Male practitioners’ interactions with children in ECEC settings: observational data from cities of Edinburgh, Hong Kong, and Tianjin

In recognising that there is a lack of empirical studies that observed male teachers’ interactions with children in ECEC settings, and that cross-cultural analyses of men’s participation in ECEC would provide fresh insights into the area (Rohrmann and Brody, 2015), this paper will present findings on how male teachers from three cultures interacted with children through their daily practices in ECEC. The complexities and dynamics of gender, as well as its intersections with other social categories within and across cultures, were found to be affecting teacher-child interactions discursively. Implications of this research include that discussions on men’s participation in ECEC should go well beyond gender binary of being men and women, and that attention needs to be given to how individual practitioners situate themselves/are situated in various social and cultural contexts of gender and ECEC.