Towards a More Inclusive Early Childhood Education Workforce: Challenging the Stigma of Male-Identified ECEs Working in the Field
About the Project
The field of Early Childhood Education is known for having a female-dominated workforce and for being considered a feminized profession. These gendered connotations come from common conceptions of work with children as ‘women’s work’ with many recruitment campaigns emerging specifically targeted towards recruiting men into the profession. Within many countries globally, recruitment campaigns aim to introduce more male-identified ECEs into the workforce under the auspices that bringing more male-identified workers into the field will serve the development of young boys (Besnard & Letarte, 2017). Such campaigns tend to focus on men as ‘role models’ in their respective fields and ideas of ‘gender balance’ that seek to reinforce normative notions of masculinities while also interrupting ideas of ECE as a feminized profession (Warin, 2018). Still, male-identified workers in the field of ECE face stigmatization, stereotypes, and even presumptions of pedophilia, particularly for gay and queer male ECEs (Goose, 2011; King, 2000). As such, it is important to examine and understand both the attitudes and perspectives of male-identified ECEs and their own experiences and understandings of their masculinities within the field.
This research will create an understanding of the attitudes towards and perspectives of male-identified ECEs in an Ontario, Canada context, which is the only Canadian jurisdiction with a professional regulatory body for the field and where little empirical research exists regarding male ECEs. In particular, this research aims to understand the attitudes and perceptions related to gender, professionals, and males as caregivers. As such, a two-phase approach has been employed with different aims for each phase. The first phase was qualitative semi-structured interviews exploring the experiences and potential encounters with stigmatization male ECEs might have encountered in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care in Ontario. The second phase included digital storytelling - hosted through ReVision Centre for Art and Social Justice - regarding the experiences of male ECEs in Ontario working with and caring for young children and their specific reasons for entering Early Childhood Education and Care as a profession.
Through this inquiry into the current attitudes and perceptions of male-identified ECEs in Ontario and their respective understandings of their masculinities, this research will bring new critical research regarding male-identified ECEs in Ontario, which is particularly important given the low number of men registered in the field—less than 2% of registered ECEs (Ontario College of ECEs, 2019)—with even fewer academic research published pertaining to male-identified ECEs, in particular. This research will provide contributions to current academic research on masculinities, male educators, and professional recruitment of men in ECE while also challenging gendered norms and ideologies that percolate regarding work with young children. As well, by gathering an understanding of both the perceptions and attitudes towards men and also their own understandings of their masculinities, further work can be done to challenge gendered norms within recruitment campaigns towards men in ECE, thereby creating a more inclusive field for future educators.