ABSTRACT
Throughout the world, various discourses are often used to position teaching in early childhood education (ages 0–8 years) as a “women’s job.” Historically, professions involving care work have often been considered low-status options, particularly for men. In this chapter, I present findings on how a group of South African primary school teachers constructs women as better teachers of children than men by drawing on gendered ideologies that maintain women’s work as care work. In this chapter, I employ a different spin on how a discourse of power operates in ways that assign power to women and subordinate men in early childhood education, or the Foundation Phase (FP), as it is known in South Africa.
