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THE FEMINIZATION OF TEACHING AND THE PRACTICE OF TEACHING: THREAT OR OPPORTUNITY?

Morwenna Griffiths
Moray House School of Education Edinburgh University

ABSTRACT. In this essay, Morwenna Griffiths considers the effect of feminization on the practices of education. She outlines a feminist theory of practice that draws critically on theories of embodiment, diversity, and structures of power to show that any practice is properly seen as fluid, leaky, and viscous. Examining different and competing understandings of feminization referring either to the numbers of women in teaching or to a culture associated with women Griffith argues that concerns about increasing number of women teachers are misplaced. She complicates the cultural question, observing that masculine practices have a hegemonic form while feminized practices have developed in resistance to these, and she ultimately argues that hegemonic masculinity, not feminization, is the problem because it drives out diversity. Griffiths concludes that the leaky, viscous practices of teaching would benefit from the increased diversity and decreased social stratification feminization brings to the profession.

INTRODUCTION In this article I consider the effect of the feminization of teaching on the practices of education. I argue that gender is relevant to understanding the practices of education, and that the feminization of teaching, insofar as it exists, is to be welcomed because it provides a space for resisting hegemonic masculinity. In the first section, I outline a view of practice within education that emphasizes the significance of social context in learning. This sets the philosophical and theoretical context for the rest of the essay. In the second section, I draw on the conclusions of the first section in order to sketch a feminist theory of practice. This sketch, which applies equally to both sexes, begins to fill some of the gaps in orthodox theory. It draws on theories of embodiment, diversity, and structures of power to show that any practice is properly seen as fluid, leaky, and viscous: different practices seep out into each other as a result of the embodiment of their individual members. This feminist theory of practice also shows how communities of practice benefit from internal diversity and difference, not only of gender but also of race, sexuality, religion, disability, and the like. Such diversity increases the flexibility of a practice as different models of expertise are developed. Finally, the understanding of practice needs to take into account how differences are connected with power structures. The power structures within a society mark the power structures of the community of practice. Therefore, they mark what models of expertise are dominant. In the third section, I demonstrate that the feminization of teaching is not quite what it seems at first sight. The situation is complex. There are different and competing understandings of feminization as referring either to the (absolute or proportional) numbers of women in teaching or to a culture associated with women. The widespread concern about the increase in numbers of women teachers is
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misplaced. The increase has been much exaggerated. So indeed has the actual proportion of women teachers at the secondary phase. The cultural question is complicated because gender differences are not binary. There are a range of masculinities and femininities. However, significantly, there is a hegemonic form of masculinity, which can affect schools in which there may be few males, let alone females, who identify with that form of masculinity. There are indications that pressures of central government policies internationally are intensifying a culture of hegemonic masculinity in schools, whether or not they have a majority of women teachers. In the fourth section, I argue that while masculinization of teaching is a cause for concern, feminization is not. Insofar as feminized practices appear, they are never hegemonic. It is important to talk of practices rather than practice. There is no such thing as feminized practice because there is no unified category, woman. Moreover, current feminized practices are formed in resistance, sometimes explicitly so, to more dominant forms. They would change if those forms changed. I give examples of some different resistant feminized practices. The feminist theory of practice shows that, in general, the leaky, viscous practices of teaching would benefit from increasing diversity and decreasing social stratification within the profession. Schools would benefit from having both men and women, in all their cultural diversities, but only insofar as the profession is able to create a culture that values difference. PRACTICES Practice is a much used, much abused, contested, and indispensable concept in education. In the United Kingdom the term best practice has become a mantra of government. In the worst cases a technicist view of teaching sets up and valorizes practice against theory. Richard Smith gives an incisive, critical account of this tendency that is focused on the United Kingdom but applicable much more widely.1 In this article I will concentrate not on that false dichotomy of unthinking practice and irrelevant theory, but on a theorization of practice in which theory roughly understood as abstraction, articulation, and explicit reflection draws on and contributes to practice, roughly understood as action, conduct, and performance. It should be noted that intelligent practice might include the activities of abstracting, articulating, and reflecting. The current dichotomization of practice and theory owes little to philosophy. Most philosophical accounts of practice, for all their variety, are indebted to Aristotle, who helpfully distinguished varieties of practice and of theory. As Jana Noel usefully shows, different accounts of educational practice emphasize different
1. Richard Smith, Paths of Judgement: The Revival of Practical Wisdom, Educational Philosophy and Theory 31, no. 3 (1999): 327-340. MORWENNA GRIFFITHS is Professor of Classroom Learning at the Moray House School of Education at Edinburgh University, Thomsons Land, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh, Scotland EH8 8AQ; email \Morwenna.Griffiths@ed.ac.uk[. Her primary areas of scholarship are philosophy of education, feminist philosophy, action research, and pedagogy.

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aspects of Aristotles discussion.2 However, all of them are agreed that Aristotle presented us with a way of thinking about the human capacity to deal intelligently with the question of what to do for the best in any situation as opposed to only contemplating it (whether to describe, explain, or analyze it). The terminology Aristotle used still permeates much contemporary discussion: praxis, phronesis, techne. As Joseph Dunne says,
But the great significance of Aristotle lies in the fact that he also set limits to the sway of techne and, through his novel conception of phronesis, provided a rich analysis of the kind of knowledge that guides, and is well fitted to, characteristically human and therefore inescapably ethical activity (praxis).3

Aristotles terminology and distinctions continue to be useful to philosophers reflecting on the different levels of intelligence and wisdom needed for acting in the world, as compared to the intelligence and wisdom needed for solving puzzles or for contemplation on the world. Indeed, his philosophy has had something of a resurgence owing to the rise of antifoundational ways of thinking during the last fifty or sixty years.4 To find his terminology and distinctions useful does not mean accepting his whole philosophy. Rather, the very difficulty of translating his terminology for our own times seems to have proved fruitful.5 I have said that any account of practice must be predicated on epistemology: what practical knowledge is taken to be. It must also be predicated on an understanding of what it is to be a human being. Many of the newly popular, antifoundational approaches emphasize the significance of specific social and material contexts. Still, individualism remains powerful. Educational accounts of practice and practical reason still tend to focus on the individual acting with wisdom, the man of judgment, the phronimos. A more adequate account of practice and practical reason needs to take full account of the fact that to be a human being is not only to be an individual, but also to be part of both a public and private community. As Hannah Arendt observed,
The human being who has lost his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent whole, is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of private life.[and which] can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love.6

