An interview with the editors of a new book, Young Children's Perspectives on Teacher Gender
Our member, Dr. Yuwei Xu (the University of Nottingham, UK), and his co-editors, Dr. David Brody (Orot College of Education, Israel), Prof. Kari Emilsen (Queen Maud University College, Norway), and Dr. Laetitia Coles (the University of Queensland, Australia), talk about their edited collection, Young Children’s Perspectives on Teacher Gender: Contextualizing Gender Stereotypes and Inclusive Practices in Early Childhood Education and Care (Routledge, 2025).
Q: What is this edited collection about?
The chapters highlight children’s perspectives on their caregivers and teachers within their socio-cultural contexts. Using the Mosaic approach, the book uses data collected through various methodologies, along with extensive observations and interviews with setting directors, teachers, and parents.
Contributors from China, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, Israel, Turkey, Norway, the UK, and the US present case studies based on early childhood education sites where both men and women work. The authors also outline macro-level cultural contexts to enhance the micro picture from the children’s evidence and demonstrate how children’s perspectives are situated in various ecologies and cultural contexts, with intersectionality such as tradition, race, and religion playing important roles.
The book ends with a cross-country analysis and recommendations for gender-sensitive pedagogies that consider local cultural gender sensitivities. This groundbreaking book will appeal to scholars and researchers in early childhood education, gender and sexuality in education, and diversity and equity in education.
Q: What made you initiate this volume?
Our curiosity as researchers—shaped by our shared interest in gender, pedagogy, and everyday life in early childhood education and care (ECEC) —was sparked by a simple but powerful question: how do young children experience and make meaning of the presence of men in their daily encounters within early childhood settings? As gender researchers, we decided to focus on children’s views regarding the gender of their teachers, both male and female. Each in our own sphere, we have engaged in children perspective research and we see much promise in this methodology for the future of early childhood education research.
We were eager to develop a research methodology based on child perspective inquiry, believing that such a model would not only provide insight into our quest for understanding how teacher gender might be viewed by young children, but also because this methodology will provide a model for other researchers in the field. We are all committed to international collaborative research. Three of the four PIs worked together on an international collaboration regarding men’s career trajectories in ECEC. We decided to apply what we learned about collaboration in that project to this new inquiry. Through our knowledge of other researchers around the world in early childhood gender study and the inquiry into men in ECEC, we recruited 20 researchers, organized into nine country teams.
We have realized our goal of international collaboration through Zoom meetings, work task forces, and peer review and feedback. Through three years of hard work and collegial support we have realized our research goals both in answering our research questions and in developing an international collaborative methodology that places the child at the center of the inquiry as the primary informant.
An excerpt from the introductory chapter:
Positioning children at the center of research on men in ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) has been a long time coming. Quite naturally, the first people to be investigated in this field were the men themselves. Much research over the past three decades has provided insights and hard data on the motivations of men to join the ECEC workforce, their experience as a gender minority, and their impact on families, colleagues, the ECEC settings, and the society as a whole. However, men’s influence on children is just beginning to be understood.
A focus on children’s perspective means uncovering their understandings and perceptions of their relationship with their caregivers and educators. These relationships find voice in their interactions, expressions, and communication with the adults who care for and educate them. Our focus is on the significance of gender for perceptions and interactions between the child and the adult.
Thus, when we address the child’s perspective, we essentially ask the question - Does the gender of the educator/caregiver matter? And if it does matter, then we need to learn what characterizes those gendered relationships, what are the causes of gendered influences, and what are the mediating factors involved.
In order to carry out this research we looked to child perspective research in other fields to inform our own methodology. At the basis of this genre of research is a profound respect for children as experts in their own lives (Langsted, 1994; Clark & Moss, 2005).
Living in a global world requires a transnational and cross-cultural view on the issue of children’s perspectives on their male and female teachers. Following Connelly and Messerschmidt’s (2005) view that gender is socially constructed, we believe that children’s views on their male and female teachers are also profoundly influenced by culture and society.
Furthermore, the distinction between sex and gender, and their interrelationship, needs to be taken into account. Just as gender is socially constructed, so are societal norms about bodily appearance and function. Therefore, we expect to find variance across societies in children’s perspectives not only about their own and their teachers’ genders, but also about their own and their teachers’ sex, as represented by their bodily awareness and their awareness of their teachers’ bodies (Ljunggren & Eidevald, 2022).
Thus, establishing an international research team was essential for our project to succeed. We decided to emphasize adequate representation of the Global South in this endeavor. We reached out to early childhood gender researchers from each continent, resulting in nine country teams with a total of 24 researchers, spread around all continents.
We chose in this study to organize our data by country, and to present nine case studies, one from each country, to be researched and written by a team of two to five researchers from that country. A cross-case analysis was carried out and follows the case studies in this book.
As such our findings in this study represent not only a breakthrough in understanding the influence of men on the young children they teach and care for, but also on the benefits of looking across cultures to attain crucial insights into the relationship between children and their caregiver/educators whatever their gender might be.
Research on children’s perspectives on their male and female teachers
Previous research shows that the presence of men in the ECEC setting did not challenge, undermine, or change children’s gendered constructions of the world. Nevertheless, positive relationships were reported with their male teachers. Overall, choices of a teacher for particular activities were related to the child’s understanding of which teacher was adept at that activity, rather than by the teacher’s gender.
Previous studies did not heavily contextualize the ECEC setting nor the socio-cultural environment. In contrast the current study will place a heavy emphasis on the culture of the setting, while paying attention to four ecological levels. This research design is intended to fill the gap of knowledge about the influence of culture on children’s understanding of the significance of gender in their daily life in the ECEC setting.
Research aims
While our key goal is to understand children’s perspectives of their teachers in ECEC, we have chosen to use a gender lens throughout the study. One avenue to achieving this goal is to look at how children understand and interpret concepts of care as seen through teacher behaviors, and the extent to which these concepts of care described by children are gendered.
Adult input will provide complementary context to children’s experiences and is not intended to cross-check the ‘accuracy’ of what children say. This will help ensure children’s sovereignty over their own stories and experiences and give credence to our ethical commitment to report children’s perspectives as accurately and truthfully as possible. Furthermore, we aim to bring to the fore the hidden curriculum through resources present within the ECEC setting.
Through observation, we aim to identify types of physical and social relationships between children and their teachers that are viewed as appropriate and valued. Furthermore, we are interested in norms and practices of classroom organization and the division of roles, responsibilities, activities undertaken between teachers and the extent to which these norms and practices are gendered.
For further contextualization, we aim to describe the broader sociocultural contexts within which children live and learn on the macro, exo, meso, and micro levels as related to gender (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Vélez-Agosto, Soto-Crespo, Vizcarrondo-Oppenheimer, Vega-Molina, & García Coll, 2017).
Research Questions
1. What are young children’s perspectives of their teachers who identify as men and women?
(a) What are these perspectives in classrooms with teachers who identify as men and as women?
(b) What are these perspectives in classrooms with either a teacher who identifies as a man or a teacher who identifies as a woman?
(c) How do the children’s perspectives differ according to the gender of their teachers?
2. How are the immediate and broader socio-cultural contexts that surround early childhood settings reflected in young children's perspectives on gender?