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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Rationale for Panel: Inspired by a forthcoming edited volume, this panel will critically examine female teachers on television alongside socio-historical scholarship on the feminized profession of teaching and feminism’s various waves. Papers will build on groundwork within the niche genre of schools on screen, e.g., Mary Dalton’s Teacher TV (2008) and The Hollywood Curriculum (1999), Robert Bulman's Hollywood Goes to High School (2015), and Sevan Terzian and Patrick Ryan's edited volume American Education and Popular Media (2015). Given the Console-ing Passions call “to consider the role of a feminist lens in pushing for reimaginings of our institutional structures and inequities,” these papers intentionally focus on the institution of schooling, wherein women have served as idealized paragons of republican motherhood, cheaper alternatives to male workers, and handmaids to hegemony.
Our feminist analyses of such pop cultural pedagogues delineate key shifts in stereotypical portrayals of female teachers on TV. For example, juxtaposing the late ’90s Fox animated sitcom King of the Hill, which takes place in a Texas suburb, against the more recent Danish dramedy Rita reveals both the global and chronological endurance of Dalton’s “Good Teacher” model as well as how contemporary television shows offer viewers more nuanced manifestations of once-tired tropes.Turning to Young Sheldon, arguably a reinvention of The Big Bang Theory, we will illuminate the prequel sitcom’s undercurrent conversations on male vs. female teachers. Ideally, this diverse display of TV teachers will foster audience discussion with a view toward reinventing schools on screen—and writ large.
Paper #1: “Education is the Sleeping Pill that Makes Dreams Happen”: Peggy Hill, Patriarchal Shill
In the opening credits to King of the Hill (Fox, 1997–2010, 13 seasons), while Hank and friends drink beer in stoic silence, Peggy singlehandedly drags a couch to the curb, enlists niece Luanne to change a tire, picks up son Bobby’s discarded bicycle, and performs that fatherly duty of taking out the trash—although Hank claims credit for the chore. Looking beyond the domestic sphere reinforces these inequities.
The first season establishes Peggy as the smarter spouse while illustrating her matrimonial submission. That she is merely a substitute teacher underscores her complacency with traditional gender roles. In Season 2, when Hank insists Bobby needs a full-time stay-at-home mom, Peggy acquiesces. Literally sub-servient, Peggy takes pride in being a “Substitute of the Year” to a dangerous degree: serving as an unwitting drug mule for a prisoner who knows how to exploit teacher tropes; embracing corporal punishment to redeem herself after a bad evaluation; and returning to work far too soon after a near-death experience. However, she scoffs when her professional rival dares to earn a master’s degree, eschewing such professional development while adopting a tellingly somnogenic aphorism: “Education is the sleeping pill that makes dreams happen.”
Situating Peggy within interdisciplinary scholarship, this paper will search for progress throughout the show’s run. Given that White women still dominate the teaching field despite ever-diversifying student demographics, Peggy the pedagogue is ripe for critique and can spark critical conversation regarding White women’s lingering responsibility to incite, rather than inhibit, transformative school reform.
Paper #2: “Rita: ‘The Good Teacher’ Gets Real”
While teaching in Copenhagen several years ago, I became hooked on the Danish television dramedy Rita (TV 2, 2012-2020, five seasons), which stars Mille Dinesen as the eponymous character, Rita Madsen. This teacher’s life at home with her own kids is a mess. She’s having an affair with the school principal. She breaks a lot of rules, among them smoking cigarettes at school. Yet, despite these transgressions, Rita is recognizable as a “Good Teacher” in the ways I have outlined in previous publications focused on the representation of educators in popular culture as part of The Hollywood Model.
Rita carries a degree of complexity and a level of authenticity that is missing from most representations of women teachers, especially depictions on American television and film. Rita seems like a real person, one who fails to meet expectations of others, and even herself, but who swings into action when the stakes are high and shines when her students need her understanding and support most. The series, which has become popular worldwide as its availability has increased on streaming platforms, offers a challenge to tired tropes and an opening for narrative reinvention.
This paper examines how the character Rita Madsen provides a model for advancing television narratives about teachers beyond tired and reductive archetypes. Rita invites us to explore the possibilities of new representations that evoke “realistic teachers,” depictions of human beings who try to make a difference but know where to train their attention and how to choose their battles.