And, as I have argued elsewhere, I is a fragment rather than an atom (I am always part of a we).7 Similarly, think of Ludwig Wittgensteins forms of life, and
2. Jana Noel, On the Varieties of Phronesis, Educational Philosophy and Theory 31, no. 3 (1999): 273289. 3. Joseph Dunne and Shirley Pendlebury, Practical Reason, in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, eds. Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 200. 4. Ibid., 194204; and Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1993). 5. Noel, On the Varieties of Phronesis; and Smith, Paths of Judgement. 6. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1966), 301. 7. Morwenna Griffiths, Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity (London: Routledge 1995), 16.

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of Martin Heideggers being thrown into the world. Educational theorizing about the practices of teaching has not derived only, or even mainly, from educational philosophy. For the last twenty years, there has been an influential movement within the social sciences, especially within psychology, theorizing the ethos and culture of teaching that is, the practices of teaching as best understood within a framework of social learning theories. Thus there is the opportunity for a coming together of two different areas of theory. On the one hand, from educational philosophers, there is a concern with epistemology, ethics, and the nature of persons in relation to practical wisdom, deliberation, and learning. On the other hand, from social scientists, there is a concern with theories of learning that are based on empirical evidence and social theories of learning but with clear, often explicit, links to the epistemological investigations of the philosophers. Both parties agree about the significance of being part of a community, about focusing on details of situations in particular times and places, and about the impossibility of translating practice into explicit theory. It could be a happy partnership. I have drawn on both in this article. The social learning theorists take their starting point from L.S. Vygotsky. Drawing especially on his theory of the zone of proximal development, and strongly influenced by his Marxist emphasis on the social and material world, a number of theories have developed around the idea that learners are inducted into a practice by their teachers.8 In the process of developing skills and other cognitive abilities, learners are brought to see objects and situations as their teachers do. This practice is always part of a culture in which most, if not all, members are participants in the target skills.9 Only some of these theories focus on school learning, and almost all of them take as their starting point empirical evidence related to apprenticeship. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, in their influential book Situated Learning, show that novices must learn how to perceive the social and material world in order to become adept.10 They do so within a community of practice through situated learning, terms that have become familiar in learning theory. Part of the knowledge they gain is distributed in the designed artefacts of the practice: physical tools, diagrams, and the like.11 Learners actively negotiate their place among their peers and in relation to acknowledged experts through a series of complex interrelations between the individual subject and his or her community.12
8. See L.S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, eds. Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 9. Allan Collins, John Seely Brown, and Ann Holum, Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, American Educator (Winter 1991), http://www.21learn.org/arch/articles/brown_seely.html. 10. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 11. Roy Pea, Practices of Distributed Intelligence and Designs for Education, in Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations, ed. Gavriel Salomon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 4787. 12. Yrjo Engestro m, Learning by Expanding: Ten Years After, trans. Falk Seeger (1999), http://lchc.ucsd. edu/MCA/Paper/Engestrom/expanding/intro.htm.

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Approaches in philosophy and philosophy of education are consistent with the thrust of social learning theory. In his discussion of possible modern senses for the Aristotelian term phronesis, Smith argues for the significance of attentiveness (understood as including alertness and sensitivity) in practical judgment, a necessary part of wisdom.13 Attentiveness, he says, is closely related to how we see the ordinary world around us. Practical judgment is practical because it guides us in knowing what to do. Gilbert Ryle made a useful distinction between this knowing how to do something, and the more passive, contemplative knowing that something is the case.14 Michael Polanyi, like Ryle, shows that knowing how to do something does not depend on explicit formulations of rules.15 On the contrary, it precedes them. Equally so for attentiveness, or what Polanyi calls connoisseurship. Thus far, the account remains individualistic. Polanyi explicitly argues, however, that practical knowledge is gained within a tradition, through apprenticeship to a master. He also discusses the indispensability of conviviality. Along similar lines, Nicholas Burbules and Paul Smeyers show that certain of Wittgensteins remarks provide a way to understand practices as being a result of social learning.16 Burbules and Smeyers use Wittgenstein to develop a philosophical account of practice that fits well with social learning theories. For Wittgenstein, learning and understanding take place within forms of life.17 By participating within a form of life, someone demonstrates that they understand the rules, they understand what is relevant for applying the rules, and they can decide whether or not to follow them.18 Learning to participate means beginning to participate with help: But if a person [who only speaks French] has not yet got the concepts, I shall teach him to use the word by means of examples and by practice..I do it, he does it after me; and I influence him by expressions of agreement, rejection, expectation, encouragement.19 Burbules and Smeyers draw on Wittgensteins remarks to explain how they understand practice:
It is a constellation of learned activities, dispositions, and skills. We learn to engage in complex practices through observing or emulating others who are more skilled than we; through our own practice, trial, and error; through making mistakes, and learning from them; through deliberation and reflection on what we are doing and why; through creatively responding to new and unexpected situations; and so on..We are initiated into a form of life that values these activities and that supports us in enacting them.20

13. Smith, Paths of Judgement, 331. 14. Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers (London: Hutchinson, 1971). 15. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). 16. Nicholas Burbules and Paul Smeyers, Wittgenstein, the Practice of Ethics, and Moral Education, Philosophy of Education 2002, ed. Scott Fletcher (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2003), 248257. 17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 23. 18. Ibid., 206. 19. Ibid., 208. 20. Burbules and Smeyers, Wittgenstein, the Practice of Ethics, and Moral Education, 251.

