ABSTRACT

Our interrogation in chapter 6 of the box office success of ‘cross dressing’ in a kindergarten classroom served to expose many of the dominant images of elementary teachers, not the least of which is the conventional notion that teaching young children is something women do. In this chapter, we shift our focus away from Hollywood’s larger-than-life hero images of teachers (mostly male), to representations of the everyday: female teachers doing ‘women’s work’. How is the ordinariness of women’s work as teachers represented and negotiated in the popular culture of childhood? What is the significance of girls’ and women’s everyday popular culture to the struggle for teacher identity?