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That's Funny You Don't Look Like A Teacher!: Interrogating Images, Identity, And Popular Culture
What do you see when you think of teacher? Where does what you see come from? This is a book about the images of teachers and teaching which permeate the everyday lives of children and adults, shaping in important but unrecognised ways their notions of whom teachers are and what they do. The authors show how, using a creative interdisciplinary approach, it is possible to analyse drawings of teachers, television programmes, films, cartooons, comics and even Barbie dolls. Illustrated with colour reproductions and excerpts from interviews and journals, this book should appeal to teachers, academics and anyone who is interested in the popular culture of childhood, gender issues, professional identity and teacher education.
- GenresEducation
180 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 1995
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February 24, 2022
A couple of years ago, I reviewed an edited collection called ‘Teachers’ Professional Lives’. One of the chapters in that book was written by the authors of this one and it really fascinated me – so much so that I’ve spoken to lots of people about it since. In fact, a friend of mine who does some freelance work training teachers in schools has even gotten the teachers she trains to do the exercise discussed here.
Basically, people are asked to ‘draw a teacher’. It isn’t really a test of your skills as an artist, but more to do with the images and stereotypes we use to understand what a ‘teacher’ is. I mean, will your drawing include an apple? Do you draw a woman? Do you include a white board? Do you include mathematical addition problems on that white board? Is she wearing a long skirt or is she in a business suit? Is she young? Are there any children in the drawing? What are they doing?
These might seem like silly questions – but they tell us a lot about how teachers are understood in our society. Teachers are often depicted as young and female, but mostly sexless. Although, some of the young boys rebelled by drawing the teachers with breasts, which some then tried to rub out.
Teachers are central to the ‘educational experience’, almost and often to the exclusion of the students they teach – in fact, remarkably few drawings (by either teachers or their students) included students. The authors here mention that at academic conferences, when they would discuss the results of their research, many of their fellow educational researchers would claim the results they were getting were actually due to how they had framed the activity. Which then meant they spent time re-framing the exercise to seek to accommodate this criticism. Actually, if I was doing this exercise with people I would do it in two parts. I would start by asking them to draw a teacher. And then I would say, “now, draw yourself as a teacher – if your first and second drawing are going to be the same, you don’t need to draw another one.” I would love to see if this made any difference at all.
Given that so many teachers, especially primary school teachers, are female, you might think that the gendered nature of the drawings is hardly surprising – but the gendering goes deep. The authors interviewed many of the people who did these drawings and sought to understand what they were attempting to draw. I’m fascinated by drawings – in a way that, I suspect, only someone who can’t draw to save themselves can be. Years ago, I read a book called ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’. In that the author says that one of the things that stops people (like me) being able to draw is that we have a series of symbols in our heads, and we draw those symbols, rather than what we see. So, noses look like this, and ears like that, and eyes like this – and rather than the subsequent drawing looking like your friend, it looks like a mess of misplaced symbols. But a symbolic mess nonetheless. These authors take this idea one step further – where what you are drawing is a symbol of a teacher, not an individual teacher at all. This reminds me of something Bergson says about comedies, when compared to dramas – that comedies often are called things like, ‘The Accountant’ or ‘The Teacher’ or ‘The Lawyer’ – because a comedy isn’t about a rich and complex character, but rather, a set of already known stereotypes. Our drawings are often much the same.
And our drawings can be insanely conservative. I noticed something a month or so ago while I was out on one of my walks. It was a stencil image of a man walking beside a bike. The stencil image was saying that this was a shared path for people and bikes. But the image of a man was used in the way ‘mankind’ once meant men and women. It is just I can’t think of anyone who would today say ‘mankind’ to mean both men and women now – but a male stick-figure saying the same thing is perfectly fine. In fact, about the only time it is not fine is when the stick-figures are used for toilets, and then you have to have both male and female stick-figures. At a local shopping centre near where I live they have male and female figures in a box to represent the lifts – but I can’t tell you how often I have seen people assume these must be the toilets. I’ve learnt to note the exasperated expression people have on their faces as they rush to the lifts and then realise they are lifts. I point them in the direction of the toilets.