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This is a perspective that accords well with the view of practice used in this article. It also accords well with social learning theory, and supports it. A form of life could be said to be a community of practice. To sum up this section, there is an increasingly widespread consensus within educational theory, including educational philosophy, that accords with Burbules and Smeyerss characterization. It is a conception of practice based in a view of the human being as being inescapably part of society. Equally, the human being is inescapably part of the material world, interacting with it and developing into a particular kind of person because of it. So practice is essentially social and intimately interconnected with the material world in all its local specificity. Individual practice is therefore part of a form of life; it is part of a community of practice. Thus a practice is what we do or the way we do things around here. Interaction takes place because a human being is someone with desires and the capacity to act on them, who actively seeks to become part of a practice or who actively resists it. To become part of a practice, a form of life, a person must desire to join it, to learn the language game and to play it. To do that means forming judgments based in attentiveness or connoisseurship. Doing all this requires acquiring tacit knowledge, that is, knowledge of how to do particular things, and it probably means acquiring the appropriate forms of discourse. This learning occurs through interactions within the community.21 SEEING PRACTICES FROM A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE So far, the argument has followed an unexceptional philosophical and theoretical pathway around articles in the mainstream journals, and well-cited and studied books and these articles and books are well worth the attention. However, it should be noticed that of the twenty-two authors so far cited, only six are women. The argument may seem to have been studiously gender neutral, but, as ever with philosophical and theoretical attempts to be neutral, it tends to the masculine.22 The landscape appears rather different when viewed from an explicitly feminist perspective.23 This difference is not just about seeing that there are women in the landscape as well as men. That is only a beginning. More significantly, it is about changing the understanding of the landscape because it is seen from a different perspective. To take a feminist perspective is not to take an essentialist position. In other words, it is not a view that biology is destiny. However, it is a view that
21. This is a broader definition than the one offered by Alasdair McIntyre in After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), which has been much discussed in recent philosophy of education. In their paper, Practice: A Central Educational Concept (paper presented at the annual conference of the Philosophy of Education Society, San Francisco, California, March 2005), Nicolas Burbules and Paul Smeyers persuasively argue for a conception of practice that is closer to the one described by Charles Taylor in Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 22. For further discussion, see Michele Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing, trans. Kathryn Haymer and Lorraine Code (London: Routledge, 2003). I discuss her argument later in this section. 23. Examples and arguments demonstrating this can be found in Jane Roland Martin, Changing the Educational Landscape (London: Routledge, 1994); Griffiths, Feminisms and the Self; Wendy Kohli, A Monstrous Manifesto: Philosophers of the World, Create! in Philosophy of Education Society 2001, ed. Suzanne Rice (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2002); and Maxine Greene and Morwenna Griffiths, Feminism, Philosophy, and Education: Imagining Public Spaces, in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, eds. Blake et al., 76.

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biology skin color, sexuality, disability, and age as well as sex is relevant in constraining how a person comes to construct an individual identity. Indeed, this is not only about biology. The process is very similar for social class, religion, and ethnic heritage.24 None of these determine a perspective, but all of them leave a footprint and then influence footsteps forward, as Pat Mahony and Christine Zmroczek and Meg Maguire have described the process in the context of social class.25 Maxine Greene argues from a feminist perspective in philosophy of education for the importance of recognizing a range of material differences among persons.26 Feminist philosophers are more likely to notice certain significant features of the philosophical landscape. The phrase more likely is relevant, precisely because this is a matter of perspective. Men and women inhabit the same world and their paths through it crisscross, even though some areas are much more trodden by one sex than the other. There are also differences within each sex, which may sometimes play a more significant role in shaping perspective. Women, like men, tread a variety of paths. As Maxine Green and I commented in an article on feminist philosophy in education, There is not anything that can be added on to philosophyas-usual to get the womans angle on it. That is, taking any feminist perspective changes all of philosophy-as-usual but not to any single recognisable end.27 A feminist theory of practice is not a theory just for feminists or even just for women. Rather, it is universal, equally applicable to men and women. In what follows, I very briefly outline the significance for understanding practice of three themes that are found in feminist philosophy: embodied relations, diversity, and sociopolitical structures of power. To repeat, none of these are the exclusive province of women or feminists, but they have, in fact, hardly appeared in the previous section. Embodiment is relevant to the most fundamental assumptions underlying philosophies of practice, identity, reason, and the like. Christine Battersby develops a feminist metaphysics, using a Kantian rather than an Aristotelian tradition of metaphysics. She argues that this metaphysics of flesh and fluidity shows both men and women that their subject-position is linked to fleshy continuity, rather than to an autonomous individualised soul or mind that merely inhabits the flesh.28 The embodied person is embedded in their relations, some personal, some professional, some political. They exist in particular material circumstances. These are not the rational men of liberal philosophy who might as well be brains
24. For more detailed discussions, see Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition (London: Routledge, 1997); and Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 25. Pat Mahony and Christine Zmroczek, Why Class Matters, in Class Matters: Working-Class Womens Perspectives on Social Class, eds. Christine Zmroczek and Pat Mahony (London: Taylor and Francis, 1997); and Meg Maguire, Not Footprints Behind but Footsteps Forward: Working-Class Women Who Teach, Gender and Education 17, no. 1 (2005): 318. 26. Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988); Maxine Greene, The Plays and Ploys of Postmodernism, Philosophy of Education Society 1993, ed. Audrey Thompson (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1994); and Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995). 27. Greene and Griffiths, Feminism, Philosophy, and Education, 76. 28. Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman, 14, 10.

