children have been addressed from different perspectives several times (e.g. Bullough 2015; Heikkilä and Hellman 2017; Pulsford 2014; Skelton 2002), while research concerning either the lack of or the growing proportion of women teaching older children (upper secondary school) is limited. This is especially crucial because general perceptions of what it is to be a special type of teacher seems to be highly gendered. Rutherford, Conway, and Murphy (2015) writes, ‘[E]veryone has an image of what teachers should look like, how they should dress and how they should behave’ (326), and this is understandable because shared common-sense perceptions of the characteristics of a profession ‘are the product of social conditions’ that ‘may be totally or partially common to people who have been the product of similar social conditions’ (Bourdieu 2005, p. 45).

Gendered division of labor in teaching

Teacher-work-related research dealing with gender issues, often provide reasoning and language that contribute to the reproduction of existing binary gender-structures rather than doing critical analyses of such structures. This is mainly done by contrasting men and women rather than discussing different types of masculinity and femininity. Described in a general and simplified manner, teacher work has been divided into ‘feminine positions’ held by women and ‘masculine positions’ held by men. The former, associated with tasks such as caring and emotional work based on close, individual teacher-pupil relations (e.g. Eley 2004; Heikkilä and Hellman 2017). The latter, with tasks such as teaching the collective and doing authoritative work based on characteristics such as rationality and deep subject knowledge and with a distant, asymmetrical teacher-pupil relation (e.g. Braun 2011; Murray 2006; O’Connor 2008).

For example, Lahelma et al. (2014) showed how the teaching profession among vocational teachers seems to be a constant negotiation between teaching and caring and is experienced this way regardless of the teacher’s gender affiliation. However, male teachers in the study seemed to more easily distance themselves from caring tasks compared to their female colleagues (see also Brownhill 2014; Roulston and Mills 2000), an observation even more obvious in teacher training than in professional practice (Hansen and Mulholland 2006) when perceptions had not yet been challenged. Expectations of being able to maintain a caring and highly feminine and heteronormative connoted ‘motherhood’ existed for teachers regardless of gender, but men more easily distanced themselves from these expectations while ‘the cultural scripts caring and the ethics of care often [were] linked to women’ (Lahelma et al., 2014, p. 299; see also further about teaching and motherhood in Acker 1995 and Hansen and Mulholland 2006).

The analogy to motherhood is recurring when ideal types of female teachers are constructed (e.g. Fischman 2007; Vogt 2002) but must be considered problematic from a professional perspective. Emotional mothering is more of a personal expression and therefore denied as professional competence and ‘consigned to unprofessionalism’ (Pulsford 2014, 219; see also Murray 2006). Parallel reasoning about unprofessionalism is absent when ‘fatherhood’ and teaching is discussed (e.g. Brockenbrough 2012), an analogy that correspond with and contribute to the reproduction of more general and heteronormative representations of the gendered division of labor.

Barber (2002) claims that among high-school teachers ‘women appear to experience a greater sense of obligation and personal responsibility’ (392) and that they ‘define themselves as successful teachers in that their students need them’ (ibid.). Male teachers ‘are less likely / … / to define themselves as successful teachers in that they are needed by their students’ (393). Gannerud (2001) claims that female teachers ‘develop a personal professionality, related to and building on both private experiences as women and professional experiences as teachers, as well as on theoretical knowledge’ (65). This type of personal professionality (teacher personalism) contributes to a constant negotiation between what is considered the personal and professional but can also work as a successful strategy to strengthen and improve the results for pupils from what Phillippo (2012) calls ‘nondominant groups’.

Skåreus (2007a) showed how prospective art teacher students in pictures draw male teachers with seriousness and self-evident authority while females are portrayed as lonely, smiling, and negotiating their professional legitimacy. Skåreus believes that ‘the images are staged and manifested in an expected manner’ (206). The man as a physical carrier and representative of the profession is so obvious that it does not have to be legitimized or explained. The presence of the female body in the pictures is rather portrayed with private elements, something that has been interpreted as saying that their professional role is problematic because activities other than the professional are present and competing with the position of teaching (Skåreus 2007b).

