Black male teachers represent 2% of the teaching profession. When grade level and area of specialization are added, for example early childhood education, even fewer Black males are visibly present in classrooms. Because of the underrepresentation of Black male teachers, clarion calls have been made in extant research, media, and popular press for racial and gender equity at and above the early childhood level. Black male teacher recruitment and retention initiatives including Call Me Mister have played an instrumental role in attempting to diversify early childhood classrooms by bolstering the percentage of Black male teachers who teach young children, and by illuminating the importance and benefits of the pedagogies and schooling practices of Black male teachers in supporting Black boys in classrooms. Black boys are often misperceived as disinterested in school, and Black male teachers are summoned to classrooms to serve as role models, father figures, and pedagogues who can meet the academic and social needs of Black boys at all grade levels. However, persistent challenges to the recruitment and retention of Black male teachers to classrooms remain daunting tasks in the teaching profession. More than 85% of teachers are White, middle-class, and female, and this overwhelmingly White female majority has concretized the idea that early childhood teaching is essentially women’s work. In doing so, White female teachers are socially constructed as the hallmark of early childhood education, possessing the White hegemonic feminine characteristics and dispositions essential to teaching young children. To that end, anti-Black misandric normative discourses such as early childhood teaching as women’s work have created barriers for and has stymied the recruitment and retention of men, regardless of race and ethnicity, but especially Black men who desire to teach young children.
An exploratory study of gender and male teachers in early childhood education and care centres in China