Do Men Still Manage While Women Teach? Using Four Reports on Middle Schooling to Portray Continuities and Changes in Teachers' Work in the 1990s

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which primary, secondary and middle school teachers are represented in four Australian reports on middle schooling in the 1990s. All reports argue for changes in school culture in the middle years but portrayals of each group of teachers reinforce the gender order in contemporary schools. Although there are continuities in the ways teachers are discussed across the reports, a focus on action research and the discourse of teacher as researcher appears in the two most recent documents. The final section of the article considers the potential of this discourse to reconstruct teachers' work and challenge the gender order of the occupation. It concludes that if the positive potential of teachers as researchers is to be realised, then primary, secondary and middle school teachers, men and women, must be participants in all types of research which inform middle schooling.