In a study on teacher students who were in the latter part of their education, Braun (2012) showed how unspoken professional knowledge contributed to remit women to occupational positions that reward caring tasks, which also means to teacher positions that usually have lower social status and lower pay. Opportunities and, not least, limitations on perceiving yourself as ‘the right person’ for a particular job seem to be socially incorporated with the individual rather than something that is perceived as possible to acquire through education. Different types of masculinity and femininity can be understood as such social processes of inclusion/exclusion, and individuals who defy what is prescribed experience their own inability to embody the profession in a convincing way both for themselves and for their social environment. Not least, Braun shows that when there is professional knowledge that is not recorded or theoretically anchored and hardly formally recognized, for example, gender-coded professional knowledge, this becomes discoverable only when the profession is practiced and experienced.

Doing authoritative work

The gender-coded tradition in the teaching profession is ‘extremely powerful and is difficult to fracture’ (Rich 2001, 49), and this is further reinforced by processes of legitimation and reproduction by both teachers and pupils. This is repeatedly present in discourses concerning authoritative work in the classroom and work with problematic boys (Bailey 1996; Braun 2011; Lahelma 2000) and is often accompanied by discussions of ‘laddishness’ (Francis 1999; Carrington 2002; Jackson 2010). Jackson (2010) showed that the view that men are more capable of handling disruptive behavior from ‘laddish’ boys is voiced by male teachers who also express sympathy for their female colleagues, but there are also examples of how female teachers argue ‘that male teachers are needed in situations of conflict with students’ (Lahelma 2000, 175) and that ‘male teachers are expected to have special insight and understanding about what to do about boys’ anti-social behavior’ (Bullough 2015, 14). Hjalmarsson and Löfdahl (2014) claim that the gender of male teachers ‘seems to be regarded as a competency and implies a kind of positional authority which they are expected to use as a disciplinarian tool in certain contexts and in relation to certain groups of pupils’ (289). This has contributed to the discourse of women ‘being viewed as poor disciplinarians, lacking the ‘commitment’ to the job or the necessary ‘masculine attributes’ to control older children, especially boys’ (Robinson 2000, 78).

Research has shown that masculinity as a disciplinary tool often is attached to ‘discourses which position females as the ‘other’’ (Francis and Skelton 2001, 19), an observation confirmed by Jackson (2010) identifying how male teachers themselves use laddish behavior to tackle laddish behavior from pupils. Way (2011), on the other hand, finds that ‘when students perceive teachers as competent, caring and respectful, classroom behavior improves’ (366), something that indicates other, perhaps more gender-neutral or even feminine, successful strategies to tackle unwanted behavior in the classroom.

Aside from contributing to the reproduction of gender imbalances and sexist discourses, the laddish behavior from male teachers also reproduces and legitimates a gendered division of teacher-labor and an exclusive gender-related way of defining professionality.

Intangible professional knowledge

One contributing factor to how the gendered division of labor can be maintained and reproduced is the presence of consecrated notions of how the upper secondary teaching profession is to be performed. When such beliefs are draped in terms of profession, the argumentation for the gender-coded division of labor is assisted as both scientific and socially legitimate and can therefore be reproduced without further resistance in the teacher education as well as in the upper secondary schoolteacher profession.

The intangible character of professional knowledge

Professionals have an exclusive function and position in the social division of labor in society ‘which is, in any comparable degree of development, unique in history’ (Parsons 1939, 457). Their position gives them high social status because they have been contracted by society to carry out tasks in society that resist ‘crude forces which threaten steady and peaceful evolution’ (Carr-Saunders and Wilson 1933, 497).

Knowledge that is scientifically anchored, abstract, and only accessible through systematic and higher education is the property that most clearly distinguishes professions from other vocations (Brante 2011; Saks 2012). The possession of professional knowledge is the key for holding the position of a professional and for keeping laymen out. Professional knowledge is the starting point of how professional work is to be practiced, it is complex, and it works ‘as the ultimate link to ‘truth’; there is no higher authority’ (Brante 2011, 18). To question professional knowledge is therefore complicated because this means that the social and scientific complex that a profession rests on is also questioned. However, the claim for professional knowledge as ‘the Truth’ must be critically examined since it is formed and defined in a special historical setting characterized by contemporary moral structures. Not at least, this includes gender-structures.

