English Teachers Gendered Identities Constructions in their Doings, Sayings and Relatings

Stating my research concern

Sharing an office space with colleagues allows teachers to talk about students and discuss teaching practices, activities, methodologies, among other aspects related to teaching. From these daily chats, I noticed that my colleagues related differently with students and had contrasting perceptions about them which further led to certain pedagogical decisions. To understand this situation in depth, I conducted observations in the form of raw field notes of my colleagues’ informal conversations about their classes and students, which I later analyzed with theory on teacher-student relationships based on a gender perspective.

The following paragraphs illustrate two examples of these field notes, which were vital to framing my research concern. The first field note reports a conversation that occurred when a colleague and I checked the attendance list of a class we shared.

My male colleague saw the name of a girl in a list and immediately reacted with anger. I asked him about his reaction, and he stated that the student tried to flirt with him as a persuasive act for approving the subject. He also added: “In class, that girl used to hang out with a male gay student, and they became unbearable by making certain comments that one sometimes does not know how to handle in class. I obviously know that the sexual preferences should be respected but it is difficult to manage that”. (Field note 1, August 24, 2017)

I can relate the above to Baxter (2003) who explains that “subjects can be multiply positioned in terms of their agency to adapt to, negotiate, resist or take up dominant subject positions within specific discursive contexts” (p. 31). In this vein of thought, the male teacher maintained a political position of respect towards sexual preferences, but he was placed in a position in which he did not know how to deal with his students’ inappropriate comments. Thus, his way of handling this situation was not to express his opinion on these comments with his students. Furthermore, Litosseliti (2013) states that, by making choices, we adopt different gendered selves. Therefore, the teacher seems to have taken on a gendered identity by commenting that a girl tried to flirt with him and expressing difficulties to handle topics related with sexual orientation in class.

Another reported conversation in my field notes happened while two teachers were discussing their students’ lack of attendance and bad attitude in an English class they shared.

A female teacher expressed her frustration towards that class. She claimed: “I make my best effort, I plan games, I take videos to class, and the students are incredibly quiet. They ignore me; they do not even speak”. A male teacher replied by saying “I tell them that if they come to class as an ornament, it is better that they don’t come. I grade those students who do something, not the ones who just occupy a chair.” He also referred to a male student like this: “There is also a boy, Pesca. He pretends to know everything. He is arrogant. He is not passing the subject with me. I want to see his arrogance lowered”. On the contrary, the female teacher highlighted Pesca as the student who saves her class when nobody participates. After that, they agreed on a topic to carry out in the next classes and finished the conversation. (Field note 2, September 5, 2017)

These two teachers had different feelings and perceptions about their lessons´ outcomes and students, and they made decisions based on them.

On the one hand, the male teacher seemed to be stricter and more discipline-oriented. On the other hand, the female teacher expressed her frustration towards the situation and expected to be advised on improving her students’ attitude toward her classes. Litosseliti (2013) explains that the construction of gender occurs within relationships and the extent to which people identify themselves with others. Therefore, these teachers might have constructed gendered identities as their perceptions and level of identification with students, and specifically in the case of Pesca, it led them to make some pedagogical decisions. Additionally, teachers could have enacted another gender construction through identifying with a discourse related to complaining about students despite their individual differences.

Hence, I considered that the relationship between the teachers’ pedagogical practices and the construction of their gendered identities is an area that needs to be further researched. Additionally, I conducted a literature review of literature at the international and national levels, and I discovered that, although gender in English language teaching and learning has been addressed ( Baxter, 2002. Benavides-Buitrago, 2017. Castañeda-Peña, 2008, 2012. Durán, 2006. Hruska, 2004. Rojas, 2012 ;

Rondón, 2012. Mojica and Castañeda-Peña, 2017. Sunderland, 2000 ), teachers’ pedagogical practices and their gendered identities is an area that is yet to be addressed. Hence, the following question guided my research.