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in vats.29 They are particular persons in a specific place and time.30 Similarly, Donna Haraway emphasizes the particularities of biological embodiment for understanding a person.31 These are views of bodies and relations as fluid rather than fixed, multiple rather than unitary, and they replace the phallogocentric imaginary of Western philosophy.32 As Battersby remarks,
Haraway has embarked on much the same project as Irigaray: asking that female identity be conceptualised in terms of a different understanding of boundaries..It is not that all identity disappears on this model; but rather that identity has to be understood not in terms of an inner mind or self controlling a body, but as emerging out of patterns of potentialities and flow.33

Issues of diversity are found more frequently in mainstream theory than are issues of embodiment. However, diversity is still much more a feature of feminist theory. Nancy Fraser details some of the history of the feminist movement in the second half of the twentieth century that explains how this issue became embedded in both theory and practice:
The exclusive focus on gender difference proved increasingly counterproductive as identity politics proliferated in the 1980s..All the various movements cut across one another. And each was going through an analogous process of discovering the other differences within itself.34

Within feminist philosophy the issue of belonging and becoming and the link between them have assumed increasing importance. Belonging and becoming are both central concepts for practice in the sense of being part of a practice and becoming someone identified with it. Maria Lugones discusses the contradiction she feels in her identity as a Latina and as an Anglo philosopher.35 Iris Marion Young discusses how participation in a group solidifies mutual affinity, and how such groups are necessarily overlapping.36 Elsewhere, I have explored this issue using some examples from education.37 Similarly, in Feminism, Philosophy, and Education, Greene and I present a dialogue about some contradictions
29. Daniel C. Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Bradford Books, 1978); and Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 30. To underline the point that feminist philosophy is not about claiming any particular content as feminist, one of the foremost philosophers of embodiment is Maurice Merleau-Ponty who is not a feminist. Similarly, Platos dialogues include descriptions of Socrates and his group of male friends as embodied and em draig Hogan point out in The Activity of Philosophy and the bedded in their world, as Richard Smith and Pa Practice of Education, in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, eds. Blake et al., 165180. 31. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991); and Donna Haraway, with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna Haraway (New York and London: Routledge, 2000). 32. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). 33. Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman, 53. 34. Fraser, Justice Interruptus, 179. 35. Maria Lugones, Playfulness, World-Traveling and Loving Perception, in Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, eds. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 275290. 36. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 37. Griffiths, Feminisms and the Self.

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and difficulties we find in our identities as (very different) women and as philosophers of education.38 It has been argued that masculinity or femininity are themselves communities of practice, but this is not an argument I agree with, precisely because gender difference is so crosscut by other markers of difference.39 Rather, my argument is that any practices, such as teaching, will themselves be inflected by gender. The issues of sociopolitical structures of power are closely linked to issues of identity and are equally fundamental to understanding practice. Feminism, like other forms of identity politics, is no mere celebration of difference. It is a response to perceived injustice. Power relations and power structures constrain who may belong in any social sphere. For instance, to take just two examples from very different social spheres, Hilary Rose details mens efforts to keep women scientists out of the Royal Society, and Ruth Hoberman describes mens alarm when women began to exercise their right to use the British Museum reading room in the nineteenth century.40 Greene traces the effects on herself of entering a male-dominated sphere.41 Feminist philosophers and theorists have explored ways of understanding what underlies such attempts at exclusion. For instance, Genevieve Lloyd traces the changing meaning of reason in Western philosophy while noting that however the definition changed, it was always deemed to be male.42 Similarly, Michele Le Doeuff argues that history of philosophy shows that women are allocated the things that men do not value their castoffs, so to speak such as intuition rather than reason, and bearing knowledge rather than producing it.43 Men then proclaim the neutrality and universality of their own perspectives. Thus, mainstream discussion operates within an assumption of neutrality that masks masculinity. What difference does all this feminist philosophy and theory make to the understanding of practice? Earlier, I approvingly quoted Burbules and Smeyerss characterization of practice. I remarked that their characterization would attract considerable agreement. However, the feminist perspective outlined previously shows that significant features of the landscape of practice are missing from it. First, practices are marked by embodiment. This is not just a matter of noticing that the members of a community of practice are bodies and that these bodies may not be male. It is also to recognize that practices, like the human beings who create them, are relational and formed in particular material circumstances. Human beings, in their diverse ways, create practices that are formed, in part, as a
38. Greene and Griffiths, Feminism, Philosophy, and Education, 7392. 39. Carrie Paechter, Masculinities and Femininities as Communities of Practice, Womens Studies International Forum 26, no. 1 (2003): 6977. 40. Hilary Rose, Love, Power and Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); and Ruth Hoberman, Women in the British Museum Reading Room during the Late-Nineteenth Early-Twentieth Centuries: From Quasi- to Counterpublic, Feminist Studies 28, no. 3 (2002): 489511. 41. Greene and Griffiths, Feminism, Philosophy, and Education. 42. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1993). 43. Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing.

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result of particular human delights and terrors. Teaching is intensely personal and corporeal.44 Thus, practices are fluid. They leak into each other. Their boundaries are permeable. Being a woman teacher also means being seen by students and colleagues as and perhaps seeing herself as a daughter, auntie, mother, nanny, her indoors, interruptible.45 Equivalently, for a man it means being seen as a son, uncle, father, breadwinner, doing something important elsewhere. The practice of teaching leaks into the practices of mothering, fathering, managing, facilitating, counselling, and philosophizing and vice versa. Second, communities of practice are marked by the diversity, or otherwise, of their members. The form of a practice depends on forms of conviviality that is, the form of a practice depends on formal and informal communication among its members. Mens communication patterns are different from womens. But also men and women belong to a wide variety of other, overlapping cultures that interact with the practices of teaching. For instance, not being heterosexual will affect how teachers enter their community of practice and this will be different for lesbian and for gay teachers.46 The same is true for other markers of difference, such as race or social class; for particular local communities; and for particular practical or intellectual passions. Practices are not only leaky but also viscous. They flow, slowly and stickily, in response to internal and external changes. If there is enough diversity within a practice, there is room for a variety of communities to develop within the larger practices. Therefore diversity makes it possible for the practice itself to be more fluid, flexible, and nonhierarchical. It can become a community of learners rather than a set of novices seeking a single model of expertise. A range of models may develop, comfortably coexisting within a practice. This provides a less hierarchical model for learning a practice. We may think of such a community of practice as more like the Himalayas and less like the single peak of Kilimanjaro. The more diverse a community, the greater the chance that there will be a range of models of expertise and the better equipped its members will be to negotiate a practice that does not compromise their identity. Thus, not only may entering a community of practice help define who we are, both as a group and as individuals, but also who we are that is, our particular identity may help define the community of practice through the models of expertise that develop.
44. Martin, Changing the Educational Landscape; Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell, Thats Funny, You Dont Look Like a Teacher! (London: Falmer Press, 1995); Erica McWilliam, Touchy Subjects: A Risky Inquiry into Pedagogical Pleasure, British Educational Research Journal 22, no. 3 (1996): 305317; and Erica McWilliam, Admitting Impediments: Or Things to Do with Bodies in the Classroom, Cambridge Journal of Education 26, no. 3 (1996): 367378. 45. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986); Jill Blackmore, Troubling Women: Feminism, Leadership and Educational Change (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999); and Simone Galea, Symbolising the Maternal: A Genealogical Study of Women Educators (PhD diss., Nottingham Trent University, 2002). 46. See, for instance, Max Biddulph, The Monochrome Frame: Mural Making As a Methodology for Understanding Self, in Just Who Do We Think We Are? Methodologies for Autobiography and Self-Study in Teaching, eds. Claudia Mitchell, Sandra Weber, and Kathleen OReilly-Scanlon (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 4957; Mary Manke, A Queer Path across the Straight Furrows of My Field: A Series of Reflections, in Just Who Do We Think We Are?, eds. Mitchell et al., 193205.

