ABSTRACT
The main focus areas of this research are pointing out the public perceptions and beliefs about male preschool teachers, fear of child sexual molestation, moral panic, and power relations in the society. The sample of the study composed of one white, female preschool teacher with a single interview transcript, working in the city of Tempe, Arizona. Qualitative method was used for the research. A semi-structured interview was conducted with the teacher which involved six main questions about the male teacher involvement in early childhood education and related issues. The data was analyzed via discourse analysis method. Both proper and figurative meanings of the words, mimics, unsaid, attitudes, and acts in the interview were carefully considered; critiques and interpretations were made in terms of fear of child sexual abuse, men preschool teachers, moral panic, and power relations. Some literary tools, theoretical perspectives, and techniques from important theorists were barrowed in order to provide better insight. The results revealed that there has still been some doubts exist related to the male preschool teachers in the society and presence of more men in this period may provide better conditions for this occupation.
Key words: Male preschool teachers, child sexual abuse, moral panic, discourse analysis.
Teachers have great importance in children’s education and lives. Great teachers can make great differences and poor teachers can hurt children’s life chances. Since children develop fast physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally in early years of life, having a good teacher is becoming a lot more important in early childhood education and years. In preschool children’s point of view, preschool teachers are individuals who teach, train, educate, love and show friendship to their children and they work hard in order to fulfill the needs of their students (Oktay, 2000). Despite the fact that teachers play such a crucial role in the education of young children, there are very few males in the profession. Having male teachers in early childhood education area has been a very underestimated and under-researched issue for years all around the world. Statistics show that there are very few male educators work with young children in early childhood settings (Cunningham and Watson, 2002).
According to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2015), the percentage of women working in the field is around 97%, with just over 3.2% of early childhood education teachers being men in the US. Eurostat (2015) statistics show that there were 1.2 million pre-primary school teachers in the EU-28 (excluding Denmark) in 2014. Men accounted for just 4.6% of all pre-primary school teachers in the EU. Netherlands was the only EU Member State in 2015 to report a share of male pre-primary teachers which exceeded 10.0%, while less than 1.0% of all pre-primary school teachers were men in 11 of the 27 Member States. In New Zealand, the rate is just 2.2% (Morrison, 2014), in Japan it is 6% (Taguma et al., 2012), and in Turkey it is 5.3% (National Education Statistics, 2014).
In recent years, men who enter the field seem to be less likely to stay, due to the low salaries in the field, social views of masculinity and femininity, low profile of the teaching occupation, the long history of the profession being dominated by females, and the negative stigma sometimes associated with a man working with young children than their female colleagues and they move into other employment that pays better than child care or teaching (Reynolds, 2002; Zhang, 2017). Encountering a male preschool teacher can be surprising for parents as well as other members of the society who are not used to seeing male teachers in preschool years. Parents who will have a male teacher for their child might have questions about this new situation and they may have negative attitudes. As a result of this unfamiliarity, male teachers may confront different situations (Sak, 2005), such as hesitation/mistrust of parents’ related with men’s caring ability or skills and doubt of a possible sexual maltreatment.
Sexual exploration, child sexual abuse, and moral panic
During early childhood, playful sexual exploration of children is known to be very common (Sandnabba et al., 2003). In this part of their life, children tend to explore and learn about their own and their friends’ bodies and compare them (Lamb and Coakley, 1993; Trowell, 1997). Children get sexually more curious around the age of 4 and 5. As a result of this curiosity explorative sexual behaviors are not very unusual for children between the age of 3 and 7 (Volbert and Van Der Zanden, 1992). In the next few years, they start learning about sexuality, sexual behaviors related to social norms and taboos, and adopt them (Sandnabba et al., 2003). According to Bernet (1997), normal sexual behaviors of children must be well known and understood by adults at least for two reasons. First, children’s normal sexual play activities should not be seen as a result of some kind of sexual abuse and second, compared to their peers, sexually abused children show and perform more sexual oriented behaviors.