Possessing or not possessing professional knowledge and legitimate symbolic capital (most clearly exemplified by a university diploma and, for teachers in Sweden, teacher certification) and thus the right (or the monopoly) to perform certain tasks is an important foundation when professionals are to be separated from lay people. The professional has acquired knowledge through recognized education (most often from the academic system) and therefore enjoys the socially and professionally recognized right to practice the profession.

When gender-coded properties are recognized as professional, such knowledge can enjoy the same strong professional and social support that scientifically based professional knowledge has. Male or female domination of a specific profession has therefore been able to be maintained and reproduced with the help of seemingly scientific and professionally merged arguments anchored, legitimized, and practiced by both men and women, by both dominant and dominated. This is especially obvious when professional practice is connected to vocal and/or bodily resources.

Habitus and symbolic violence as the principle for gendered division of labor

Habitus, a centerpiece in Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of action, draws from the assumption that individual preferences and perceptions must be understood as conditioned by structuring social constraints in the surrounding social milieu. This shapes how individuals see, interpret, and act in the social world. Even though habitus should be considered something individual and unique, collective commonalities can structure habitus in such a way that individuals cannot be separated from social groups, thus making it possible to talk about class habitus or cluster of habitus (Bourdieu 1972[1977], 84ff; Reay 2004). Gender can work as such a cluster, of which Bourdieu (2001, [1998]) says:

The divisions constitutive of the social order and, more precisely, the social relations of domination and exploitation that are instituted between the sexes thus progressively embed themselves in two different classes of habitus, in the form of opposed and complementary bodily hexis and principles of vision and division which lead to the classifying of all the things of the world and all practices according to distinctions that are reducible to the male/female opposition (30).

Further, Bourdieu (2001[1998]) argues, ‘The strength of a masculine order is [that it] imposes itself as neutral’ (9). Gender-coded professional knowledge is veiled as neutral (and scientifically anchored), and this not only contributes to the fact that men recognize such knowledge as legitimate, but also that the dominated women do so and thus that professional knowledge is legitimized and reproduced coherently by both the superior and the subordinated. The strength and self-evidence of this order is nothing that can be settled only by intellectual, liberating consciousness, and ‘do not spring from a simple effect of verbal naming’ (Bourdieu 2001[1998], 103), but is part of the type of structure that maintains the power order of superiority of male work and subordinates female work. In some sense, both genders submit to this symbolic and practical order. This type of mutual and arbitrary submission has been described by Bourdieu (1999[1993]; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990[1970]) as symbolic violence.

Bourdieu (together with Wacquant) claims that ‘gender domination shows better than any other that symbolic violence accomplishes itself through an act of cognition and of misrecognition that lies beyond – or beneath – the controls of consciousness and will’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 171f).

The gender order, according to Bourdieu, is therefore capable of functioning as a natural law, as a relationship without history – something people naturally carry in the body, an order that exists in objective, embodied form, that is, as class or clustered categories of habitus. However, this order is part of an arbitrary system that ‘cannot be deduced from any universal principle, whether physical, biological or spiritual’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990[1970], 8). The social world and its practices thus have the gender order as a reducing and classifying principle, and the body is the most visible representation of this classification. The male domination exists both in the male and in the female body – ‘a form of domination which is inscribed in the whole social order and operates in the obscurity of bodies’ (Bourdieu 2001[1998], 91). How subordinate and superordinate are enrolled in the body is central to Bourdieu's reasoning on how the principles of the gendered antagonism are valid, and this is related to Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) who stress that ‘we need to understand that bodies are both objects of social practice and agents in social practice’ (851). This can be about how men and women move, how their posture is portrayed, or how they speak, things that produce and reproduce the gender classification that both men and women recognize as obvious and identifiable gender codes. Differences in body constitution or in envisaged stereotypes of gender constitution make it impossible for women to perform certain tasks, tasks that are collectively recognized as the status of professional work. In the case of teaching, Braun (2011) even means that ‘to some extent the reality of one’s body represents a first hurdle (or aid) in filling the teacher role’ (276).

