Vinn deras hjärtan! - Om genus och emotioner i Tv-serien klass 9A

Abstract

This article investigates the mediation of teachers in a reality-TV program, how gender, femininity, masculinity and emotions interact in a school fiction. The reality-TV program, Klass 9A, consisting of 13 episodes, was broadcasted in Swedish television during spring 2008. In the program, viewers could follow a high school class during the fall semester 2007. The class teachers were replaced by “eight of Sweden’s foremost educators” (the TV-producer´s words) to help the pupils improve their scores from low level to the third best class in the country during that semester. In that sense this was a Makeover-television and in analyzing the teachers, they are treated as constructions of the producers. Theoretically and methodologically Sara Ahmed’s concept of emotions are used – what emotions do between people, giving and constructing attributes. Three teachers, two men and one woman, are exemplifying the analysis. The (male) math teacher’s pedagogical strategy is love, an approach he both articulate and perform. Love as a teaching method appears as an exercise of power, a patriarchal and biblically informed performance and a powerful discipline tool. In the sport subject, the (male) teacher act to a high degree as a coach, engaging in a democratic sport leadership. He is doing it with empathy, in a way feminine, but without loosing his masculinity, secured by his traditionally male subject sport. The female teacher (Swedish language) is doing masculinity, disembodied by how the producers represent her, but is embodied in the end of the semester, by being represented as sentimental and caring when it comes to the final test. In that sense she is castrated, made less powerful and brought back to the conception of female teachers as carrying. The program supports the conception of missing male teachers in school and a longing for old time discipline.