Therefore, it is appropriate to be aware of the thin line in between these two realities. Otherwise, limited knowledge can cause overreacting or underreacting, so that, one can minimize a problematic sexual behavior or pathologize the normal behavior like it is abnormal (Sandnabba et al., 2003). Child sexual abuse represents a serious challenge to all societies, increasing the risk of behavior problems, mental disorders, physical problems, and adjustment problems in childhood period and the risk of serious long-term problems in adulthood (Dong et al., 2003; Maniglio, 2009). It is a major public health concern and a problem that impacts the overall well-being of children across all cultures globally (Fontes and Plummer, 2010). Child sexual abuse does not have a universal definition. There are three categories of sexual abuse; penetrating abuse (mouth, vagina or anus), contact abuse, and noncontact abuse which includes genital exposure, filming, and other forms of sexual activity not involving sexual intercourse or physical contact (American Psychological Association, 2001; Gilbert et al., 2009). Children who have been sexually abused often exhibit problem behaviors; such as acting and playing in a much more sexualized way than their peers (Dominguez et al., 2001).
There is no ultimate estimation of the occurrence of a variety of physical, sexual, and emotional child abuses. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2013), 20% of girls and 5% of boys suffer due to child sexual abuse. Only 10% of sexually abused children are abused by a stranger (Finkelhor, 2012). Around 90% of children who are sexually abused, are familiar with their abuser. However, these incidences can happen almost anywhere, such as home, schools, churches, recreation centers, sports league and clubs, and any other place that children gather. About 1 in 3 sexually abused children are abused by a family member (Finkelhor, 2012; Whealin, 2007) and it is more likely true for the younger victims (Snyder, 2000). According to Finkelhor and Williams (1988), the average of sexual abuse in day care settings is only 5.5 children per 10,000. It seems that most child sexual abuse goes unreported (Leventhal, 1998). Researches in the field show that the rate of identification of child sexual abuse is about 30% and even less are reported.
The estimate number of disclosing the sexual abuse by victim children is 38% (London et al., 2003; Ullman, 2007). Around 40% of these children preferred to share this information with their close friends (Broman-Fulks et al., 2007). However, these do not mostly get reported to the authorities. The majority of the incidences remain unreported (Finkelhor et al., 2012). Since 1970’s, there have been series of changes in beliefs and attitudes related to the frequency of child sexual abuse incidences. According to the American Association for the Protection of Children (1988) statistics, the estimated number of substantiated cases of child sexual abuse was around six thousand in 1976, around one hundred and twenty thousand in 1986. It went up to a national estimated peak of around one hundred and fifty thousand in 1992. From this point on, the number of cases started to decrease every year (that is, 103,600 in 1998) (Jones and Finkelhor, 2001). The number of substantiated incidents of child sexual abuse reported to child welfare agencies decreased (47%) from 1993 to 2006 (Sedlack et al., 2010).
In 2003, it is estimated that around ninety thousand children were sexually abused (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2005). According to the child protective agencies data, there has been a 62% decline in rates of substantiated sexual abuse starting in 1992 and continuing through 2010, with the largest drop occurring in the late 1990s (Finkelhor and Jones, 2012). In the United States, almost sixty-three thousand incidents of child sexual abuse were reported in 2012 (U.S. Department of Justice, 2015). These numbers indicate that although child sexual abuse remains a problem of significant proportion, substantiated incidents of child sexual abuse are declining with no clear indication of a cause. However, as a result of these huge numbers, child sexual abuse had quickly gained widespread public attention, concerns about this crime deepened, became significant social problem, and caused a “moral panic” in the society in recent years (Denov, 2003).
Moral panic, a phrase first coined in the seventies by Cohen (1972), Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, is defined by Hendershott (2002) as: a form of collective behavior characterized by widely circulating rumors which greatly exaggerate the threat posed by some newly identified form of deviance. In a moral panic, there is a heightened level of concern over the behavior of a certain group and a greater than normal fear about the consequences of this behavior for the rest of society. The sentiment generated by the newly identified threat is referred to by sociologists as a 'kind of fever characterized by heightened emotion, fear, dread, anxiety, hostility and a strong feeling of righteousness (p. 7). According to Furedi (1994), throughout time there have been several issues related to panic occurring in the society, such as committing crime and the activities of youth, using drugs, and sexual freedom. All of these have been considered as a threat to the moral fiber of society since then.