When choosing Bourdieu's reasoning on the male domination as a way to understand gendered division of labor in teaching, the profession's physical bodywork must be given special attention when studying occupations, a task that becomes more complicated when professions that are preferably associated with intellectual thought work are to be investigated. This does not mean that this type of occupation lacks physical features. The doctor conducts examinations and treats patients, lawyers appear in trials, and social workers interact with clients. Physical elements (the body, the voice) of the performative part of the profession includes, when it comes to teaching, tasks such as the practical contact with students. Discussions on how the upper secondary schoolteacher uses the body in the profession are thus mainly about the work that takes place in direct meetings with the students. Studies on this can be performed by studying the experiences and perceptions of teaching among upper secondary schoolteacher students.

Methodology

This study is mainly based on semi-structured interviews with 10 upper secondary schoolteacher students who were interviewed on several occasions during their education. Altogether, the study includes 28 separate interviews. The interviews focused on the students’ educational and professional biographies. This means that the themes that the interviews dealt with were broader themes and were mainly retrospective.

The design of the study with recurring interviews with the same people during their education, meant that experiences in professional practice were accumulated, changed and developed over time. A longitudinal data sampling design is particularly suitable when processes of change are to be explored (Saldana 2003). In this context, this is especially interesting in relation to the observation made by Hansen and Mulholland (2006) about how gendered perceptions of the teaching profession are markedly stronger in teacher training than in professional practice.

No theme that specifically dealt with gender-related experiences was addressed during the interviews. Instead, the experiences presented and analyzed in this study have been ones that the interviewees themselves initiated when talking about experiences from and perceptions of teaching. The findings presented in this study to some extent can be described as ‘accidental’ (Barker 2019; Braun 2011). Such a procedure is often be seen as problematic because the subject can hardly be said to have been completed during the interviews, and more precise interviews were able to unmask additional themes that helped to deepen the answers to the question. At the same time, the responses of teacher students show that the themes presented below are so present that the interviewees themselves chose to talk about them. This makes them important to explore further.

Gender differences in doing authoritative work

How to keep authority in the classroom was a recurrent issue in the interviews. Two types of empirical information were used in order to do the analytic work. First, gender was directly referred to by the interviewees as an obstacle or resource in how to be authoritative in the classroom, and second there were differences in how males and females experienced situations that included disciplinary and authoritative work. The following is structured from these findings.

(A)symmetrical teacher-pupil relations

The interviewed students showed differences in how they articulated the ideal teacher-pupil relation and how to develop professional strategies to deal with messy classrooms and mischievous pupils. Monica, a female art-teacher student, rejected the existence of any general ‘Strategy’. She was convinced that the way of working must be uniquely adapted to each class and that it is the teacher's professional responsibility to assess how this adaption must be carried out in order to gain authority.

If you don’t know the climate in the class in advance, you don’t know what kind of tasks will work and not work. Monica, teacher student, year 2.

Monica’s statement that teachers cannot look upon pupils and the classroom as without context expresses a more conscious practical strategy to gaining authority. In her description of the ideal teacher-pupil relation, the personal, symmetrical, and contextual features are even more present. She stresses the importance to … 

Keep track of who in the class plays football on the weekends, who are the drama nerds, and who are dependent on Facebook. It is important to know such things. Then I get a little more respect from them. If I don't talk down to, but talk with, the pupils … Monica, teacher student, year 4

Eric, a male student, expressed an ideal more based in an asymmetrical teacher-pupil relation. He was actually strengthened in his choice of vocation when the asymmetrical relationship between teacher and student was confirmed during his practice:

I noticed it [the satisfaction in being treated as a teacher by the pupils] when I sat at my desk and pupils came knocking on the door and wanted to talk to me. It felt like I was a teacher as well. That they wanted to ask me questions before any test or anything. So, you felt pretty instructive. It was great to get into that role. Eric, teacher student, year 2

