“You Don’t Have to Be a Teacher to Teach This Unit:” Teaching, Technology, and Gender in the Classroom

Abstract

Given the increasing power of conservative movements in the larger society, there is considerable pressure currently not only to redefine the manner in which education is carried out, but to redefine what education is actually for This has had a major impact on teachers’ autonomy and the definition of what counts as a skill. We argue that teaching is a specific kind of labor process, one that is currently being subject to rationalization, deskilling and intensification. Since teaching has historically been seen as largely “women’s paid work,” the gender implications of such tendencies are crucial. By interpreting teaching in gender and labor process terms, we report data from an ethnographic study of the use of a computer literacy curriculum to illuminate the effects of these tendencies on teachers’ daily lives. In this context, teachers often employed a prepackaged curriculum that deskilled them and frequently left them bored and reliant on outside experts and purchased material. Yet they also employed the curriculum for their own purposes, using it to partly solve the problems caused by their intense schedule and work load. This pragmatic response cannot be understood unless the gendered realities of teachers’ work inside and outside of the school are recognized.