When society has not been able to adapt to dramatic changes and when people express fear as a result of seeing these dramatic changes as a loss of control, moral panics have a tendency to occur over and over again. Since the numbers of male preschool teachers are very low and the concept of male preschool teachers is relatively new and uncommon for the society, this expression of fear/anxiety of sexual abuse and related moral panic may be considered normal. However, as Tobin (1997) mentioned, considering the fact that male teachers’ involvement in the child sexual abuse cases in preschools are very low, it becomes more complicated and difficult to understand the ethics and belief systems of the society. Therefore, the notion of moral panic seems an appropriate explanation for unfounded fears of male teachers.
Purpose of the study
The main focus areas of this study was pointing out the public perceptions and beliefs about male preschool teachers, public fear of child sexual molestation in preschools, moral panic, and power relations in the society. Therefore, the purpose of this research was set to investigate the relationship between having male preschool teachers and the society's fear of child sexual abuse in depth.
Research design
The qualitative research design was used for this study. It was conducted as a qualitative phenomenological study and discourse analysis technique was used for the analysis based on the theories, philosophical ideas (perspective of discourse, speech genres, etc.) of Bakhtin (1973, 1981, 1986, 1990) and based partially on the notions of Foucault (1972, 1973, 1980, 1981), and critical discourse analysis. The purpose of a phenomenological approach is to develop a clear, accurate, and complete, understanding and articulate description of a particular human experience or experiential moment (Padilla-Díaz, 2015). In this type of research, the analysis begins right after collecting the first data, which may consist of no more than a single interview (Tesch, 1990). Discourse analysis, on the other hand, is the analysis of how language patterns are constructed according to people’s utterances, or small parts of speech (Phillips and Jorgensen, 2002).
Setting and sample of the study
The sample of the study consists of a female preschool teacher from Tempe, Arizona. One interview transcript (excerpt from a larger study), with 6 semi-structured questions, with a middle class, white female in her mid-40s, parent of a 3.5-year-old girl in a preschool, which was found very interesting and strong, was used as a main source. The interview was conducted in a quiet place, away from the classrooms in a preschool, through a videoconference and lasted about 20 to 25 minutes, in spring 2016. The whole interview was tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim by the researcher after the interview was over.
Data collection
The main focus of the interview questions originally was seeing and understanding the public perceptions about male preschool teachers and possible recruitment strategies, as a part of a larger study. However, at the end, this particular interview resulted in a concern with the participants, as well as the public, fear of “a potential sexual molestation of children in child care settings by male teachers” case. In order to provide deeper insight and give a chance to analyze the text for the readers, the text is provided beforehand. Then, the focus will be on the details of this text, in order to cover the actual meanings of her statements. Here it is:
Interviewer: Do you think that are there any advantages or disadvantages of having male teachers in Early Childhood Settings for children, especially for children?
Participant: I think there are many advantages. Because, I think that first of all if you have males and females in a certain position like teaching, it lands a certain amount of respect to the position just because especially among male students. Because they might think all of this is just you know women, all these teachers and also the men can be good role models for young boys which they really desperately need today, probably always but seems like to me especially today and I think that also if more men got into the field that I think, the pay would go up. Just that seems to always be the case. I do not know because they do mandate or whatever and I cannot really think of any disadvantages and I think that it would be good for other men to see males as teachers because who would make them feel like it was okay to be more nurturing and it would make them feel like umm like teaching was a more important job.
Interviewer: Do you think they may have any problems with children or families or directors?
Participant: Well, now that you mention it I um I think there could be some men who maybe wouldn’t be quite as understanding or patient as.. as some women, not to say that all women teachers are going to be understanding and patient but it seems to be a trade of.. of most of us because I am a teacher. And um anyway and also I think that it’s kind of difficult for men too because it is just like people make fun of sometimes male nurses and they tend to make fun of male teachers. So, if the.. if the man does not have good self-esteem that could cause him problems but he should get over it.
Interviewer: Yeah
Participant: If he really likes that type of job and but then also it is kind of hard, too because of the.. the people some people do tend to distrust or mistrust men being alone with their children and that’s understandable because of different you know different abuse things that have happened in the past but it is happened with women too with children.
Interviewer: Yeah
Participant: So, in sexual abuse or whatever and so that I could see where some men would feel hesitant about taking of that position. In fact, I know some male teachers who feel really nervous about that and they always keep their doors open and their shades are wide open. They don’t want there to be any kind of thought about anything going on.