How do EFL university teachers’ pedagogical practices relate to their gendered identity construction?

Pedagogical practices framed into sayings, doings, and relatings

I conceptualized pedagogical practices from the perspective of feminist poststructuralist theory ( Weedon, 1987 ), which relies on the subjective construction of the human being through language and meanings assigned to words. Thus, human beings are constructed through discursive practices within specific contexts. Humans also assign meanings to the world in order to understand, adapt, oppose, or resist their own reality.

Hence, teaching under the feminist poststructuralist theory should be a relational process, not a mechanical one. It goes beyond designing lesson plans and implementing teaching methods ( Castañeda-Peña at al ., 2016 ). Thereby, Kemmis at al . (2014) conceived pedagogical practices to be as socially established as any other human activity, and as complex and unfixed spaces where individuals might adopt different positions according to the dynamic nature of settings, discourses, and situations. In other words, practices are intersubjective spaces in which we shape and are shaped by discourses, actions, and interactions.

For Kemmis at al . (2014) , practices are framed into the architectures of sayings, doings, and relatings, which take place withing culturaldiscursive, material-economic, and sociopolitical arrangements.

As shown in the Figure above, cultural-discursive, material-economic, and sociopolitical arrangements are preexisting conditions for practices within semantic, physical, and social spaces. Therefore, sayings involve the discourses, topics, issues, or problems addressed in practice. Doings are related to the way the classroom is set up, the materials or resources used, and the activities implemented. Finally, relatings correspond to power positionings and arrangements during the interactions between teachers and students. The way a practice takes place is determined by the conditions given within a particular time, space, and discourses. It also comes into being through individual and collective participation. The participants could leave memories, interactional capacities, material, and social spaces that could come into existence in other practices.

Doings, sayings, and realtings are a product of the pluralism, instability, and variation of teachers’ discourses, interactions, and actions. Kemmis at al . (2014) invite us not to consider just teaching practices, but also the relationship these practice architectures could have with other practices as webs of human social activity. Hence, sayings, doings, and relatings might interweave, occurring at the same time and influencing other practices such as students’ learning, educational research, or educational administration.

Figure 1: Figure 1. The media and spaces in which sayings, doings, and relatings exist

Source: Kemmis at al. (2014, p. 34)

Construction of gendered identities

It is important to highlight that gender is not equated with sex. Hence, according to Butler (1999) , the sexed body serves only as an instrument to assign cultural meanings to the world. However, we cannot consider sex only as a category that classifies males and females according to their genitalia and bodily functions. Therefore, gender should not be seen merely as a social construction shaped by context and interactions. Gender and sex are “systems assembled from bodily, cultural, and intersubjective subsystems” ( Fausto-Sterling, 2019, p. 11). This means that gender structures might change biological functions, and biological structures affect gender identity.

Regarding the above, being male or female does not entirely define our gender identity because it is socially constructed and developed according to time, context, interactions, or circumstances. Thus, we construct gender every day by “making use of discrete, well-defined bundles of behavior that can simply be plugged into interactional situations to produce recognizable enactments of masculinity and femininity” ( West and Zimmerman, 1987, p. 135 ). In other words, our gender identities are shaped as we adapt, contest, negotiate, or oppose normative, hegemonic behaviors.

We cannot put ourselves into normative boxes and behave according to what is supposed to be feminine or masculine. Depending on their situations and interactions, women and men could enact or construct varying personal femininities and masculinities. This implies that “as humans we construct our identities in various ways, some of which are related to ideal typical forms of masculinity and femininity, and some of which are not” ( Paechter, 2006, p. 262). Therefore, any person, woman, or man, can enact masculinities and femininities, as they are diverse and varied gender identity constructions. Additionally, talking about femininities and masculinities in plural implies that there are many forms of masculinity, and many forms of femininity that entail individual performances, power positionings, and levels of identification with others.