Paper #3: He Doesn’t Belong Here: An Arendtian Consideration of Young Sheldon
In “The Crisis in Education” (1954), Hannah Arendt argues that educators are responsible for presenting children with space and time for contemplating the world and their eventual role in its renewal. Arendt presents the child as a newcomer in a liminal state of being or “natality,” a state of newness where the child and the world must be protected from each other that is the “essence of education” (171). What happens when educators do not fulfill this role for a certain student? What if that student has an off-the-charts IQ and enters high school at age nine and college at age eleven? In Young Sheldon (CBS, 2017 – present), educators fail continually to preserve the newness in Sheldon Cooper. Viewers see this play out comedically during the first three seasons through Sheldon’s interactions with his high school teachers. Two of these characters are female: Victoria MacElroy and Evelyn Ingram. In the fourth season, he encounters a female professor, Dora Ericson, whose philosophy class sends the first-year college student into an existential crisis.
These female educators encounter barriers to cultivating natality in Sheldon in sharp contrast to the two recurring male professor characters. Episodes are constructed to send Sheldon to the male professors for guidance and mentorship constantly, which effectively promotes these male scientists as more capable of cultivating Sheldon’s natality. In the world of sitcom producer Chuck Lorre, discourse surrounding gender and education plays out in ways that are ripe for reinvention.
The Female Teacher on TV: From Reification to Reinvention
Rationale for Panel: Inspired by a forthcoming edited volume, this panel will critically examine female teachers on television alongside socio-historical scholarship on the feminized profession of teaching and feminism’s various waves. Papers will build on groundwork within the niche genre of schools on screen, e.g., Mary Dalton’s Teacher TV (2008) and The Hollywood Curriculum (1999), Robert Bulman's Hollywood Goes to High School (2015), and Sevan Terzian and Patrick Ryan's edited volume American Education and Popular Media (2015). Given the Console-ing Passions call “to consider the role of a feminist lens in pushing for reimaginings of our institutional structures and inequities,” these papers intentionally focus on the institution of schooling, wherein women have served as idealized paragons of republican motherhood, cheaper alternatives to male workers, and handmaids to hegemony.
Our feminist analyses of such pop cultural pedagogues delineate key shifts in stereotypical portrayals of female teachers on TV. For example, juxtaposing the late ’90s Fox animated sitcom King of the Hill, which takes place in a Texas suburb, against the more recent Danish dramedy Rita reveals both the global and chronological endurance of Dalton’s “Good Teacher” model as well as how contemporary television shows offer viewers more nuanced manifestations of once-tired tropes.Turning to Young Sheldon, arguably a reinvention of The Big Bang Theory, we will illuminate the prequel sitcom’s undercurrent conversations on male vs. female teachers. Ideally, this diverse display of TV teachers will foster audience discussion with a view toward reinventing schools on screen—and writ large.
Paper #1: “Education is the Sleeping Pill that Makes Dreams Happen”: Peggy Hill, Patriarchal Shill
In the opening credits to King of the Hill (Fox, 1997–2010, 13 seasons), while Hank and friends drink beer in stoic silence, Peggy singlehandedly drags a couch to the curb, enlists niece Luanne to change a tire, picks up son Bobby’s discarded bicycle, and performs that fatherly duty of taking out the trash—although Hank claims credit for the chore. Looking beyond the domestic sphere reinforces these inequities.
The first season establishes Peggy as the smarter spouse while illustrating her matrimonial submission. That she is merely a substitute teacher underscores her complacency with traditional gender roles. In Season 2, when Hank insists Bobby needs a full-time stay-at-home mom, Peggy acquiesces. Literally sub-servient, Peggy takes pride in being a “Substitute of the Year” to a dangerous degree: serving as an unwitting drug mule for a prisoner who knows how to exploit teacher tropes; embracing corporal punishment to redeem herself after a bad evaluation; and returning to work far too soon after a near-death experience. However, she scoffs when her professional rival dares to earn a master’s degree, eschewing such professional development while adopting a tellingly somnogenic aphorism: “Education is the sleeping pill that makes dreams happen.”
