Music teachers' constructions of gender in elementary education

Downloaded by [ ] at 06:52 16 November 2011
Music Education Research 7
multiple interpretations of data. That is, a constructionist position (Crotty 1998)
implies that participants both select and co-construct meanings of gender in social
settings, whereas an approach informed by post-modern theories suggests that
participants construct the meaning of gender from the discourses available to them in
society. It is the former of these two approaches that we take in this article.
The authors then returned to the transcriptions, read and discussed each one, and
conducted a cross-case analysis. In order to focus the report, we asked a number of
questions of each transcription, including:
“ What was the early background of the participant?
“ What were their personal and professional experiences of gender in relation to
music education?
“ What issues were highlighted in interviews by each participant?
“ How did the participants describe the involvement of mothers and fathers in
the musical lives of children?
“ What were the salient characteristics of participants’ accounts?
Below, we begin by providing overviews of findings from each of the six cases, before
presenting findings from the cross-case analysis.
Case summaries
Case study 1: Amy
Amy described herself as a highly capable competitor against other males in the
male-dominated settings of high school and college bands. In relation to the
elementary music classroom, Amy portrayed women and mothers in facilitating and
supporting roles for children, some of which conflicted with her professional
expertise as a music teacher. Men and fathers, in contrast, were portrayed as able
to provide strong and important role models for boys in their participation in
musical activities. Amy’s portrayal of other music teachers was one in which women
could provide the caring, sharing and nurturing required of teachers in elementary
schools. Amy speculated that this feminine ‘motherly’ role was one that few male
teachers would want to engage in. Conversely, the high school band directors she had
met at a recent music convention conformed to the competitive male image that she
outlined of her own experience as a musician in school and college settings.
Amy described boys’ participation in musical activities especially chorus as
influenced in powerful ways by male role models:
And so I think ...that a father’s influence is huge, or a male influence is huge. Especially
for boys ...because [of] the stigma, I think, of boys singing ...my chorus has ...eighty
kids in it. And maybe ...less than a third of them are boys. So ...knowing that that’s
acceptable. And to have someone like a role-model that says it’s OK and that has done
it, I think, is huge.
When asked how she envisioned the role of mothers, grandmothers, and other
females in children’s music lives, Amy found it more difficult to respond, and was
reluctant to make generalisations concerning her observations.