This book investigates the dynamic relationship between masculinity,
fiction and teaching answering one central question. How are male
teachers influenced by fictional narratives in the construction of
masculinities within education? It achieves this in three major steps:
by describing a methodological system of narrative analysis that is able
to account for the influence of a fictional text alongside a reading of
interview data, by focusing on a specific cohort of male teachers in
order to measure the influence of a fictional text and the literary
tropes they contain, both widening and restricting perceptions of
teachers and teaching. The book demonstrates how fictional narratives
and their encompassing ideologies can become a powerful force in the
shaping of male teachers professional identities. The book focuses on a
collection of 22 fictional narratives drawn from the teacher text genre.
Each text describes the world of teachers and teaching from differing
perspectives, in differing forms including, literary texts; dramatic
works such as plays or musicals; feature films; and television and radio
series. The teacher text is a popular and prolific genre. As part of the
analysis the book pilots an innovative methodological process hat
reconciles the structural and textual differences between fictional
texts and interview data in an effort to find points of commonality and
mutual influence. Stories of Men and Teaching reveals how teaching
professionals utilise tropes found in fictional texts in chaotic and
unstructured ways to manage points of professional intensity as they
arise. Key features such as legacy, fear, belonging, reparation and
violence are identified as themes that occupy male teachers most when
considering their own identity and professional performance, and each is
also represented in the fictional teacher text canon.
