The gendered construction of teachers’ identities and practices: feminist critical discourse analysis of policy texts in Ireland

Abstract

While gender and education studies abound, there are fewer studies examining how the gendered construction of teachers’ identities and practices are enabled, and constrained, in policy and research. Here, I conduct a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of this gendered construction in four policy texts in teacher education in Ireland, set within a neoliberal imaginary playing-out across OECD countries, and in mainstream research of teacher effectiveness. The analysis uses a metaphor of confinement to trouble the problem, and to generate wider representations and emancipatory possibilities. The findings reveal how this reform ensemble in Ireland acts more often than not in sync with a global education reform movement in gender-blind ways to constrain, if not actively confine (mostly women) teachers’ voices and agency, often in assumed, theory-weak and patriarchal ways. The study foregrounds the gendered politics of teacher education within a pressing need for egalitarian rather than conservative gender discourses.