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A practice that has only one model of expertise (best practice) will be less robust with respect to external pressures. These pressures may come from policy makers or they may come from other changes in the world at large. They may be demographic, for instance. A very homogeneous practice will be like a very sticky fluid, stuck in a single model, with the only possibility of movement being a sudden rush like ketchup coming out of a bottle. The more a community of practice has a range of models of expertise, the more responsive and proactive it can be, as a learning community, to external pressures. The more diversity there is among teachers, the better chance there is that different models of expertise will emerge. Third, it is important to bring the idea of systematic, structural power into any analysis of communities of practice. Practices are changed by structural power relations existing in the society. Thus, the practices will always be political and marked by politics over and above their marking by diversity. Within standard theories of communities of practice, such as that of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, the issue of power is little discussed, except as it is involved in novices becoming experts and replacing the old experts.47 Lave and Wenger use the term legitimate peripheral participation to indicate how any novice in a practice begins at the periphery and moves inward (though not necessarily to any single center). They are resistant to the idea that there may be such a thing as illegitimate peripheral participation.48 But there is. Illegitimate peripheral participation is about not being allowed in. For instance, each sex can observe some of the practices of the other sex. They can role-play them, and would be able to begin to take part in them, but they are not allowed to.49 Such prohibitions act particularly strongly on males to prevent them from transgressing the rules of hegemonic masculinity.50 A community of practice will be strongly affected by who is perceived to have power within it, and who is perceived to be an expert. Career structures within teaching are skewed by gender, as they are by race, religion, sexuality, and disability. Senior management is disproportionately male. Thus what is perceived as expertise by novices and outsiders is strongly influenced by gender. Further, senior management is in a position to influence practices within their schools and, therefore, the direction of change within a practice. Moreover, such influence not only affects the practice of teaching, but also the perceptions of students about learning which, in turn, has a direct impact on the practices of teaching.
47. But see Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, Constructing Meaning, Constructing Selves: Snapshots of Language, Gender and Class from Belten High, in Gender Articulated: Language and the Culturally Constructed Self, eds. Mary Buchholtz and Kira Hall (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 469507; and Engestro m, Learning by Expanding. The processes of gendered power from the point of view of language communities are explored by Deborah Cameron, Performing Gender Identity: Young Mens Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity, in Language and Masculinity, eds. Sally Johnson and Ulrike Meinhof (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 4764. 48. Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning, 35. 49. There is a rich description of inner-city teenage boys successfully role-playing women in Lynn Raphael Reed, Troubling Boys and Disturbing Discourses on Masculinity and Schooling, Gender and Education 11, no. 1 (1999): 93110. 50. Jonathan Salisbury and David Jackson, Challenging Macho Values: Practical Ways of Working with Adolescent Boys (London: Falmer, 1996).

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At the end of the first section I presented a preliminary characterization of practice. Taking into account the arguments of this section, I can now outline a more adequate characterization. Practice is part of a form of life; it is part of a community of practice. So a practice is what we do or the way we do things around here. However, that we does not mean that all the members are identical. Each of them is not only sexed and of a particular gene pool, but is also gendered, racialized, classed, and so on. So each one is always part of other communities and other practices. Interaction takes place because a human being is someone with desires and the capacity to act on them, who actively seeks to become part of a practice or who actively resists it, wholly or in part. To become part of a practice, a form of life, a person must desire to join it, to learn the language game and to play it. Conversely, the community of practice must allow that person to join. Learning the language game and playing it means forming judgments based in attentiveness or connoisseurship. Doing all this requires acquiring tacit knowledge that is, knowledge of how to do particular things and it probably means acquiring the appropriate forms of discourse, which will be more or less congruent with other discourses that the individual inhabits. This learning is accomplished through interactions within the community, which is itself socially stratified. In general, the more embodiment and diversity are recognized, and the less social stratification is allowed to affect forms of conviviality, the better. In particular, the practice of teaching would be improved. It would become more responsive to changing contexts and make learning more accessible to the diverse student body. THE FEMINIZATION OF TEACHING In the first section, I outlined a theory of practice derived from educational philosophy and other theory. It is a theory that depends on a view of the human being as being inescapably part of the society. In the next section, I sketched a more feminist theory of practice that takes into account the embodied nature and cultural diversity of human beings. In this section, I focus on the feminization of teaching, prior to investigating how feminization might influence the practice of teaching in the next, and final, section. The feminization of teaching is currently attracting attention. It is generally viewed with concern, even anxiety. There is a widespread perception that gender is significant to the practices of teaching because teaching is feminized. Boys need role models, so it is said, and are disaffected by having so few male teachers at school. Further, it is claimed that this is not only already a problem but the situation is becoming worse. This message is widely purveyed in popular articles and appears to be widely believed, as articles in newspapers around the world show.51

51. Christopher Bantick, Respecting Boyness Can Get Boys Back to Books, The Age, May 13, 1998; Jennifer Buckingham, Lets Make a Start to Fix Boy Troubles, New Zealand Herald, November 26, 2003; Steve McCormack, Classes in Need of Men, The Independent, December 9, 2004; Alanna Mitchell, Goodbye Mr Chips, The Globe and Mail, January 16, 2004; and Maria Sanchez-Traynor, The Gender Gap, Greeley Tribune, October 29, 2005. These newspapers are from Australia, New Zealand, England, Canada, and the United States, respectively.