Paechter (2007) suggests considering communities of femininities and masculinities by understanding these gendered constructions from a local perspective since what is considered as masculine or feminine could vary from one culture to another. Thus, for the data analysis section in this paper, I will refer to masculinity and femininity constructions as to how teachers adapt, oppose, and challenge normative or hegemonic features of what should be feminine or masculine. For instance, I will argue that a male teacher is constructing femininity because his language style is normatively considered feminine. Additionally, I will explain a female teacher’s masculinity construction as she engages in a playful discourse with male students.

For this research concern, the preexisting semantic, physical, and social spaces where sayings, doings, and relatings take place are places where teachers can enact various masculinities and femininities while constructing their gendered identities.

Feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis (FPDA)

In theoretical terms, the FPDA approach is based upon the third wave of feminism, which detaches from men and women dualisms and recognizes that there is also diversity among women. Hence, third-wave feminism conceives gendered identities as plural and conflicting variables constructed within institutional and contextual constraints ( Mills, 2013 ). Additionally, Baxter (2003) claims that, from a poststructuralist perspective, discourses determine power relations, and meanings are negotiated according to the speakers’ positions. This means that a person could be in a privileged position in one discursive situation but unprivileged in the other. We shift positions as there is dynamism in our discourses, interactions, and relations.

FPDA framework has been implemented by some Colombian scholars. Castañeda-Peña (2008) , one of the pioneers in this field, used this framework to analyze power struggles during classroom races identifying teacher and peer approval discourses which had an impact on language learner identity and the construction of assertive masculinities and femininities. He also found that girls dealt more with conflict resolution and that boys seemed to be marginalized in this area. In a later study conducted at an all-girl preschool classroom, Castañeda-Peña (2010) analyzed a ‘talk cycle’ class segment under FPDA parameters, which led to a deep discussion regarding EFL classes being sites for girls to construct, foster, and dimmish femininities through an interplay of competitive discourses.

Rojas (2012) implemented the FPDA methodology to identify the telling cases in which female students exercised power by being involved in activities such as debates and disputes. The findings of this research highlighted the multiplicity of gender identities that students can construct in EFL classes. Finally, Rondón (2012) used FPDA to identify lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and, queer (LGBTQ) EFL students’ discourses to negotiate, resist, or adapt to heteronormativity. Apart from unveiling a constant shift of power positions among students, findings revealed that EFL teachers performed heteronormative discourses leading to marginalization and patriarchy.

The context and participants

This study was carried out at a private university in Tunja, Boyacá, Colombia. This institution has around 5.300 students and offers 23 undergraduate and 10 postgraduate academic programs. These programs are distributed in departments, and the language area belongs to the department of human sciences.

The language area offers four English courses for all academic programs. Each course has a theoretical and a practical component. Hence, there is a teacher who orients grammar and vocabulary acquisition (theoretical component), and there is another one in charge of implementing strategies for students to improve their listening, reading, writing, and speaking abilities (practical component).

From the eighteen teachers who belonged to the languages department, I initially contacted five teachers to be part of my study. Afterwards, I used convenience sampling ( Creswell, 2007 ) to select the participants from whom I could easily collect data, as they were available because of their class schedules and their willingness to be video-recorded during their classes. As a result, I had a male and a female teacher who agreed to participate and signed a consent form.

Additionally, these teachers agreed to be interviewed and chose their pseudonyms for the research. Hence, the female teacher is Mona, and the male teacher is Humberto. Both teachers are in their early thirties. One holds a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages and the other in Foreign Languages from a public university in Tunja, Boyacá. Additionally, these teachers work in the aforementioned private university, and they have more than three years of experience teaching at the university level.

The students captured in the video-recorded classes belonged to English levels 1 (Humberto) and 4 (Mona). These students were enrolled in the different academic programs offered by the university. Their ages ranged from 16 to 25 years old. Some of them were interviewed to include a variety of voices and to give a voice to the silenced and silent in the analysis. These students were also named under pseudonyms and signed consent forms to be video-recorded and interviewed.

