Teachers' Work, Food Policies, and Gender in Argentina

Abstract

Few studies explore teachers' involvement in school feeding, questioning gendered implications within a feminine and feminized profession. Ethnographic data from one public high school in Metropolitan Buenos Aires suggest that teachers' efforts to address student hunger added new work roles: food advocates/activists, food managers, and service providers/caregivers. The data illustrate the collision of gendered roles (feeding and teaching) as well as how the gendered nature of policy shapes teachers' work. [teachers' work, gender, policy, school feeding] Hunger is a major educational concern around the globe: the World Food Programme states that approximately 66 million children attend school hungry on a daily basis (World Food Programme 2009:4). Where school feeding programs exist, they attempt to alleviate hunger and malnutrition to support students' education. Curiously few studies question the implications of school feeding for the teaching profession (Conklin and Bordi 2003;Murphy et al. 2000; Russell et al. 2007), let alone question the gendered implications of food work on a feminine and feminized profession. How are teachers involved in school feeding programs, which provide such vital support for students' education? How does that involvement affect teachers' work in a moment characterized by cuts in social services and economic crises? In this article we explore teachers' work feeding students in one public high school in Metropolitan Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ethnographic data revealed that feeding students via two different programs added three new nontraditional roles to high school teachers' work, roles that reflected feminized work behaviors and practices. In particular, the food work illustrated how the policies (discourses, texts, processes, and contexts) involved high school teachers in more affective or care work associated with elementary teaching. We suggest the feminization of teaching work insidiously expanding from elementary education has uncertain implications for secondary education. We argue that the gendered nature of feeding and teaching work has colluded with the gendered nature of policy to create this change.Our argument resulted from braiding two strands of literature: teaching work historically framed as women's work and involving feeding students, and policy as a sociocultural practice-a gendered one, specifically (Stambach and David 2005). Numerically in the majority, women are responsible for the formal education of children in many parts of the world. Intimately linked to discourses of caring, self-sacrifice, and nurturing, "the teacher" has long been embodied by women and framed in relation to the role of mother (Fischman 2000;Morgade and Bellucci 1997). Since the beginning of the Argentine mass education project, teachers were presumed to feed students "literacy, values, and civic virtues" along with spirituality (Fischman 2007:356). Feeding hungry students, as policy and economic crisis demanded in the early 21st century, could be seamlessly woven into historically perce...