Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 4; July 03

The Heart of the Matter : Gender in Teaching

Lou Spaventa, California

"Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism.
But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another.
Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid.
There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman."
-- Margaret Fuller

When you picture a teacher, what sex is the teacher? Do you see a man or woman? Do you see a person of the same sex as yourself? Do you see a figure without any specific sexual traits, so you cannot clearly say male or female? Is there anything about the act of teaching that is inherently male or female for you? Do you think of a nurturer, and thus a female? Do you think of a manager, and thus a male? Forgive the stereotypical and perhaps outdated use of language and image here. Indulge me further. Do males have one sort of teaching style in general, and women another, again, in general? Is a good teacher blind to gender difference or is a good teacher acutely aware of gender difference? Does such awareness matter in teaching? Is the gender of a teacher an important factor in that person's professional practice or isn't it? Does a successful teaching-learning relationship between teacher and student have nothing or everything to do with gender?

My feeling is that gender does play an important role in the teaching-learning relationship. Certainly, when we look at historical evidence, we see that teaching has passed from a primarily male occupation to one in which females are the majority in the so-called developed countries of Europe and North America. In the U.S., nineteenth century women were expected to give up ideas of marriage and family if they became teachers, curiously creating a social class of supposedly sexually-neutered women. While women were needed in the co-educational common school classroom, the headmaster or principal (from principal teacher in the U.S.) remained a male in charge of the school, its teachers and students. It took quite a while for schools in North America to come under female leadership. In fact, when one looks at the statistics in U.S. schools today, female principals (as well as female teachers) are far more common in the primary schools than at any other level, a reflex no doubt of the perceived connection between nurturing one's own child as a mother and educating the children of others. As well, there is the presumption that each ascending level of education carries more prestige; therefore, while females outnumber males in primary education leadership positions, males outnumber females in secondary and tertiary leadership positions. When I reflect on my own primary education, I see a line of women's faces, not a single male. It was only in secondary school that I encountered a male teacher.

And when I first studied with a male teacher, was there anything different about that experience? I think there was. The male instructors seemed much more focused on their subject matter and less focused on their students. They were intent on conveying the truths and laws of their disciplines, and only secondarily interested in the interior lives of their students. My memory hastily skips over the secondary years and rests at college. There I had a creative writing teacher who made a lasting impression upon me. My father had just had a massive heart attack and I was struggling to survive intellectually against the tug of family turmoil. In this male instructor's creative writing class, we were assigned to write original poetry. In a meeting with the instructor, he ripped apart my poems, partly for their spiritual content, but mostly because they weren't very good poems. He had no tact, nor cared to show me any sympathy when I tried to explain how my father's heart attack had affected me, coming a year and a half after my mother's bout with cancer. I left that instructor's office totally shattered emotionally. I felt low as could be. Months later, in a comparative literature course taught by a woman, I found someone interested enough in me as a person to give me unsolicited advice in conversation. She had thought about me and what I might do with my life. I have never forgotten that. Incidentally, her advice was that I become a teacher, something I silently rejected out of hand as soon as I heard it - all these years later, of course I see that she had chosen wisely for me. I did become a teacher.

Finally, when I think of male mentors later in my professional life, I see them not as encouragers and supporters, but as challengers to my sense of who I was as a teacher. I owe them a great debt indeed for helping me to think and to learn, but there was no warmth and little affection in those relationships beyond a laugh or occasional smile. I think men are socialized to see other men as competitors and to treat work as a zero sum game in which there can be only one clear winner. I believe it is not so with women. My sense is that women are socialized to be inclusive in their thinking and to entertain the idea that everyone can succeed. They thus make better potential mentors than men for me. However, it is the least common case for a male student to have a female mentor. Mentors tend to be same sex although an older male mentor to a younger woman is not uncommon. Yet, in this last relationship the possibility of a liaison other than professional is awake in the minds of people.

For me, the male spirit of teaching brings competition to the classroom, order to the subject matter, and risk to the classroom ethos. Competition among students can be a positive force for the betterment of all or it can create an atmosphere of mistrust and one-up-manship. Order is the second element brought by the male mind for me. Order seeks to classify and organize the world in order to understand it. When order is successful, it makes the task of learning easier for students, but it also can be dry and squeeze the life-blood out of the subject matter. Risk is the sense that both the male instructor and his students may try to move beyond the given knowledge of the subject into new territory, new territory in which failure or a dead-end is as likely as success. Risk can create interest and even camaraderie, but it also can create a climate of fear if unsuccessful risk-taking is penalized with criticism.

The female spirit of teaching brings cooperation, appreciation and safety. Cooperation is the assumption that both instructor and students will work together in harmony for the common good. When cooperation works, it produces more and better quality work from teacher and students. When it doesn't work, it is because cooperation is only given lip service in the act of teaching-learning, and students realize that a separate agenda exists, usually the teacher's sense of where the class should go. Appreciation is the notion that the subject matter has value, and it falls to the instructor and her students to examine it to see where that value resides. Appreciation can make a classroom a place of joy; on the other hand, indiscriminate appreciation makes nothing valuable because everything is. Safety is the idea that the classroom is a safe place for the individual and for the group, a place in which error will not be criticized, but acknowledged for what it is, a clue to learning. When safety permeates a classroom, everyone works in peace and at their own pace. When it suffocates a classroom, learning becomes stagnant.

Gender matters because I see these elements in teaching as dominantly male and female, and thus attached to men and women. However, it is only when “fluid hardens to solid and solid rushes to fluid,” when male and female qualities join together, that one can really begin to talk of great teachers. Great teachers possess both male and female qualities, and know how to use them for the good of their students. I realize in writing this that I am making a sweeping generalization which can be proven false by any number of individual testimonials to successful teachers different from what I have described here. I believe a certain adrogeny of human qualities, a mixing of male and female, characterizes great teachers. Yet even as I write this, I recall one of my mentors, Caleb Gattegno, whom I regard as a great teacher, and he contradicts my generalizations.
But then, doesn't the exception prove the rule? I believe it does. “Nature provides exceptions to every rule,” said Margaret Fuller.

Finally, just as male and female teachers bring differing dominant qualities to their teaching, male and female students bring them to their learning. In fact, when one teaches co-ed classes, one is forced to acknowledge other ways of knowing the world. If male, one begins to see the benefits of affect, cooperation, and a congenial classroom atmosphere which female students bring to their learning. If one is female, one begins to see the benefits of competition, order and risk which male students bring to their learning. From such experience, the androgynous teacher develops. Gender matters, then it merges.

(Margaret Fuller, whose quotation begins this column, was a mid-nineteenth century feminist writer and political activist who created intellectual salons for women in Boston, cofounded The Dial with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and was with Mazzini in Italian political struggle. Her influence on women's rights in the U.S. was great, and she is often called the “first American feminist.” )