Interviewer: Okay. And so should we recruit more male educators in preschool settings and if yes how could we do that?
Participant: I think yes we should and I think that they need to stop denigrating teachers so much just in.. in public and in the news, and just everywhere where they denigrate teachers and make it a more prestigious job and pay more and just umm make ….
Interviewer: And do you have children?
Participant: Yes, I have one daughter.
Interviewer: One daughter, good. Do you have any preference about having a male or female educator for your children? For your child actually?
Participant: Y’know it’s funny is that you asked me that because after everything I’ve said, I would have to say I would prefer to have a woman. (Laughs) hahaha I know it’s well especi.
Interviewer: No it is okay, I mean.
Participant: Because I know but, because I do have a girl and I just somehow think that with most girls probably they would relate better to a woman but on the other hand we do have a couple of male teachers at my school and I.. and I would feel very comfortable with any child of mine being in their classroom and it is probably just because I am used to having women as teachers and so even though I am a teacher I still need to get used to the idea. So, I think it is going to be hard to get to public used to it.
Interviewer: So, would you mind having male teacher for your child?
Participant: No, I would not mind but I have to say I would.. I would really kind of be… I would I would really check out the male teacher just to make sure that he seemed above board. And just because I would worry I know I would worry about.. about him being alone with my child.
Method of analysis
During analysis, some literary tools, theoretical perspectives, and techniques from important theorists, such as Bakhtin and Foucault, were barrowed in order to provide better insight for this study. The transcript was treated as a collection of details or clues, which might be considered pretty similar to the Bakhtinian perspective of seeing and analyzing the discourse. During this process, both proper and figurative meanings of the words, mimics, unsaid, attitudes, and acts were carefully considered, critiqued (Foucauldian/critical discourse analysis), and some interpretations were made in terms of fear of child sexual abuse, men in the field of early childhood education, moral panic, public perceptions, and power relations.
In "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin, sees writing as “a complex and ongoing interplay among personal and public voices” (Welch, 1993). Attempt was made to implement this principle in my analysis as much as possible. While this text was being analyzed, the focus was on text, read in depth and read genuinely, took public relations in consideration, and gave credits almost every word, term, and sentence of the participant. She starts her first statement by pointing out the power relations in the society. Her statement “if more men got into the field…the pay would go up” shows us that for her, and may be in the real world, men have power of influence on society and they set the standards in the society especially in the economic base. Since men have the power in today’s world, for her, more male colleagues in the field will supply better economic conditions for everybody in the field. She naturally wants more money and status that men can bring in. For example, she mentions that jobs that are mostly populated by men are very prestigious and pay more, whereas, on the other hand, female-related, nurturing, jobs mostly less important, less prestigious, and pay less. She supports her idea in her fifth answer, which is “they need to stop denigrating teachers so much in public and everywhere…make it more prestigious job and pay more”. She also mentions that more males in the field bring more respect to the position from others, especially from men.
What she is saying is an unfortunate reality in every society worldwide. History shows us that until recently, women have been holding the jobs that are related with mostly caring and teaching and also women have not been considered as bread winners in the society (Spring, 1993). Related to this issue, Foucault (1980) says that “people are unequal; power is thus concerned with domination and subjection” (P 201). For Foucault, neither power nor subjectivity has meaning or existence outside of a particular relationship between social forces (Evans and Davies, 2004). In Foucault’s discourse, power is not just repressive but also productive. Since there is categorization of discourses of sexuality such as male-female, masculine-feminine, and homosexual-heterosexual, one form of discourse will always have power over others. According to Ghaill (1994) power relations have repeatedly produced the concepts such as race, class, age, etc. The hidden curriculum (the unwritten, unspoken, unofficial rules) that reflects the cultural hegemony of the dominant class also works to reproduce and reinforce this dominance by intensifying and multiplying its power.
