Conference Program

The aim of this essay is to address the so-called male shortage in early education and teaching professions, through an interdisciplinary frame. Creating inclusive schools, as well as gender mainstreaming, are at the forefront of the EU policy (European Commission, 2020) and are key targets for European policymakers for the upcoming years. In this article I will explore the overlap of these two EU priorities, focusing on theinvolvement of men in early childhood care and teaching professions ˗ as the target that was set more than 20 years ago has still not been reached. Critical studies on masculinities and literature on role models in schools are here in dialogue with pedagogical perspectives on hidden curriculum studies and inclusive education theory. Most studies concerning the male shortage in education (Davis and Hay, 2018) focus on one or two dimensions, e.g. male educators in early care, black male teachers (Woodson and Bristol, 2020), male teachers with disabilities (Neca, Borges and Campos, 2020) or LGBTQI+ teachers (Lee, 2020). Hegemonial discourses are thus compartmentalised based on individual characteristics and the according single categories. Our hypothesis is that In order to challenge schools as mainstream and hegemonic discourse reproducers, it would be more effective to broaden the analysis and to consider all of these dimensions as different facets of a complex phenomenon.There is also an urgent need, I would like to stress, to move from a personal and biographical perspective −the individual teacher −to a social perspective −the team, the class, and beyond that, to an institutional perspective −the school as a democratic institution. The contribution describes a theoretical framework and preliminary results of a research proposal aimed at investigate whether a more diverse teaching staff may increase inclusion in education, understood as the never-ending commitment to developing better ways of responding to diversity. Although international literature is quite attentive to minority teachers, the Italian scenario does not look so rich of theory or empirical study. While reframing the male shortage definition in an intersectional framework, including gender identity and performance perspective, but also considering ethnicity, (dis)ability, religious back ground, I intend to investigate if a diverse teaching staff may challenge the mainstream curricula and increases the level of inclusiveness of schools in a diverse society.