Eric could maintain a traditional distant teacher authority versus the pupils. When this asymmetrical relation couldn’t be upheld, the vocation became less attractive. Boris, another male student, described his experience as a deterrent when he experienced just how much close, emotional, and relational work the teacher work included:

I have to take like tranquilizers when I come home. I run more than they [the pupils] do to make everyone quiet. There is always something that must be fixed. More noise and teasing and stuff like that. Like more conflict resolution. It gets so much more personal in some way. You need to be so very personal with the pupils. You have to put so much energy into these pupils. If you are going to solve all these problems then you have to know a lot about their background and maybe bring in others, the social workers, the police, and things like that. Boris, teacher student, year 1

The only solution Boris identified in order to do the professional work was to relate more personally to the pupils, skills he experienced as less attractive. Ethel, another female student, appreciated these features though:

And I often noticed during practice that it was pupils who brought problems to school from home and that a lot of the lessons went into talking about problems and other things that had nothing to do with the subject I was supposed to teach. So that's what I think is fun, these relations … Ethel, teacher student, year 2

Preferences as well as perceptions among the interviewed students can be interpreted as a gendered habitus. While Boris and Eric appreciated asymmetrical relations to their pupils, Ethel and Monica enjoyed more close, individual relations to their pupils where they could include element of emotional work in order to perform authoritative work. Experiences made by the interviewed male students suggest a traditional school-master perception of the professional upper secondary schoolteacher profession, while the female experiences rather reflect traditional female ways of doing teacher work. When socially structured preferences (habitus) that are gender-related clash with experiences from the classroom, alternatives are sought to avoid social positions where the social game is too hard or at least too uncomfortable to play. The story told by Boris is such an example.

The actions taken from the interviewed students indicate a crack in the upper secondary schoolteacher male traditions, a crack that comes in conflict with the gendered habitus and is an explanatory factor for why another type of feminine preferences are more suitable in doing upper secondary schoolteacher work today. On the other hand, as the next section will illustrate, experiences from female upper secondary schoolteacher students indicate that masculinity related to the body trumps femininity when it comes to performing authoritative teacher work.

Bodily resources in authoritative work

‘I will never be able to do the job as effectively as you,’ the female upper secondary schoolteacher student suddenly said to her male student colleague. The students were at the end of their education, and I had stopped and chatted for a while in one of the university's corridors about upcoming exams, about approaching final essays, and of course about the rapidly forthcoming labor market. Both students were high achievers with good results from both university and practical courses. The male student did not confirm or dispute the female student's claim before I asked what she based her claim on. As the most obvious thing, she replied, ‘I have neither his voice nor body’ and pointed to the male student who, half-lying on the couch, nodded in agreement.

This everyday chat in the corridor expressed and confirmed recurring statements from the interviews. To do teacher work was not just about learning how to play the professional game. It was also a question about being in possession of bodily properties – something that qualified men and disqualified women to do the professional work properly. The reference to the masculine body as a crucial professional asset came back during the interviews with the female students but was totally absent in the statements from the male students. In order to maintain discipline in the classroom, it was experienced by female students that a large and strong body and not least a strong deep voice were important assets – assets that more than anything constitute valuable symbolic resources because they are so clearly exclusive and so obvious next to the invisibility of those who have them and so visible and unattainable to those who do not have them.

The lack of such resources means experienced shortcomings in the ability to do authoritative work in the classroom. Lisa, a female student, referred to her body and to her gender as a professional shortcoming in keeping order in the classroom.

I am not very big; I am a girl and so I have no dominance in the classroom like that. Like you know … a man. Lisa, teacher student, year 2

Two years later a more experienced Lisa returned to the reasoning about body, gender, and how she considered it connected to the ability to do the professional work as a teacher and especially as a teacher in vocational programs dominated by boys.