The last few chapters of this book provide various readings of how teachers are represented in films and children’s television shows. There is a wonderful ‘re-viewing’ of To Sir With Love – a film one of the authors had watched and loved in the 1960s, but hadn’t seen since. I had almost the exact same reaction when I saw the film again after not having seen it since the 1970s. I read the book too back then, and another book by the same author, Honorary White – about him being invited to South Africa. The scene that troubled both me (and the author here) was where the teacher walks into the classroom and discovers a sanitary pad smouldering – the teacher is so outraged he calls all of the young women in the classroom sluts. The highly gendered nature of his attack, and his removing of the boys from all blame, plays so clearly into gendered stereotypes of women as damned whores or god’s police. The author here says seeing the film again after so many years highlighted all of the gendered, raced and classed issues with the film – none of which she remembered prior to seeing the film again.
There were other things that were interesting to notice in these reviews of teacher films. That in so many of the films the teacher (‘how do I get through to these kids?’) is something of a rebel. That school systems and curricula are invariably presented as boring and ultimately worthless to the lives of the students. That the turning point in the film generally involves a kind of figurative book burning – with Sir in ‘To Sir With Love’ dumping the text books into the bin, or Mr Keating in ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ getting the boys to tear a page out of their poetry textbook.
They also discuss ‘Kindergarten Cop’. How Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t have or need any training as a teacher to be the best god damn kindergarten teacher anyone has ever seen. This is a frequent trope in such films – in fact, it would be interesting to know if there has ever been a drama where the main teacher succeeds by using the kinds of evidence-based pedagogies taught in university graduate teacher courses. (I’m only joking…)
These images denigrating real life teachers have real-world consequences. Recently, the Australian federal government conducted an inquiry into initial teacher education courses. As part of that review, it looks like Teach for Australia will become an accredited higher education provider – that is, able to train their pre-service teachers without working with a university provider. Their model sees teaching as a form of ‘leadership’ – it is not supported by peer reviewed evidence, and the evidence against its model is overwhelming and conclusive – I can provide links if you are interested. But we have been brought up to believe that smart people invariably make better teachers, that teaching is a skill you are born with, rather than something you learn or develop, that ‘high achievers’ in the classroom will automatically become high achieving teachers. And we have learnt this from crappy films set in classrooms where an outsider teacher (often not a teacher at all) overcomes all odds, not by turning to the distilled wisdom of a couple of hundred years of pedagogical inquiry and theory, but through gut instinct and grit and damned hard work.
As the authors ask, although, perhaps not as dramatically as I’m about to – why are there no dramas set in hospitals where a janitor uses their wits and radical empathy to cure cancer, after the simpleminded, dysfunctional and rule-following doctors have all given up or failed dismally? Such a script would be the basis for a comedy – however, it is the absolute standard for every classroom drama.
I really liked this book – a lovely piece of research.
Basically, people are asked to ‘draw a teacher’. It isn’t really a test of your skills as an artist, but more to do with the images and stereotypes we use to understand what a ‘teacher’ is. I mean, will your drawing include an apple? Do you draw a woman? Do you include a white board? Do you include mathematical addition problems on that white board? Is she wearing a long skirt or is she in a business suit? Is she young? Are there any children in the drawing? What are they doing?
These might seem like silly questions – but they tell us a lot about how teachers are understood in our society. Teachers are often depicted as young and female, but mostly sexless. Although, some of the young boys rebelled by drawing the teachers with breasts, which some then tried to rub out.
Teachers are central to the ‘educational experience’, almost and often to the exclusion of the students they teach – in fact, remarkably few drawings (by either teachers or their students) included students. The authors here mention that at academic conferences, when they would discuss the results of their research, many of their fellow educational researchers would claim the results they were getting were actually due to how they had framed the activity. Which then meant they spent time re-framing the exercise to seek to accommodate this criticism. Actually, if I was doing this exercise with people I would do it in two parts. I would start by asking them to draw a teacher. And then I would say, “now, draw yourself as a teacher – if your first and second drawing are going to be the same, you don’t need to draw another one.” I would love to see if this made any difference at all.
