Titled Men school teachers get bullied too: examples from an Australian study, three educators reflect on the offences they have endured from both students and parents, with long-term career consequences for some.
Strong themes emerged from the teachers’ narratives, with researchers struck by three key things:
“First, the depth and breadth of offences against these individuals.
“Second, that each participant in their different ways at times downplayed what had happened to them.
“Third, the longer-term effects on them particularly with two out of three leaving their chosen careers.
“Each of these reflections point to the lack of appropriate organisational support and interest in these men’s welfare,” the study highlights.
One participant named Mark reported that he’d had disruptive students placed in his class purely because of his size and gender.
“…Because I’m a male and I’m big, it’s law-of-the-jungle; it’s a little bit easier for me.
“So there’s been kids that have been pulled out of other classes and put into my classes, because there are other teachers that just aren’t coping…”
The teacher said this had nothing to do with the ability of other staff to manage poor behaviour.
“It’s to do with the fact that they might be quite small or they might have a higher-pitched voice, or they might be a woman.
“You get some kids brought up in families where they’re not really taught to appreciate women, or women are seen as someone who stays at home or whatever. Then those [teachers] can have a hard time really quickly.”
The teacher also recalls experiencing ‘harassment’ from parents during parent-teacher meetings.
“Some parents, if you bring up academic issues or behaviour issues, take it really, really badly,” he says.
“They feel like because they’re spending this money it shouldn’t be an issue. So when you bring these things up, they can get very, very aggressive – very rude, angry and aggressive.
“Not physical contact, but in terms of being very argumentative, and you can see them going red in the face and getting very worked up about it,” he shares.
He reports that his school leadership had been afraid to tackle students’ poor classroom behaviour, noting “the management has been worried about how they should reprimand these people who are paying so much money”.
“Probably a month after starting I went to the head of the middle school (mainly Year-9 but also Year-8s) and I said ‘this is a real issue because we’ve got a lot of kids who are disrupting the class and taking away from my ability to teach kids, because they feel very, very entitled’.
“His response was, ‘Yeah, well, that is just the way it is and that is just something we need to deal with.’ Like, it was… as educators, they had almost resigned themselves,” he says.
Every move you made had to be justified, the teacher added, saying not many student behavioural incidents get reported to school leadership because “there’s a real sense that it’s just a part of the job”.
“The thing you’ve got to remember at schools is that for any action to be taken, things have to be really, really overt and really, really black-and-white.
“So, if a kid swears at a teacher and another teacher hears it and it’s a decent swear word, then that will get followed through. Or if a teacher is shoved and another teacher sees it, that will be followed through.
“But it needs to be very, very black-and-white. There needs to be two people backing it up,” he notes.
Lead researcher Edgar Burns from New Zealand’s University of Waikato said it was striking the extent to which the three male teachers downplayed their experiences.
“It was very interesting to me, in preparing their views and the literature around it, how understated they were. There was no stridency or assertion that, ‘I’ve been bullied’.
“In fact, if you run through the comments ... [they’re] almost apologetic. So that was something that struck me – and also the fact that it’s not an entirely a [gender-based] issue,” Burns tells EducationHQ.
The male teachers simply expected bullying to be part of their job and “recognised that it was part of what their world of teaching was, Burns adds.
Rob, another English teacher and author, who previously had worked at a rural Victorian school, described a campaign that a select group of parents had mounted against him when he started his six-month contract.
He recalls how they falsely informed his principal that he was ‘essentially a paedophile’ and claimed he was exposing their children to books with inappropriate sexual content.
“One of the stories which I wrote many years before I came to that school was about a young boy coming out as gay in a country town, written as a first-person narrative.
“The parents read that and immediately thought I was grooming their children … They emailed the principal to that affect, removed their students from my class and also started telling people in the community that’s what I was…”
The teacher says he asked his principal for mediation many times.
“She didn’t push the issue with them and basically sacked me.”
His short-term contract, he was told, “wouldn’t be renewed; I wouldn’t be welcome back at that school ever again under any circumstances.”
The impact was profound, the teacher indicates.
“They were telling their friends in the community about me, all these lies about me as well.
“So I barely left the house, I’d go up the road with my daughter to take her to the playground and I’d just feel people were saying, ‘there’s that bloke with his kid and he’s here to try and find more kids’ or something, you know what I mean?”
The teacher says the situation “completely dominated my entire thought process.”
“I didn’t feel comfortable in the town, I couldn’t go anywhere. I didn’t feel like I could go to the playground with my daughter … I didn’t know who they’d told and who was thinking what, so it just really was just a horrendous situation for me personally and my family.”
Around 20 per cent of bullying and harassment cases towards teachers might actually get reported, the teacher flagged.
“There’s a lot of filtering, too, people don’t feel it will go anywhere. They just feel that it falls on deaf ears, so they don’t bother.
“I think, too, sometimes it’s very hard to talk to leadership because they’re always so busy. You might send an email; you get no response. You might try and see them, but they’re in a meeting…”
When eventually access is realised this might be a week or two after the incident.
“…it’s almost like, ‘well, it’s so long ago, on the scale of things it’s hardly worth pursuing anymore’. There’s no ability to have the instant response you really need.”
According to the teacher, principals ought to be the buffer between parents and staff and this should be a role they take “very seriously”.
“They shouldn’t just take parents’ sides all the time; they should really see that in some ways they should be on the side of the teachers to a fair degree.
“Unless something’s been proven, in which case that’s different, but they shouldn’t let innuendo and hearsay become reality when it’s not. I spoke to the union about [my being targeted] and they weren’t very helpful either.”
When asked whether teachers are safe at school, Rob says that “as a whole they’re not”.
“I generally feel fairly safe and that’s because I’m a six foot four male, but I think a lot of teachers don’t feel safe. I have kids in my unit who are there because staff don’t feel safe with them in their classroom. That’s part of the job for me.”
The ‘vacuum of support’ from school leadership was quite pronounced in all three case studies, Burns says.
Keen to avoid getting into a ‘blame game’ here, the researcher says it was curious the three teachers all expressed a degree of sympathy and understanding for their principal or deputy and the complicated work they do.
“They felt frustrated and let down but there was some acknowledgement [that the school leader is] kind of like a station master, the kind of station where you need to be in and out and perhaps [dealing with] crappy parents or the recalcitrant kids.”
The overarching message about bullying sent to the male teachers was they they had to suck it up, Burns suggests.
But to what this extent this is due to gender remains yet to be unpacked, he says.
