Advance praise for my new book from Rowman & Littlefield, Wise and Foolish Virgins. Thanks to Christine, Shabana and Camille for their endorsements and support.
“A complicated argument presented with aplomb, that in what many rush to call a post-gender world, the feminized performances of teachers and teacher education ooze gender. While popular media and the mind’s eye of our own past educational experiences often reduce women teachers to a monolithic caricature, Sally Campbell Galman reminds us that wisdom comes in releasing the foolish, too-simple answers and seeking the complex contradictions of being an effective woman teacher.” —Christine Mallozzi, University of Kentucky
“Sally Galman’s book cleverly combines story, metaphor, and research to shed new light on the gendered nature of the teaching profession. This book is a provocative read for anyone interested in how gendered teaching identities are taken up and performed by white, middle-class, heterosexual females who dominate the profession.” —J. Camille Cammack, University of Massachusetts
“Sally Galman closely examines teachers through qualitative data gathered at various schools of education in a beautifully written book that both informs and entertains the educated lay reader and the scholarly critic. Elementary teacher identity emerges as twisted up in life-choices and identities that are feminine, racial, class-based, sexual, and professional. Galman seriously yet critically switches like a ‘born’ teacher among ironic humor, intense concern, and trenchant analysis. This book is an important study of teacher identity that achieves the difficult balance of rootedness in elementary teacher education as well as Goffman-framed anthropological analysis.” —Shabana Mir, Oklahoma State University
About the book:
Wise and Foolish Virgins: White Women at Work in the Feminized World of Primary School Teaching by Sally Campbell Galman asks the question, what does it mean for an entire profession to be numerically dominated by white women, and what is the relationship between teacher preparation and professional feminization? The book tells the story of three very different teacher preparation programs, explores the hopes and struggles of the mostly white, female students in those programs, and opens a window upon the closed world of teacher educators themselves who must straddle multiple worlds and multiple masters. With one foot in ancient allegory and the other in contemporary popular culture, this text addresses the complex ecologies of gender identity and negotiation between student teachers, teacher educators, and policy-makers against the politicized backdrop of pop culture “feminization” and the unique contours of homogenization in the emerging elementary teaching force.
Shane, The Lone Ethnographer is an accessible and entertaining introduction to ethnography. Campbell Galman walks the reader through the process of doing ethnographic research, via her comic character Shane, the Lone Ethnographer, on the campus of an unnamed university. For the novice researcher about to embark on fieldwork in qualitative research methods, this is an excellent–and the only comic-book–introduction. Her text will delight and inform students who are learning ethnographic methods in anthropology, education, and other social science courses.