Data collection, management, and analysis

To collect data, I carried out a piloting stage in which I video-recorded one class per teacher. This piloting stage allowed me to foresee any technical mishap. Additionally, it helped my participant teachers and the students to get familiar with the recording process. Afterwards, two paid people and I recorded four classes per teacher. Then, I selected the video clips that represented the starting and ending points of a set of teacherstudent and student-teacher interactions. I thoroughly observed the video clips and named them capturing the content of the interactions that took place.

Lastly, I followed Baxter’s (2003) advice of identifying the significant moments pertaining the research focus. Thus, from the video clips, I selected the excerpts in which teachers’ interactions with students seemed to represent power struggles, different subject positionings, divergence of opinions, and conflicting relationships.

Following a feminist poststructuralist framework to analyze the significant moments selected implied considering my interpretations, a literature review, and the voices of the teachers and students as supplementary or interconnected. Concerning

Baxter’s (2003) principle of finding a feminist focus, I oriented my analysis in identifying the sayings, doings, and relatings in which the two teachers constructed their masculinities and femininities.

The considerations above led me adopt the principle of self-reflexivity, also proposed by Baxter (2003) , who claimed that “researchers need to draw attention to the choices they make in determining exactly how they are going to analyze texts, and then be prepared to justify or explain the effects of those choices” (p. 61). Hence, I considered my position as a researcher to make the choices I considered pertinent during the analysis, acknowledging and being responsible for the subjectivity that those decisions might entail. For instance, I focused the analysis on privileging some turn constructional units over others that were more telling regarding the teachers’ gendered identity construction. Additionally, I included teachers and students’ voices in certain parts of my analysis which I considered that needed to be supplemented, contested, or juxtaposed with other voices.

In practical terms, FPDA implies carrying out the analysis on two levels: denotative and connotative. The denotative level “aims to give a concrete description of what is going on within a text, […], by making close and detailed reference to the verbal and non-verbal interactions of the participants” ( Baxter, 2003, p. 75). Thus, I made use of conversation analysis to understand how talk was organized within the selected excerpts ( Heritage, 2005 ).

The connotative level of analysis is an emergent feature of the interactional patterns found through conversation analysis. Thus, the purpose of connotative analysis is to provide an interpretive commentary, which, in this case, was focused on exploring the teachers’ gendered identity construction within their sayings, doings, and relatings. Therefore, this level of analysis required the consideration of Bakhtin’s (1981) principles of polyphony and heteroglossia.

For Baxter (2003) , implementing the principle of polyphony implies providing space for different sources of data that might juxtapose, contradict, or co-exist. I followed this principle, firstly, by identifying and analyzing the ways in which the teachers could probably construct their gendered identities within their doings, sayings, and relatings. Secondly, I included theory and literature that provided a supplementary or contesting view to my interpretations. Thirdly, I interviewed teachers and students regarding some parts of the excerpts that needed to be confirmed or contested.

Bearing in mind that heteroglossia seeks to locate patterns of subordination and marginalization, I also used my interpretations, the literature, and open interviews to identify and to include voices who might have been silent or silenced by male or female counterparts ( Baxter, 2003 ). In total, I analyzed 20 excerpts from both teachers’ classes. Thus, to provide an overview of how the analysis was conducted, the following paragraphs illustrate two excerpts taken from the original study.

Two samples of FDPA analysis

Conclusions

Answering the research concern pertaining the relationship between teachers’ pedagogical practices and their gender identity constructions implies addressing two aspects: firstly, an overview regarding the most common doings, sayings, and relatings that Mona and Humberto performed. Secondly, an exploration of the ways in which teachers’ doings, sayings, and relatings are related to their gendered identity construction.

Mona’s doings intended students to communicate by asking questions to make their classmates say “Yes, I can” and “No, I can’t”. Mona’s sayings interweaved when she asked the students to be ‘more daring’. This teacher’s relatings took place when she maintained a playful discourse with male students upon the latter.

