— Robert Frost , " The Road Not Taken "
Male Elementary School Teachers — Still an Endangered Species
Garry Jones
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence : Two roads diverged in a wood , and I — I took the one less traveled by , And that has made all the difference .
— Robert Frost , " The Road Not Taken "
As men who chose to teach , we took the road less travelled , and that has made all the difference . This was the focus of my PhD research and my work as a teacher , administrator , and curriculum consultant for forty-five years .
As a man who chose to teach kindergarten , I became the subject of a front-page newspaper article in 1978 . Twenty years later , I researched the topic of male teachers for my PhD at the University of Alberta . Twenty more years , teaching at the university , I still see three or four men among thirty-five women in every class of student teachers . I wrote an article in the ATA Magazine in 2002 and described the conflicting expectations and
challenges experienced by male elementary school teachers . For the spring 2005 ATA Magazine , in an article titled , “ The New Gender Gap : So Few Men in Education ,” Editor Tim Johnson visited “ male elementary school teachers … to gather their insights into their professional lives , teaching as they do in schools staffed primarily with female teachers .” I presented on the topic at many conferences , such at the Calgary City Teachers ’ Convention , the Western Canadian Association for Student Teaching ( WestCAST ), and the World Forum on Early Care and Education in April 2024 .
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