It Takes Team Effort

Men and Women Working Together to Enhance Children’s Lives

Edited by:
Lemuel W. Watson, Kinsey Institute, Indiana University

Published 2014

This book explores the many ways and opportunities in which men and women might work together to highlight creative ways as well as examine the role of men in schools, families, and community engagement. The book helps to broaden the group’s “collective identity” of those who work with male teachers and caregivers by expanding an understanding of their experiences in order to better ways of collaboration. This book serves as a practical guide and resource to challenge the status quo in following our own intuition about our life’s work as men and women in early childhood education.

The central theme that is sought here is to remember the general purpose of education: to enlighten for multiple purposes and to ask the resounding questions of how do we best achieve this purpose as men and women working together without the confines of gender roles, especially as educators in early childhood and the general educational setting where gender roles are specific to men and women’s perceived ways of caring, nurturing, providing, and educating future generations.

CONTENTS
Preface, Lemuel W. Watson. Understanding the Context of Early Childhood and Best Practices from a Social-Cultural Perspective, Lemuel W. Watson. Being a Man in the Early Childhood Classroom: Challenging Some Assumptions about Our Roles and Responsibilities, Jamison Browder and Herman Knopf. Men in the Field of Early Care and Education: Perceptions of Male and Female Early Childhood Professionals, Angela C. Baum, Kerrie L. Welsh, and Nancy K. Freeman. Why Can’t Men Care for Children? The Development of a Male Nurturer, Darryl B. Holloman. Being in the Minority: A Comparative and Contrasting Perspective of Two Early Childhood Education Professors, Reginald Williams and Herman Knopf. Empowering Children through Gender Diversity, Jeff Daitsman. Learning to Hear the Unspoken, Learning to See Beyond Myself: One Man’s Journey to a More Caring Masculinity, Terence A. Beck. Women and Men Teaching Children Together: A Global Analysis, Margaret Asalele Mbilizi. Conclusion, Lemuel W. Watson. Biographies.