Product Description: First published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: "Challenging Professions" is an innovative, interdisciplinary collection of 13 thematically linked yet methodologically diverse essays that explore Canadian women's engagement with professional education and employment in the 20th century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The Realities of Teacher' Work: Never a Dull Moment follows the fortunes of the teachers at Hillview Primary School over ten years. It explores what it is like to be a primary or elementary school teacher in an urban school with about 200 children, mixed in social class and ethnicity, and suggests what we may learn from them for the future.Sandra Acker links her research with other literature on teachers' work, and describes the school as a workplace, focusing on four key features: the characteristics of the children, the school's physical setting, the available resources, and the ethos of the school.She successfully places us in the classroom giving vivid images of daily interactions with the children, and shows too how teaching extends far beyond the classroom door. The book explores the caring culture that has developed among the teachers and helps them to cope with the difficulties they encounter. It also considers the school as located in the wider community by looking at changes in teachers' careers over time and the effects on Hillview of recent educational reform.This book shows us how and why we need to revise our assumptions about schools and teachers and see them not as isolated individuals in closed classrooms and self-contained schools, but as an integral part of a much broader community. Above all, it shows that teaching is hard, demanding work that is influenced by workplace cultures and the gendered expectations society holds about teachers.

Product Description: Addresses invisibilities and inequities in the sociology of education, the careers of women teachers and the experiences of women academics. The author examines the development of the sociology of women's education and considers whether gender equity in education is feasible.

Product Description: Older literature on teaching as a professsion has been criticized for its inadvertent sexism as writers appeared to believe that the presence of large numbers of women in an occupation was automatically incompatible with professionalism...read more