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Most discussions of feminization do not specify exactly what the discussion is about. The term feminization is associated with several distinct though overlapping meanings. They vary from a focus on absolute or relative numbers of men and women; to a focus on school ethos, teaching strategies, and education policy; to perceptions hopes and fears about the effects of any or all of these. The latter two are often as much about masculinity or femininity as about actual men and women. I have drawn on several different definitions in structuring this section. In an International Labor Office (ILO) report about the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, Cathy Wylie considers a statistical meaning, used in calculating percentages of men and women in a given profession.52 Jane Martin refers to the concept of gender balance, using Joni Lovenduskis definition that distinguishes between positional, policy and organizational balances.53 The first, positional, refers to the numbers of men and women in organizations as a whole and, within those organizations, to their presence in decision-making positions. The second, policy, refers to the extent to which public policies impact on women and men in somewhat different ways, as well as the question of who plays the majority role in the policy-making process. The last, organizational balances, refers to the biases integral to the rules, values, norms, structures and policies of a specific organization.54 Christine Skelton brings in another factor, the concern expressed about feminization and its supposedly bad effects. Quoting Smith, she identifies
three distinct, but often overlapping, ways in which the phrase [feminization] is employed: statistical to indicate the number of women teachers in relation to men teachers; cultural whether the teaching environment is seen to be biased towards females; political backlash politics.55

In what follows I begin by presenting some facts about relative proportions of men and women (positional/statistical meaning) and then go on to consider the evidence about teaching strategy, school ethos, and educational policy (policy/cultural significance). All over the world, with some few exceptions, there has been very little increase in the proportion of women in the teaching profession. In England, the proportion of women teachers has been remarkably stable for years. Official reports

52. Cathy Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession in OECD Countries 19801995 (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2000); http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/sector/papers/ feminize/wp-151.htm. 53. Jane Martin, To Blaise the Trail for Women to Follow Along: Sex, Gender and the Politics of Education on the London School Board, 18701904, Gender and Education 12, no. 2 (2000): 169. See also Joni Lovenduski, Sex, Gender and British Politics, in Women in Politics, eds. Joni Lovenduski and Pippa Norris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 54. Martin, To Blaise the Trail for Women to Follow Along, 169. 55. Christine Skelton, The Feminisation of Schooling or Re-masculinizing Primary Education? International Studies in Sociology of Education 12, no. 1 (2002): 85; and J. Smith, We Need More Males in Primary Education! Or Do We? (paper presented at the conference of the Australian Association for Research and Education, Melbourne, Victoria, November 1999).

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show, so far as the statistics are available, that it has changed hardly at all over the last two decades. In primary schools about 78 percent of teachers were women in 1985.56 By 2005 that figure had risen by just 6 percent to 84 percent. Women made up 48 percent of secondary school teachers in 1990, a figure that rose by just 7 percent in 2005 to 55 percent.57 The pattern is similar in other countries. In the United States, for instance, women make up about three-quarters of teachers between the ages of 25 and 34, a proportion that has remained fairly constant for at least 40 years.58 Wylies ILO report on OECD countries shows that in 1995, in the two-thirds of the countries for which information was available, more than 50 percent of the teachers were women. For half the countries more than 70 percent of the primary teachers were women, but none of them had as many as 70 percent women secondary teachers, and only one-third had more than 55 percent women secondary teachers. There has been increasing feminization in both primary and secondary schools across the OECD countries from 1980 to 1995. However, that is where the similarities cease. The factors influencing any changes appear to vary across countries. For most of the countries the increase has not been rapid. Rates of increase are not correlated with initial levels of feminization. And within-country rates are not correlated with each other: different rates of increase at the primary compared with secondary phase were found in the same countries. Further, factors such as availability of part-time work, salary levels, workload, and spending on education had no clear relation to the levels of feminization across the different countries. The report states:
The teaching profession continues to attract women, probably for the same reasons identified in earlier studies, including relatively good salaries, the nature of the work itself, and the ability to better combine family and employment responsibilities than is found in other occupations easily open to women.59

Insofar as there is an increase, the situation is put into the context of the labor market:
The teaching profession is not alone in experiencing growing proportions of women as paid employment becomes the norm for most women, and their qualification level has increased. Other social service industries and service roles, including those which had relatively small numbers of women in them have also experienced noticeable feminization over the last 20 years.60

Historical surveys bear out these contextual comments and show that there is nothing new about feminization in the sense that there are relatively large numbers of women in teaching compared to other jobs. Meg Maguire discusses some of the changing reasons for women to be attracted to teaching in the United Kingdom.61 Many of them relate to the labor market in general for women, and are s trace how women entered linked to status and pay. Gaby Weiner and Daniel Kallo
56. Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession. 57. This statistic comes from the Teachernet Web site, http://www.teachernet.gov.uk (last accessed December 2005). There were no figures for secondary schools for 1985. 58. Virginia Postrel, In Their Hiring of Teachers, Do the Nations Public Schools Get What They Pay for? New York Times, March 25, 2004. 59. Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession. 60. Ibid. 61. Maguire, Not Footprints Behind but Footsteps Forward.