She continued talking about one of the important issues in the community is that public perception about females being more nurturer than males so that naturally teaching is a female occupation. Her statements like “...make them feel like it was okay to be more nurturing”, which is, by the way, a politically correct belief, or “there could be some men who maybe, wouldn’t be, quite as understanding or patient as some women” shows us that she shares and also agrees with this perception. According to Spring (1993), there were practical reasons for the feminization of the teaching profession. At the beginnings of the 1800’s, after doing a few years of teaching, most men moved on to another career. However, most women preferred to continue this profession since they almost had no other career opportunities. Practically, comparing to males, females could be paid less and this would have had the benefit of keeping school expenses and taxes at a very low level. Therefore, ‘Schoolmarms’ (as women teachers were referred to at that time) were necessary for the development of a "stable, inexpensive, and moral teaching force". For the school reformers, women were best-suited for carrying out the high moral ideals necessary for the establishment of professional teaching forces.
In the second statement, apparent disadvantages such as males being less understanding or less patient can be seen as a “binary” by which females are categorized as being more understanding and more patient. Levi-Strauss (1964) explains how binary pairs and binary opposites form the basic structure of all human cultures, ways of thought, and signifying systems and how the cultural relations can be understood with the help of basic structures. For him, “these relations appear as binary pairs or opposites”. “These oppositions form the basic structure for all ideas and concepts in a culture”. The important thing for Levi-Strauss is that since every culture organizes knowledge into binaries (opposite pairs of things), every culture has these contradictions, which have to be resolved in a logical way (Levi-Strauss, 1964). Another binary that can be seen is relating “nurturing” with females and “education” with males. This is also a contradiction in the community and seems to be concept that is shared or accepted by females as well as males. One of the most important points here is seeing teaching as a “gendered occupation”.
This shared conception in the culture is both related to power relations in the society and to Bakhtin’s “authoritative discourse”. This concept refers to the act of basically reciting words from somebody important such as father, teacher, or from another discourse such as political, religious, or moral. In the participant’s statement about the male-female binary may have its origins in her perceptions of political power and moral understanding. In her third response, the participant mentions “the sexual abuse” for the first time but she avoids naming it yet. By saying “people do tend to distrust or mistrust men being alone with their children and that’s understandable” and adding “you know different abuse things” she, in one way, starts to introduce her shared ideas about public fear and moral panic of having male preschool teachers. By saying “it happened with women, too”, she automatically includes the others (males), which may be seen as a “non-dit” (Foucault, 1980), a French word for “unsaid”.
This sort of binary is the opposite or missing half of “things that stick out.” The literary critic Macherey (1966) argues that alongside everything said in the text there is a sort of other, ghost text made up of all the things that are unsaid but present. This non-dit brings an important question into minds that “why it is hard only for men if it happened with women in the past, too?” As it was mentioned in Tobin (1997), even though most of the sexual abusers are close relatives of the children and female teachers’ abusing children cases almost equal with male teacher’s and more than gays’ and lesbians’, people still tend to see male teachers more abusive and dangerous for young children. In my opinion, it is a very big contradiction in the community and reasons of this fear/anxiety should be analyzed exclusively. The trust-distrust binary can be seen as another presentation of this public fear. In “Discourse in the Novel” (1981), Bakhtin says, "The word in language is half someone else's. . . . [I]t exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own" (293-294).
To make the word one's own, the writer enters into "a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents," and the writer seeks to negotiate that tension through "selectively assimilating the words of others" (276, 341) (Welch, 1993). This statement is a very good example of what Bakhtin says. By mentioning the issue of abuse and trust in the public, she is introducing us to her and the public’s perceptions and fears. We will see these Bakhtinian discourses of "The word in language is half someone else's. . . .” and “authoritative discourse” in different parts of this text again. In her fourth response, she says “I know some male teachers who feel really nervous about that and they always keep their doors open and their shades are wide open”. I think this is the most important statement of this text. With this one sentence, she summaries males’ fear of being a preschool teacher because of a potential accusation of child sexual abuse, shared public anxiety and fear of having male teachers, power relations between the larger society and its small units, moral panic in the society and male teachers assimilation and acceptance of this panic.
Tobin (1997), in publisher’s summary, contributes to this point by saying “Kindergarten kissing games; four-year-olds playing doctor; a teacher holding a crying child on his lap as he comforts her. Interactions like these - spontaneous and pleasurable - are no longer encouraged in American early childhood classrooms, and in some cases they are forbidden.” Accordingly, while talking about his similar experience, he once said that “while I was holding a child, a parent of the child appeared and I panicked for no reason but my unintentional fear of getting understood wrongly by the parent”. The most important question in here is “what is the source of their fear?” The most logical answer to this question would be the social and ethical values. Since accusation due to sexual abuse is a common, dangerous, and life related issue all around the world, this kind of fear should be taken as an appropriate reaction. According to Anderson and Levine (1999), teachers may be fearful and tend to not relate closely with children. In teachers’ perspective, the emphasis on child abuse reporting may create the risk of being accused or reported as abusers for no reason. The perception of risk may result in teachers’ distancing themselves from their children.