Situating Peggy within interdisciplinary scholarship, this paper will search for progress throughout the show’s run. Given that White women still dominate the teaching field despite ever-diversifying student demographics, Peggy the pedagogue is ripe for critique and can spark critical conversation regarding White women’s lingering responsibility to incite, rather than inhibit, transformative school reform.
Paper #2: “Rita: ‘The Good Teacher’ Gets Real”
While teaching in Copenhagen several years ago, I became hooked on the Danish television dramedy Rita (TV 2, 2012-2020, five seasons), which stars Mille Dinesen as the eponymous character, Rita Madsen. This teacher’s life at home with her own kids is a mess. She’s having an affair with the school principal. She breaks a lot of rules, among them smoking cigarettes at school. Yet, despite these transgressions, Rita is recognizable as a “Good Teacher” in the ways I have outlined in previous publications focused on the representation of educators in popular culture as part of The Hollywood Model.
Rita carries a degree of complexity and a level of authenticity that is missing from most representations of women teachers, especially depictions on American television and film. Rita seems like a real person, one who fails to meet expectations of others, and even herself, but who swings into action when the stakes are high and shines when her students need her understanding and support most. The series, which has become popular worldwide as its availability has increased on streaming platforms, offers a challenge to tired tropes and an opening for narrative reinvention.
This paper examines how the character Rita Madsen provides a model for advancing television narratives about teachers beyond tired and reductive archetypes. Rita invites us to explore the possibilities of new representations that evoke “realistic teachers,” depictions of human beings who try to make a difference but know where to train their attention and how to choose their battles.
Paper #3: He Doesn’t Belong Here: An Arendtian Consideration of Young Sheldon
In “The Crisis in Education” (1954), Hannah Arendt argues that educators are responsible for presenting children with space and time for contemplating the world and their eventual role in its renewal. Arendt presents the child as a newcomer in a liminal state of being or “natality,” a state of newness where the child and the world must be protected from each other that is the “essence of education” (171). What happens when educators do not fulfill this role for a certain student? What if that student has an off-the-charts IQ and enters high school at age nine and college at age eleven? In Young Sheldon (CBS, 2017 – present), educators fail continually to preserve the newness in Sheldon Cooper. Viewers see this play out comedically during the first three seasons through Sheldon’s interactions with his high school teachers. Two of these characters are female: Victoria MacElroy and Evelyn Ingram. In the fourth season, he encounters a female professor, Dora Ericson, whose philosophy class sends the first-year college student into an existential crisis.
These female educators encounter barriers to cultivating natality in Sheldon in sharp contrast to the two recurring male professor characters. Episodes are constructed to send Sheldon to the male professors for guidance and mentorship constantly, which effectively promotes these male scientists as more capable of cultivating Sheldon’s natality. In the world of sitcom producer Chuck Lorre, discourse surrounding gender and education plays out in ways that are ripe for reinvention.
Bio
Author #1: Elizabeth Currin, a Clinical Assistant Professor in Instruction and Teacher Education at the University of South Carolina, teaches action research and curriculum studies courses for the online Ed.D. in Educational Practice and Innovation. Elizabeth also serves as a liaison within the Professional Development Schools Network and, having been a high school English teacher, engages in scholarship related to stories by and about teachers, encompassing practitioner research, the history of education, and representations of schools in popular culture.
Author #2: Mary M. Dalton is Professor of Communication at Wake Forest University where she teaches courses in critical media studies and screenwriting. Her scholarly publications include articles, book chapters, and the books The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies (third revised edition), Teacher TV: Seventy Years of Teachers on Television (second revised edition), and the co-edited volume The Sitcom Reader: America Re-viewed, Still Skewed (second revised edition). Her documentaries have been screened at various festivals, museums, galleries, libraries, and on public television.
Author #3: Stephanie O’Brien teaches in the Mass Communication Department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and, before that, began her career as a community college instructor. Her B.A. is in Broadcast and Cinema Studies from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, her M.A. in Communication Studies is from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies is from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She recently published her dissertation in ProQuest and a related article in Philosophy, Theory, and Foundations in Education. Prior to her career in education, she worked in the film and television industry as an assistant director. She has worked on over 35 film and television productions and is a member of the Director’s Guild of America.