Music teachers' constructions of gender in elementary education

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Music Education Research 5
early childhood, face numerous challenges such as isolation, suspicions surrounding
their motivations to work with children, anxiety surrounding child-touch, and
pressure to perform in stereotypically masculine roles. Male teachers in the US
account for only 21% of the teaching workforce, and male music teachers in
elementary school are even rarer. Male music teachers’ accounts of their work
(Roulston and Mills 2000) suggest that for men who teach music especially in
elementary schools demands to conform to hegemonic notions of masculinity are
amplified, since the subject area of music occupies a subordinate role within school
curriculums and historically has feminine associations (Green 1997).
There is still much to be learned about music teachers’ conceptualisations of
gender and how they account for these in relation to their classroom practices. This
study investigated music teachers’ constructions of gender in relation to elementary
teaching (in this study elementary refers to pre-Kindergarten to 5th grade involving
5 10-year-olds). Specifically we asked:
(1) What are music teachers’ gendered images of music teaching?
(2) In what ways do men and women describe their experiences of teaching
elementary music differently?
Theoretical perspectives
Connell (2002, 8) rejects the common usage of the term gender to mean ‘the cultural
difference of women from men, based on the biological division between male and
female’ as an adequate and appropriate definition. In this usage, gender is defined by
‘dichotomy and difference’ (2002, 8). Instead, Connell (2002, 9) suggests that the
focus of gender be on ‘relations’, highlighting that gender is a ‘social structure ...of a
particular kind’. He explains:
Gender involves a specific relationship with bodies. This is recognized in the common
sense definition of gender as an expression of natural difference, the bodily difference of
male from female. What is wrong with this formula is not the attention to bodies, nor
the concern with sexual reproduction, but the idea that cultural patterns simply ‘express’
bodily difference. (Connell 2002, 9)
Here, Connell (2002) is challenging essentialist conceptualisations of gender in which
femininity and masculinity are ‘largely biologically fixed’ in binary opposition to one
other (Cushman 2008, 124). In order to ‘escape’ the ‘paradoxes of ‘‘difference’’’
Connell proposes an alternative definition for the term gender, ‘Gender is the
structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive arena, and the set of
practices (governed by this structure) that bring reproductive distinctions between
bodies into social processes’ (2002, 10, italics in original).
In this paper Connell’s definition of gender is utilised to explore the social
relations of gender in music educators’ accounts of their professional lives and
teaching experiences in elementary schools. By examining how teachers describe
gender in relation to the many stakeholders involved in schooling teachers, parents,
children and administrators we argue that it is possible to highlight some of the
complexities and contradictions inherent in the possible ways that gender may be
thought about in relation to music education in elementary education.