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teaching during the second half of the nineteenth century in many parts of Europe, as formal education was extended to the masses. They show that while men retained a hold in elite education, especially secondary education, Kindergarten and elementary teaching drew women because it enabled them to gain payment for work outside the home and also to achieve public standing and recognition, at a time when there was much hostility to women working in the public sphere.62 Elizabeth Boyle tells a very similar story for North America: Industrialization, the availability of other jobs, and the perception of education affected the degree to which teaching became feminized. The Industrial Revolution created a wide variety of jobs for men; many of these jobs paid more than teaching.63 She quotes John Rury:
School committees often searched in vain for men teachers before finally hiring women. Teaching paid poorly compared with other jobs that men could get in urban areas..Simultaneously, the nineteenth century ideology of domestic feminism limited the range of occupations to which young middle-class women could aspire.64

So far in this section I have discussed the term feminization in terms of the proportions of men and women in teaching. I now turn to the policy/cultural meaning of feminization. There are two opposing concerns about feminization in this sense. First, there is a concern that the high proportion of women teachers leads to an inappropriate femininity of culture within schools. Second, there is a concern that managerial policies lead to an inappropriate masculinity of culture within schools. There has been widespread concern, in popular articles and speeches, that a preponderance of women in school has been bad for boys. However, research evidence does not support this. Research studies have repeatedly shown that boys are not disadvantaged by being taught by women.65 It is unlikely that men or women make better teachers, whether of boys or girls. There is some evidence that the traits students see as important are gender neutral, as a recent study by Elina Lahelma shows.66 Students want teachers to be good at teaching and keeping order.
s, Positively Women: Professionalism and Practice in Teaching and 62. Gaby Weiner and Daniel Kallo Teacher Education (paper presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, April 2000), http://www.educ.umu.se/;gaby/positively_women.html. 63. Elizabeth Boyle, The Feminization of Teaching in America (Louis Kampf writing prize essay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004), http://web.mit.edu/womens-studies/www/writingPrize/ eb04.html. 64. John L. Rury Who Became Teachers? The Social Characteristics of Teachers in American History, in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, ed. Donald Warren (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 16. 65. Bruce Carrington, Peter Tymms, and Christine Merrell, Role Models, School Improvement and the Gender Gap Do Men Bring out the Best in Boys and Women the Best in Girls? (paper presented at the conference of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, University of Nicosia, Cyprus, 2005); Wayne Martino and Deborah Berrill, Boys, Schooling and Masculinity: Interrogating the Right Way to Educate Boys, Educational Review 55, no. 2 (2003): 99117; Rob Pattman, Boys, Masculinity and Early Years Work What Do We Know? (paper presented at the Research in Practice Inter-professional Conference, Birmingham, England, 2003), http://www.rip.org.uk/learningevents/ip_reports/earlyyears.asp#6; and Nola Alloway, Peter Freebody, Pam Gilbert, and Sandy Muspratt, Boys, Literacy and Schooling: Expanding the Repertoires of Practice (Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth Department of Education Science and Training, 2002). 66. Elina Lahelma, Lack of Male Teachers Problem for Students or Teachers? Pedagogy, Culture and Society 18, no. 2 (2000): 173186.

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They also want them to be friendly and relaxed. There may well be gender influences on ways of keeping order, being friendly, and being relaxed, but these appear to be irrelevant to achievement levels. Feminist educators argue that, far from the culture of school being feminine, teaching is becoming masculinized as government policy across the world increasingly imposes managerialism on schools. The concern about masculinization refers to the likelihood of children, women, and many men flourishing within an ethos associated with stereotypical, dominant males. The masculinity in question is hegemonic: individualistic, competitive, performative, calculative, and hierarchical.67 Pat Mahony, Ian Hextall, and Ian Menter argue that the new English promotion arrangements for teachers are masculinist, and are part of the general move toward masculinist practice in education, driven by policy.68 They detail ways in which this move is difficult for many women. Still, as Wylie points out, managerialism has not stopped women from becoming heads:
Although it was hypothesised that an even greater emphasis on management and financial responsibility would deter women from applying, or being appointed, in fact women have continued to increase their share of headships in two countries with strong decentralization to the school level, United Kingdom and New Zealand.69

It remains to be seen whether these women will feminize the cultures of their schools. Jill Blackmore argues that the rise in managerialism presents particular dilemmas for women leaders.70 Part of their dilemma is whether to embrace, resist, or subvert the forms of masculinity implicit in their managerial role. But this is not necessarily an argument about women. Mairtin Mac an Ghaill and Chris Haywood make the point that the globalization of managerialism has the effect of intensifying gender issues, for example, by encouraging hegemonic masculinity and by reinforcing a rigid male/female binary.71 FEMINIZATION AND THE PRACTICES OF TEACHING In this section I explain an apparent contradiction in the argument so far. In the last section I looked briefly at evidence about feminization and masculinization in schools, noting that, contrary to much popular belief, it seems that feminization has had little influence on boys achievements, nor do students perceptions of good teaching appear to be gender related. I simultaneously argued, on the other hand, that masculinization was a problem for the culture of schools. This appears to be contradictory. The feminist theory of practice outlined previously in this essay explains why there is no contradiction. In describing this theory I argued that practice is leaky
67. R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 68. Pat Mahony, Ian Hextall, and Ian Menter, Threshold Assessment and Performance Management: Modernising or Masculinising Teaching in England? Gender and Education 16, no. 2 (2004): 131149. 69. Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession. 70. Blackmore, Troubling Women. 71. Mairtin Mac an Ghaill and Chris Haywood, Man of the World: Emerging Representations of Global Genders (Paper presented at the conference, Travelling Policy/Local Spaces: Globalisation, Identities and Education Policy in Europe, Keele University, June 2001), http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/ed/ events/ conf-pdf/cPaperMacAnGhaill.pdf.