I think, I'm a girl, I'm not so big, so it's not easy to get respect when you're there. I have noticed that I may have struggled to get it, even in fairly quiet classes. But when I think about working in the industry [program dominated by boys] or something like that, it gives me the creeps. Lisa, student, year 4

This quote reflects relationships that can be understood in relation to symbolic violence. Effective professional work recognized by her as well as by her male peers limits her opportunities to operate and experience the profession to its full potential due to gender attributes such as voice and body. In the case of Lisa, she probably will consider the labor market limited relative to her male colleagues who do not make this kind of distinction and who do not express this type of strategy to avoid male-dominated vocational programs.

Another example of how symbolic violence works is Valerie who referred to how her limited vocal resources inhibited her ability to discipline students and maintain authority in the classroom. For her, being a woman meant being unable to do the job well enough according to some kind of objective requirements that were subjectively experienced.

You try to talk to the students and make them calm down, get the students to sit down and show them what to do, but … Sometimes I needed someone with a stronger voice who could scream at them. I am a woman. I don't have that in me. Valerie, teacher student, year 4

Valerie’s physical shortcomings meant that she considered herself not able to do the job with same efficiency and authority as her male colleagues. A more concrete example is illustrated by Monica when she described an art lesson involving a knife, which was something some male pupils could not handle and which required rigid discipline from Monica:

Now during practice, they would sit and make templates for printing, and some of the guys sat with the knife and used it to cut the table instead of doing what they should. / … / Yes, they were not real knives they had, but they were sharp enough to be dangerous. Once the tip of a knife broke and I came there and said, ‘Now give me the knife, now give me the knife because you are handling it wrong and dangerously. You're not doing what you should.’ Monica, teacher student, year 2

The pupil refused to do as Monica said, referring to the fact that he did not have to obey someone who was not a teacher (a sort of double subordination being a female student), which created a troubled power struggle in the classroom that Monica for as long as she could sought to avoid with reference to his physical superiority.

Maybe I waited a little too long to tell him. It was as if you did not dare to go up to a pupil who was sitting there and who is bigger, taller, and stronger than me and who has a knife that he sits and knocks on the table. Monica, teacher student, year 2

The professional position in itself was not enough to be considered as an authority and to solve the situation without accelerating conflict. But even more importantly, her action strategy was motivated by the perception that she lacked the necessary bodily resources to resolve the situation. In the end, her strategy put her in a fragile and potentially dangerous situation. The symbolic violence had in some sense accelerated into a risk of physical violence, which was the only possible actual problem (we actually do not know to what extent it was a dangerous situation) related to the body and of performing authoritative teacher work that turned up during the interviews.

The use of body and voice was, most of the time, percepted and therefore lived as professional property. By labeling professional work with gender-coded properties, students like Monica, Valerie and Lisa contribute to their own inability to ever be able to perform the professional work according to general and dominant perceptions of the professional work. The body is a centerpiece in the practice of masculinity and femininity (see Connell 1995; Bourdieu (2001[1998]), and by referring to, what they perceive as masculine bodily resources as a vital professional property, the impossibility to fully embody an upper secondary schoolteacher is a fact for women. At the same time the students reinforce the binary perception of what counts as a ‘masculine body’ in contrast to a ‘feminine body’.

Concluding discussion

Is there a script or habitus that excludes a type of femininity from properties experienced as vital to fully practice the upper secondary schoolteacher profession? Even though conclusions are drawn from just a small number of cases, this study indicate the existence of such script or habitus and also, more important, how such a thing can be reproduced.

This study shows how caring, close, and individual strategies to do the professional and authoritative upper secondary schoolteacher work are present, experienced, appreciated, and identified as possible to do by the interviewed female teacher students. These types of properties are related to teacher domains, dominated by women, and are part of ‘the ‘objective expectations’ inscribed / … / in the positions offered to women by the still very strongly sexually differentiated division of labour’ (Bourdieu 2001[1998], 57), positions more often related to pre- and primary schoolteachers, which are socially subordinated to the upper secondary schoolteachers who are traditionally dominated by a certain type of masculinity far from caring work. When the interviewed male students experienced that kind of work, they were deterred and some of them eventually dropped out from the program with the motivation that their experiences weren’t equivalent to their expectations. More traditional schoolmaster work based on asymmetrical and distant teacher-pupil relations, on the other hand, were appreciated by the male students but were totally absent in the interviews with the female teacher students.