Given that so many teachers, especially primary school teachers, are female, you might think that the gendered nature of the drawings is hardly surprising – but the gendering goes deep. The authors interviewed many of the people who did these drawings and sought to understand what they were attempting to draw. I’m fascinated by drawings – in a way that, I suspect, only someone who can’t draw to save themselves can be. Years ago, I read a book called ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’. In that the author says that one of the things that stops people (like me) being able to draw is that we have a series of symbols in our heads, and we draw those symbols, rather than what we see. So, noses look like this, and ears like that, and eyes like this – and rather than the subsequent drawing looking like your friend, it looks like a mess of misplaced symbols. But a symbolic mess nonetheless. These authors take this idea one step further – where what you are drawing is a symbol of a teacher, not an individual teacher at all. This reminds me of something Bergson says about comedies, when compared to dramas – that comedies often are called things like, ‘The Accountant’ or ‘The Teacher’ or ‘The Lawyer’ – because a comedy isn’t about a rich and complex character, but rather, a set of already known stereotypes. Our drawings are often much the same.
And our drawings can be insanely conservative. I noticed something a month or so ago while I was out on one of my walks. It was a stencil image of a man walking beside a bike. The stencil image was saying that this was a shared path for people and bikes. But the image of a man was used in the way ‘mankind’ once meant men and women. It is just I can’t think of anyone who would today say ‘mankind’ to mean both men and women now – but a male stick-figure saying the same thing is perfectly fine. In fact, about the only time it is not fine is when the stick-figures are used for toilets, and then you have to have both male and female stick-figures. At a local shopping centre near where I live they have male and female figures in a box to represent the lifts – but I can’t tell you how often I have seen people assume these must be the toilets. I’ve learnt to note the exasperated expression people have on their faces as they rush to the lifts and then realise they are lifts. I point them in the direction of the toilets.
The last few chapters of this book provide various readings of how teachers are represented in films and children’s television shows. There is a wonderful ‘re-viewing’ of To Sir With Love – a film one of the authors had watched and loved in the 1960s, but hadn’t seen since. I had almost the exact same reaction when I saw the film again after not having seen it since the 1970s. I read the book too back then, and another book by the same author, Honorary White – about him being invited to South Africa. The scene that troubled both me (and the author here) was where the teacher walks into the classroom and discovers a sanitary pad smouldering – the teacher is so outraged he calls all of the young women in the classroom sluts. The highly gendered nature of his attack, and his removing of the boys from all blame, plays so clearly into gendered stereotypes of women as damned whores or god’s police. The author here says seeing the film again after so many years highlighted all of the gendered, raced and classed issues with the film – none of which she remembered prior to seeing the film again.
There were other things that were interesting to notice in these reviews of teacher films. That in so many of the films the teacher (‘how do I get through to these kids?’) is something of a rebel. That school systems and curricula are invariably presented as boring and ultimately worthless to the lives of the students. That the turning point in the film generally involves a kind of figurative book burning – with Sir in ‘To Sir With Love’ dumping the text books into the bin, or Mr Keating in ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ getting the boys to tear a page out of their poetry textbook.
They also discuss ‘Kindergarten Cop’. How Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t have or need any training as a teacher to be the best god damn kindergarten teacher anyone has ever seen. This is a frequent trope in such films – in fact, it would be interesting to know if there has ever been a drama where the main teacher succeeds by using the kinds of evidence-based pedagogies taught in university graduate teacher courses. (I’m only joking…)
These images denigrating real life teachers have real-world consequences. Recently, the Australian federal government conducted an inquiry into initial teacher education courses. As part of that review, it looks like Teach for Australia will become an accredited higher education provider – that is, able to train their pre-service teachers without working with a university provider. Their model sees teaching as a form of ‘leadership’ – it is not supported by peer reviewed evidence, and the evidence against its model is overwhelming and conclusive – I can provide links if you are interested. But we have been brought up to believe that smart people invariably make better teachers, that teaching is a skill you are born with, rather than something you learn or develop, that ‘high achievers’ in the classroom will automatically become high achieving teachers. And we have learnt this from crappy films set in classrooms where an outsider teacher (often not a teacher at all) overcomes all odds, not by turning to the distilled wisdom of a couple of hundred years of pedagogical inquiry and theory, but through gut instinct and grit and damned hard work.
As the authors ask, although, perhaps not as dramatically as I’m about to – why are there no dramas set in hospitals where a janitor uses their wits and radical empathy to cure cancer, after the simpleminded, dysfunctional and rule-following doctors have all given up or failed dismally? Such a script would be the basis for a comedy – however, it is the absolute standard for every classroom drama.
I really liked this book – a lovely piece of research.
Displaying 1 of 1 review