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and viscous, with a viscosity affected by diversity and by the structures of power in society. Regimes and models of expertise imposed by policy makers and managers inevitably leak into the practices of individual teachers. At the same time, practices associated with women leak into womens practices of teaching, and similarly for men. Equally students expectations and evaluation of their teachers may increase that leakiness. More generally, the community of practice of teaching has an embodied, diverse membership. That diversity includes gender, but always in relation to class, race, sexuality, religion, and the like. Practices associated with each of these are also leaky. This is why there are a range of masculinities and femininities. However, there is one, clearly dominant masculinity, as pointed out in the last section: hegemonic masculinity. There is no equivalent hegemonic femininity. It is hegemonic masculinity that is a problem. Hegemonic masculinity is a problem if it crowds out other practices. As noted previously, the greater the diversity of the teaching profession, and the less the power structures in society have a hold within it, the less viscous the practice. Increasing fluidity is important because it allows more responsiveness to the variety of students and educational needs within schools and to changing external contexts. A highly viscous practice is more likely to try and make one size fit all. The problem is, therefore, that the new international managerialism imposes structures that encourage hegemonic masculinity within teaching practices. Feminization is not a problem in the same way. Insofar as feminized practices appear, they are never hegemonic. Equivalently, there exist practices of nonhegemonic masculinities. To repeat an observation made earlier, it is important to talk of feminized practices rather than practice. There is no single practice that could be described as feminized practice because there is no unified category, woman. In short, no single form of femininity is dominant in teaching, even if there is an attempt within a particular institution (like a girls school) to impose one. There are always other forms that are equally powerful. Hegemonic masculinity ensures that no one form of femininity could be dominant. Part of what keeps hegemonic masculinity unified is that it relies on valorizing forms of femininity that disempower women. Some current feminized practices are formed in resistance, sometimes explicitly so, to dominant masculinized forms. Resistant feminized practices are instructive. They exemplify how embodiment, diversity, and relation to power can be used to mitigate the effects of overly standardized practice. They are self-consciously different from more orthodox forms of practice, but it is clear that they form no unified category. There are many examples of feminized practices of resistance in the educational research literature. In England, examples have come from black women (for instance, in supplementary schools) and from workingclass women.72 Here I will sketch an example taken from a conversation I had with Syble Morgan, an African Caribbean woman who was the head of the first
72. Maguire, Not Footprints Behind but Footsteps Forward; and Heidi Mirza and Diane Reay, Redefining Citizenship: Black Women Educators and the Third Space, in Challenging Democracy: International Perspectives on Gender, Education and Citizenship, eds. Madeleine Arnot and Jo-Anne W. Dillabough (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000), 5872.

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community black nursery in England. I met her fifteen years ago when she enrolled for a gender course, and we have remained in contact ever since. At the time of this discussion, she was a headteacher of a state-run nursery in Birmingham:
People in their individual places will be trying to do something to improve the situation, but its not known. In some cases you cant even let it be known, whats your thoughts, and why youre doing things. Because were not politicians nobody hears about it and, maybe its for the best as well [that they dont hear]..I thought if I divided the weeks into two I could be more than a 45-place nursery. If I could get the staff which is the maximum staff then I could help a lot more than 45 families in the area, and thats what Im proceeding to do, actually. Then, I go out and form my own liaisons with community groups. From the college thats just up the road from us, come September, or any other time for that matter, I get information about courses that parents could get on, to get out of whatever rut they might find themselves in and could try and better their cycle of life. I do offer support to past parents as well. They ring me up if they have a problem also. But thats not in the system, because, if they have a problem youre supposed to show them to the social worker, who hasnt got the time for the clients she has on her books, never mind to help a free one. A lot of people, I call them the families in the twilight zone. A lot of families in the twilight zone want independent help so that they can help themselves. They dont want to find, especially the Afro-Caribbean ones, they dont want to find themselves with a social worker.73

Syble instantiates a feminized practice, specifically in the way that she draws on a number of other practices of which she is a part: community worker, grandmother, ex-nurse, and so on. It is clearly a resistant practice. She also demonstrates that there is no such thing as a single feminized practice. She was contributing to the fluidity of practices in nursery schools in Birmingham and beyond. CONCLUSION The feminist theory of practice shows that, in general, the leaky, viscous practices of teaching would benefit from increased diversity and less social stratification within the profession. Schools would benefit from having both men and women, in all their cultural diversities, but only insofar as the profession is able to create a culture that values difference. Feminized environments are likely to give more room for maneuver to both students and teachers. If hegemonic masculinity is less prevalent, this gives other masculinities the opportunity to show themselves in safety.74 Feminization, in the sense of a high proportion of women in teaching, is womens problem rather than societys. Society is fortunate that women go on working in essential jobs for less pay, worse conditions, and lower status than their brothers. However, the situation is not good for the women nor for any men who work alongside them (as opposed to being swiftly promoted over them).75 On
73. Syble Morgan, personal conversation with author, Birmingham, England, November 6, 1998. 74. See, for instance, Tony Sewell, Black Masculinities and Schooling: How Black Boys Survive Modern Schooling (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 1997); and Reed, Troubling Boys and Disturbing Discourses on Masculinity and Schooling; Louise Archer and Hiromi Yamashita, Theorising Inner-City Masculinities: Race, Class, Gender and Education, Gender and Education 15, no. 2 (2003): 115132. 75. In the ILO report, part of the definition used for feminization includes the term subsequent low status. It points out that while teaching may provide relatively good salaries for women, this is true only in relation to other occupations that are open to them. Salaries for women are not good in relation to salaries typical of all occupations open to men. Wylie points out that a 1997 OECD report stated that nursing and teaching work in the public sector tend to combine a high level of employment opportunities for women with a below-average wage penalty that is, a wage premium in comparison to the average gender pay ratio (Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession).

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the other hand, it could also be an opportunity. The ILO report lists some of the benefits for women teachers about high levels of feminization in the teaching profession:
It would appear that increased levels of feminization pave the way for a decrease in horizontal segregation, allowing a higher proportion of women to become headteachers. This is not a mechanical relation, but differs from country to country, and takes time to show itself. Other changes in the role of the headteacher may also be playing a part.76

The feminization, in the sense of feminized culture, is harder to find. Historically, women have used whatever spaces are available to them within education to develop their own ways of doing things.77 It may be that current proportions of women in teaching will have a long-term effect on the practices of teaching, even if this is only through creating forms of resistance to imposed hegemonic masculinity. So, far from the feminization of teaching being a threat to good schooling, it is an opportunity to improve education for both sexes.

76. Wylie, Trends in Feminization of the Teaching Profession. 77. Joyce Goodman, A Question of Management Style: Women School Governors, 18001862, Gender and Education 9, no. 2 (1997): 149160; Lynne Walker, Home and Away: The Feminist Remapping of Public and Private Space in Victorian London, in New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender, ed. Rosa Ainley (London: Routledge, 1998); and Martin, To Blaise the Trail for Women to Follow Along, 165181.