Male Teachers as Role Models: Addressing Issues of Masculinity, Pedagogy and the Re-Masculinization of Schooling WAYNE JOHN MARTINO The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada ABSTRACT This article focuses on the call for more male teachers as role models in elementary schools and treats it as a manifestation of “recuperative masculinity politics” (Lingard & Douglas, 1999). Attention is drawn to the problematic gap between neo-liberal educational policy–related discussions about male teacher shortage in elementary schools and research-based literature which provides a more nuanced analysis of the impact of gender relations on male teachers’ lives and developing professional identities. In this sense, the article achieves three objectives: (1) it provides a context and historical overview of the emergence and re-emergence of the male role model rhetoric as a necessary basis for understanding the politics of “doing women’s work” and the anxieties about the status of masculinity that this incites for male elementary school teachers; (2) it contributes to existing literature which traces the manifestation of these anxieties in current concerns expressed in the popular media about the dearth of male teachers; (3) it provides a focus on research-based literature to highlight the political significance of denying knowl- edge about the role that homophobia, compulsory heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity play in “doing women’s work.” Thus the article provides a much-needed interrogation of the failure of educational policy and policy-related discourse to address the significance of male teachers “doing women’s work” through employing an analytic framework that refutes discourses about the supposed detrimental influences of the feminization of elementary schooling. INTRODUCTION Putting a man, any man, in place of women in school will not do. A man who is less than a man can be more damaging to boys than domineering mothers. (Sexton, 1969, pp. 29–30) This article raises important questions about the politicized function of the male role model discourse within the context of “moral panic” which has intensified in recent times in response to the declining number of male © 2008 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Curriculum Inquiry 38:2 (2008) Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK doi: 10.1111/j.1467-873X.2007.00405.x