In order to focus deeply on this issue, taking Foucault’s “Panoptic schema of discipline” into consideration would be very appropriate at this point. Foucault says, “Thanks to its mechanism of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate in to men’s behavior; knowledge follows over all the surfaces on which power in exercised” such as “Megan’s Law”. California's Megan's Law was enacted in 1996. It mandates the California Department of Justice to notify the public about specified registered sex offenders. Magen’s Laws require convicted sex offenders to register with local police and to notify the law enforcements whenever they move to a new location (www.meganslaw.ca.gov). This issue is very related with the original, historical “panoptic” observation idea (controlling cells by seeing through small holes from one authority center and its power on prisoners) in the prisons in the very basic meaning. He adds that “because the internal panopticism can constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail”.
The statement mentioned is also another example of “non-dit”. The unpleasant part in here is other teachers (females) not being worried about this issue. The question is: if it happens both with female and male teachers, why only males take it seriously? This shows that teachers as well as parents all share the society’s unspoken fear. As another question: are the males using it as an excuse for not doing this job and remain the area female populated for power purposes? In this part of the text, it is possible to interpret some of her statements metaphorically. A “metaphor” is “a trope, figurative language. A trope in which a word or phrase is shifted from its normal uses to a context where it evokes new meanings” (Greene and Cushman, 2016). “Doors open and shades wide open” are metaphors for safety and visibility, visibility refers to safety. On the other hand, as an “unsaid binary” of this safety, dark/beneath should be seen as metaphors for dangerous and sneaky. What Bakhtin calls “double-voiced discourse” was also found (the positing of two distinct consciousnesses within a single word) in this important statement. She is probably citing somebody else’s (or more than one person’s) statement here, because it seems very artistic, like a cliché. Additionally, “any kind of thought about anything going on” also refers to a moral panic again and this must be considered as a deterrent beyond low wages and low prestige.
In her next statement, it is possible to see another form of metaphor called “catachresis” which is generally used for a bad, unwanted situation or time such as get used to bad weather, illness, poverty, etc. Catachresis is an odd metaphor, or borrowing a term from a discourse that does not seem to fit to describe another sort of discourse (Palonen, 2010; The Literary Encyclopedia, 2015). This is the case when she says, “getting used to, it is going to be hard public get used to”. The question here is, “what do we need to get used to?” If the answer to this question is the presence of male teachers in the field of early childhood, it should be considered as potential gender bias for male teachers. On the other hand, in this statement it is possible to see her doubling the publics’ authoritative voice again as Bakhtin states in his Discourse in the Novel. Another statement “girls would relate better to a woman” suggests another binary for relating badly or less well with a male teacher. Here, she is considering being more comfortable with the same sex, which is understandable but still it seems related with public fear for potential sexual abuse case of young children.
In her final statement, there are very interesting examples of catachresis, such as “above board”, which refers to visible and safe and which is taken from the discourse of gambling (Keeping your hands on the table and visible, cards over the table, above the board, rather than under is considerably more difficult to cheat). Supposedly, for her, it would be safer when the men in classrooms are visible to others. “I would really check out the male teacher” statement is another metaphor that is called a “Freudian slip”. Freud argued that the slips or mistakes we make in conversation are the result not of lack attention or our being tired but of ambivalent thoughts and feelings that end up being expressed unintentionally by a speaker or writer who reveals more than he/she intended to. According to Freud, these errors reveal unconscious thoughts, beliefs, or wishes (Freud, 1901). In daily life, we see this idiom to point out our physical attraction to somebody, such as “checking out a girl”. However, here, it refers to physical appearance and its positive or negative effects, such as trust or mistrust, on people.
