The Sterotyped Teacher

Today in my ECE class, we had a wonderful presenter, Michelle Gray, who gave us some insight on the EYE (Early Years Evaluation) assessment which happens in pre-school and kindergarten. Although I have many comments and things to write about the EYE assessment alone, that is not where this blog post it going. 

Michelle Gray gave us some examples of what to expect in the EYE assessment. One example she gave is that children are given pictures of certain occupations which they have to identify and tell what the role of the person in the occupation does. If they are able to identify the particular occupation but not tell of the role, they receive zero marks. If they tell what their understanding of the role is, but it is not an 'accepted' answer, they also receive zero. Michelle mentioned that there are three occupations that are shown, a firefighter, a police officer and a teacher. Through her experience she has noticed that one that children often get wrong is the one of a teacher. Why? Because how do you show a picture of a teacher? Most police officers and firefighters are in a uniform that easily identifies them as being in their roles. How is one to identify a teacher through a picture? 

One picture that is provided is of a women, with a bun in her hair, holding a textbook writing "ABC" on the board. Most children cannot identify this image to that of a teacher. Children may say, "A girl writing on the board." With Michelles suggestion to change the picture, they did. They changed it to an image with a female holding a globe. You know, because all teachers stand in the front of the room holding the Earth. Michelle found that that is how children would respond to the image, "Umm, a lady holding the world?" Young children cannot connect to these images because the teachers they work with each day do not look like the people found in these particular images.

These are stereotypes of what a teacher "should" look like. In reality, there are few teachers who will appear that way. For fun, I googled the word "teacher" and clicked to see the image results. All the results contained a female, a chalkboard in the background and they are either wearing glasses, holding a pencil or an apple, pointing, or they look mean. I don't know about you, but I haven't run into a teacher who looks like the following teachers in my professional years of becoming a teacher. I'll give credit to the fact that the people in these images aren't wearing cardigans with knitted apples and one room school houses all around. I realize that these images of teachers were realistic years ago when blackboards were dominantly used, students sat in desks in rows and students all learned through direct instruction, coping notes and worksheets. Are there people today that still believe that a teachers role is to stand powerful among all the students and dictate learning?

 

Not one of the top search results contained an image of a teacher with a child or group of children learning through a hands on experience, a classroom filled with students working on different tasks in a way that suits their learning needs or a teacher facilitating learning through various uses of technology.

I know these images are only a few of teacher stereotypes. Are there other stereotypes that you have faced as a teacher?