Being ‘fun’ at work: emotional labour,class, gender and childcare

This paper reports on data drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded project investigating the experiences of UK‐based students training on level‐2 and level‐3 childcare courses. We focus on the concept of emotional labour in relation to learning to care for and educate young children and the ways in which the students’ experiences of emotional labour and the expectations placed upon their behaviour and attitudes are shaped by class and gender. We consider the ways in which students are encouraged to manage their own and the children's emotions and we identify a number of ‘feeling rules’ that demarcate the vocational habitus of care work with young children. We conclude by emphasising the importance of specific contexts of employment in order to understand workers’ emotional labour and argue for more recognition of the intense demands of emotional labour in early childhood education and care work.     

Demands and design principles of a “heterodox” didactics for promoting critical thinking in higher education

Higher Education - Following on from the already wide-ranging academic discussion about fostering critical thinking in students as an important component of a university’s educational...     

Parents’ Perceptions of Child Care for Children with Disabilities

Sixteen Minnesota families with children with disabilities participated in a 2-year interview study of their care experiences. Findings show that families developed a network of care providers, struggled to pay additional costs for care, were not informed of community services and programs, and believed that their children received adequate child care. This study highlights the need to provide information to families and providers and to link services in both rural and urban communities.

Zwischen Seniorität und Alterität

Demographic changes are leading to an altered population structure and subsequently to changes in the age structure of potential participants in educational training. Adult education has reacted to this by developing special provisions for older participants and a concept of intergenerational learning provision for different generations. Arranging such intentional intergenerational processes is indeed no small task for adult education. This contribution will look at this challenge more closely. To this aim, the orientations of professional and non-professional adult educators and participants in intergenerational learning processes will be reconstructed in a qualitative investigation. It can be shown that the andragogic skill of adult educators is a pre-requisite for the facilitation of learning processes, which are explicitly intergenerational.     

‘Walking yourself around as a teacher’: gender and embodiment in student teachers’ working lives

This paper considers the psychic and social dynamics reported by student teachers when learning to embody their teacher persona in the secondary school environment. Focusing on gender dimensions of embodiment and drawing on qualitative interview data from a UK study of postgraduate teacher‐training students, teaching is examined as a physical experience. The paper conceptualises findings under two related headings: the appropriately gendered body, signified by heteronormative readings of gender and sexuality; and the gendered authoritative body, conceptualised as male. The ‘teacher body’ emerges as an important element of student teachers’ stories of trying to fit with the new professional environment and the paper concludes by arguing for a consideration of gender and body politics in the practice and training of teachers, thus challenging the assumption that professional occupations are essentially ‘disembodied’ and gender neutral.