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The way masculinity and gender influence in institutions

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Research Question:

According to the Danish Ministry of Equality, 7% of all educated pedagogues employed in communal Danish day-care institutions are men. (Børnehaver mangler mandlige pædagoger 2013) The contemporary awareness in society and even governmental activism to increase employment of male child-care workers made them an interesting target of research. With every third student at the Pedagogue-seminars being male, but so few choosing the field of child-care (Stobbe 2013), we wanted to research in which way this influences masculinity and gender-roles in institutions. Why didn't more educated male pedagogues want to pursue a career within the field of child care/education? ”In the institution where I was formerly …show more content…

85 %, our presence would cause confusion and instability. The challenges related to multi-ethnicity, language - and culture barriers, were almost always acknowledged and told by our informants as part of the everyday-pedagogical framework. Most of our informants had chosen this particular institution because of the scene and the location and represented a crucial way of identifying themselves through their political ideology (Interview with Dean and Ryan). All in all everyone's professionalism was reflected through this particular setting of multi-ethnicity.
On the very first day we were allowed to observe inside, and were only denied access to one of the four rooms. We tried negotiating this with one of the attached child-care workers, so that we'd only visit when fewer children were present, but time flew and we ended up spending little time there. During our research we usually arrived at 10 am, spent an hour in one of the rooms, and then went to the staff-room to jot field-notes or to engage in informal conversations with the staff on break. We then joined the staff and children on the playground to observe and speak to available personnel. Even though they at times were extremely busy, we managed to gain good ethnographic material. A couple of weeks into fieldwork we started reflecting upon what we saw every day in the institution. There were certain situations where we repeatedly discovered general patterns and wanted to hear our informants

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