When the social game does not match socially structured and incorporated perceptions and expectations, habitus clashes occur. To act in familiar (in terms of how habitus is structured) social settings is easy. In more disparate social settings, individuals have difficulties acting comfortably and have difficulties fitting in. Bourdieu (1972[1977]) describes how practices ‘incur negative sanctions when the environment with which they are actually confronted is too distant from that to which they are objectively fitted.’ (78). The production of more insecurity can be interpreted as actions taken because of conflicts between socially and gender-related perceptions (the cluster of habitus) of what upper secondary teaching is all about and what it is actually experienced as. Teacher students who experience fitting in or being the ‘right person for the job’ (see Braun 2012) do not experience such clashes.

Such clashes should not be interpreted as what Bourdieu calls ‘cleaved’ habitus (Bourdieu 1999[1993]; Friedman 2015), meaning a habitus where the individual tries to fit in into two opposite social positions at the same time. These clashes, that inevitably will mobilize action from the individual (e.g. dropping out, seeking alternatives, resignation, and subordination), are rather an expression of ‘’the order of things’, as people sometimes say to refer to what is normal, natural, to the point of being inevitable’ according to Bourdieu (2001[1998], 8). The habitus complicates or even prevents any attempt to challenge the gender structure.

This becomes more obvious in statements about shortcomings in the authoritative work from the interviewed female teacher students. They testify about failings in the authoritative teacher work due to a lack of bodily resources held by male teachers, a picture that research (Jackson 2010) has also shown is supported by male teachers. The interviewed male students do experience shortcomings in the authoritative work but never refer to it as a consequence of lacking bodily resources. Perceived shortcomings have nothing to do with them not able to perform as professional teachers. With inspiration from the well-known habitus-analogy of being a ‘fish in water’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 127), they don’t seem to feel the weight of the water. For the interviewed female students, the lack of a male body and voice is considered a professional shortcoming impossible to overcome. The specificity of the male body is draped in professional claims. From this perspective, this signal how hard it is for women to fully embody the upper secondary schoolteacher profession. The acceptance of this shortcoming can be interpreted in terms of symbolic violence because the dominated category, women, has perceptions of the what it takes to embody the profession incorporated in their habitus and because this perception contributes to their own gendered subordination and makes ‘their acts of cognition / … / inevitably acts of recognition’ (Bourdieu 2001[1998], 13) reproducing the gendered ‘learned helplessness’ (Bourdieu 2001[1998], 61).

From this perspective the upper secondary schoolteacher profession is, despite the actual female majority, dominated by a certain type of masculinity. The upper secondary schoolteacher is in its ideal embodied form a man, something that is recognized by both men and women. Bourdieu (2001[1998]) writes:

To succeed completely in holding a position, a woman would need to possess not only what is explicitly demanded by the job description, but also a whole set of properties which the male occupants normally bring to the job – a physical stature, a voice, or dispositions such as aggressiveness, self-assurance, ‘role-distance’, what is called natural authority, etc., for which men have been tacitly prepared and trained as men (63).

But there are indications of a more loosened or multidimensional definition of what it takes to be and practice the upper secondary schoolteacher profession. The interviews indicate that professional elements of caring, personal, and emotional work are demanded in the everyday work as upper secondary schoolteachers, something that would reward something else than a certain type of masculinity. The more or less holy professional knowledge was consecrated in a historical context influenced by a gender structure that is contested in contemporary school and society. This study indicates something of a crack in a traditional reproductive process of gendered division labor in the teaching profession, a process worth investigating further. Connell (1995) reminds us that the body ‘is inescapable in the construction of masculinity; but what is inescapable is not fixed’ (56). The type of embodied masculinity that seems to be hegemonic is challenged by another professional ideal that makes the body a little less important when the upper secondary schoolteacher is to be defined and that makes it even more crucial to remind us that ‘our bodies are important but they are not, or not entirely, our destinies’ (Paechter 2012, 230).

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Magnus Persson

Magnus Persson is a senior lecturer in sociology at Department of Social studies, Linnaeus University, Sweden.