Conflicting Social Perceptions of Men Who Teach in Indonesian Kindergartens

DOI

10.2991/icece-16.2017.41How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Indonesian kindergarten, gender, male teachers

Abstract

This paper aims to understand social expectations of male teachers who work as educators and carers of young children. According to the Ministry of Education and Culture's Centre of Data and Statistics of Education/PDSP (2014), the number of male teachers in Indonesian ECE is very small; it is only 3% (11,434) of the whole population of ECE teachers (377,164). However, the number of male teachers has increased compared to the 2001 data, which only 1.95% of teachers in ECE were males. There is an assumption that the small number of men teaching in ECE is related to heteronormative gender ideology of the society. Caring for and educating children is considered a female role while providing for and protecting the family is the male's domain. The increasing number of male teachers in Indonesia might be a clue of as to a shift in the Indonesian idealized gender construction. Based on interviews with seven parents, seven female teachers, and four school administrators, this paper argues that there are conflicting social perceptions of men who work in kindergartens. In a situation where ideologically men/women supposed to be superior to women/men, the society perceives male teacher in accordantly. The attempt to perceive as socially expected trigger inconsistency, contradictions, and ambivalence. The analysis shows that the contradiction is embedded within the social gender system itself. Thus, social perceptions of male teachers in ECE is not a simple black and white social phenomena.

Copyright

© 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hani Yulindrasari
PY  - 2016/11
DA  - 2016/11
TI  - Conflicting Social Perceptions of Men Who Teach in Indonesian Kindergartens
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Early Childhood Education (ICECE 2016)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 233
EP  - 238
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icece-16.2017.41
DO  - 10.2991/icece-16.2017.41
ID  - Yulindrasari2016/11
ER  -