Humberto’s doings were oriented towards teaching the use of ordinal numbers by employing a specific example. Humberto’s sayings entailed the example given to illustrate the use of ordinal numbers. This teacher’s relatings occurred during his interaction with Felipe, which caused a humorous environment in the class.

Mona and Humberto’s gendered identity construction was a dynamic process in which they shifted power positions within their discourses, actions, and interactions. Regarding the first excerpt, the double entendre discourse held by Mona with two male students was the point of departure for various interpretations. Firstly, Mona constructed a masculinity in her sayings when she challenged students to be more daring and then used playful discourse around the expression ‘cochino’. Additionally, Mona did not contest their disruptive behavior.

I support her masculine construction because she was detaching from the normative conception of women being expected to portray good manners and use delicate language ( Johansen, 2017 ). Hence, her masculinity was being constructed based on what femininity is not ( Sunderland, 1992 ). Mona explained this construction in her interview when she argued that she liked to be at the same level as male students, including them in her approval discourse ( Baxter, 2003 ). Unfortunately, her approval discourse marginalized girls, as they were not able to make debatable contributions.

In excerpt two, Humberto’s gendered constructions originated from his communicative styles. At first, his sayings were oriented towards the use of hedges, reformulation, and mitigated language, which are regarded as “womanly communication styles” ( Coates, 2013b, p. 34). Then, his doings and relatings changed as he mentioned an example of a male student’s personal life, making fun of him and causing a humorous environment in class. By using humor, Humberto was able to show his heterosexual and dominant masculinity. According to Bird (2009), Crawford (2003) , and Francis and Skelton (2001) , this practice is usually initiated by men to express or maintain patriarchy. The cause of Humberto’s relatings with Felipe might be in line with his gender ideology about men being emotionally detached, strong, and independent ( Haase, 2008. Robinson, 1992 ).

Thereby, I assert that the two teachers’ preconceived notions on sexist roles influenced their gendered identity constructions in their doings, sayings, and relatings, thus implying consequences in terms of students’ learning opportunities and gendered identity construction. For instance, Mona did not expect debatable contributions from women. Thus, it was evident that her practices were oriented towards giving more interactions to male students, who would make her class more interesting. Hence, it is possible that women could feel inhibited to participate and practice the language, as they were not willing to maintain a playful discourse with the teacher. Additionally, their gendered constructions might have originated from their emphasized femininity ( Schippers, 2007 ) because they normalized their unprivileged position.

Humberto did not consider Felipe’s feelings because he conceived men as strong and emotionally detached individuals. Thus, this gender ideology could lead Humberto to establish power battles with male students under the use of rude and formulaic language. This can have some impact on students’ gendered identities, as they could be placed in an unprivileged position by this teacher’s communicative styles. Also, some students might contest Humberto’s sayings by resisting to participate and practice the English language.

It is important to state that the findings of this research could have varied if more participants were included, or if the sociocultural context were different. Thus, as it was mentioned above, individuals are constructed in words and within a specific context. This means that what was unveiled in a single event could be contrasted or contested in the immediate next interaction or contextual situation.

Transformative actions

The outcomes of this study could be a point of departure to consider teachers’ gendered constructions within their practices in the EFL setting. Hence, as it was evident in these research findings, teachers gendered constructions are derived from certain pedagogical decisions, which included sexist practices and silencing students’ voices. Therefore, without noticing, teachers could lessen egalitarian practices in class. It is paramount that EFL teachers analyze and reflect upon their actions, discourses, and interactions (doings, sayings, and relatings) with students to create a more gender-equitable environment. Hence, I invite my colleagues not to consider gender as an isolated or irrelevant term that only implies a set of features assigned to men and women. It is necessary to acknowledge that we and our students construct our gender identities when speaking, interacting, making decisions, or relating with others. As soon as we understand these dynamics, we can identify unequal or unfair situations and take agency to change our practices and surroundings.