Women teachers’ perceptions of their identities inside and outside the school

Abstract

Despite the growing interest in the issue of gender and education, few studies have been concerned with the question of women teachers’ identity formation considering the expected roles from them by the society they live in. This thesis attempts to explore the perceptions of women teachers about their identities inside and outside the school through a case study with ten women teachers working in public elementary schools of Istanbul. The results, gathered from semi-structured interviews, indicated the teachers’ identities as multiple and contextually-bound. All the women teachers in the study identified their position in society through the internalized social roles and the socially constructed expectations from them as a “woman”. Impacted by gender, professional and social discourses that sometimes collide with each other, findings from women teachers’ interviews demonstrate how these women struggle to take a position in a male-dominant system. The analysis of the interviews indicated that women teachers perceptions’ of their identities shaped around these themes: “patriarchal norms of the society”, “authority and power relations at school”, “expectations from the profession and disappointments throughout teaching”, “being emotional and emphatic as a women”, “economic freedom” and “political awareness of women teachers”, “balancing the demands of private life and work life”, “marriage and effects on women teachers’ social status”, “collegial relations- cooperation” and “discrimination against women teachers”. This thesis presented that regarding these themes, negotiating identities within themselves and within the complex socio cultural context they live in, these women teachers are involved in an ongoing process of adjustment, adaptation and resistance.