Finally, in my opinion, “I would worry I know I would worry about him being alone with my child” is the central problematic of this text. This is the last and maybe the most obvious example of moral panic and fear of child sexual abuse. By the definition, “central problematic” is Louis Althusser’s concept. For Althusser (1990), in every piece of theoretical writing central problems are raised that cannot be resolved. In this sense, every work has at its core a problematic, a set of tensions, assumptions, reasoning, tentative solutions- that it can raise but not solve. In my case, it seems almost impossible to get over this problematic idea of gendered and racialized discourse about “the dangerous others” in the near future and it seems that it will remain as a challenge to researchers for a long time.
This paper reflects researcher’s thoughts and interpretations on some issues that people have to deal with in everyday life based on one interview transcript. During analysis some techniques, literary tools, and views of the important theoreticians were barrowed. At the first glance, it may seem impossible, maybe even meaningless, to do this kind of a research and raise questions based on a single transcript. However, it is important to consider that micro-analysis is worthwhile and viable in critical discourse analysis and everything is meaningful in language (Fairclough, 1995). Therefore, it is a very meaningful way to analyze society and its potentials as a beginning point, but making generalizations might be inappropriate at some points. During the process of writing and making interpretations based on this particular text, honesty and objectivity were taken as top priorities by me. As a conclusion of the discussion of this interview, a challenging question was encountered that threatens to undermine the entire interpretation so far presented. A question that arises, and leads to a totally different line of questioning is: “Was she honest with me?” It is not possible to know the true answer of this question.
At first glance, it feels like she was being very honest, considering the fact that I was a male professional in early childhood education field! This maybe a stream of consciousness event, whereas, she considered my question about having males in early childhood education, she began to recognize the barriers and identified her own biases (mirrored by society) that contribute to these barriers. At this point, the only thing that can be done is using my imagination and making some guesses. While I cannot be certain of my impressions (may be acting a little bit weird or may be being pathetic), however, I believe she was not very honest with me at some points. If we take a look at the transcript as a whole, it would be possible to see there is something wrong in it, something that sticks out as ill-fitting, that this transcript has two different parts. In one part, she says positive things about having more male teachers in preschools. However, in the other part, she talks about several negatives, completely opposite of what she said earlier about them.
What may be the reason of this quick change? While Tobin (2000) was making his interpretations based on a group of children’s actions and their answers in his book called “Good Guys Don’t Wear Hats”, at one point, he comes to a conclusion that two participating little girl understood his aim and gave him exactly, may be even more than what he was looking for in his study. Tobin says “I think they got me on this point”. Right now, I am feeling in the same way, I think she got me! She was playing a little game with me. She understood my aim and gave me the answers that I was looking for, even though my action was unintentional or should I say, “I was acting unconsciously”. I am saying “unconsciously” because, I thought, my purpose for this study was different (to find out about the situation of male teachers in early childhood education). Now, I am not sure whether it was really different from my initial intent, or was I unconsciously seeking information on “child sexual abuse, public fear, and moral panic” issues? Considering the fact that I am a male early childhood education professional and searching for the reasons of low male involvement in to this area, naturally, I can say, I was going for that information.
When I showed up for this particular interview and started asking questions related to male teachers, especially after my second question, she gave me the answers that I was looking for. As a result of this “action and reaction”, I decided to focus on this interview transcript and wrote this paper. If we remember Foucault’s power/knowledge discourse, ideas and sayings about power relations in the society, between concepts, especially the power of patriarchy, or men’s power on women and homosexuals in another word, it is possible to say that she reversed this relationship in our interview section. As a male interviewer, I was dependent on her answers, less powerful than her, so that, she naturally used this power on me. Overall, I tried to focus on several important and different issues, such as fear of potential child sexual abuse in both public and male teachers, moral panic, bias and power relations in the society, by analyzing a single interview transcript. While I was analyzing this text, I used some theories, techniques and literary tools.
While doing this kind of research, the most important point that one should consider is, as Bakhtin states, listening carefully, understanding, and then responding properly. As I cited earlier, in Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin (1981) says, "The word in language is half someone else's. . . . It exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own" (293-294). Based on this perspective, I always thought that her answers were all related to some authoritative voice, which is society and that only half of what she said was her own words. Supposedly, she was reflecting the society’s negative points of view, perceptions, guilt, and fears. Maybe it was so. But, so did I, may be even more so. If the word in language is half someone’s, so too were my words in this study.
The author has not declared any conflict of interests.
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