Dr. Robert Dahlgren
Professor Robert Dahlgren wrote a chapter in “The Female Teacher on Television: Shifting Stereotypes on the Small Screen.”
Dr. Dahlgren’s chapter, “You’re Not Really My Children: Teachers and the Attack on Public Education,” explores the images of female elementary school teachers contained with the narratives of “Teachers,” a situation comedy series that ran on the TV Land cable network from 2016 to 2019.
“The series centered on the lives of six teachers whose caricatured portrayals dovetailed neatly with the negative tropes about public education,” Dahlgren said.
Dahlgren’s argues that the overwhelmingly negative images of public schools and teachers embedded in popular entertainment have coincided with the efforts of neoliberal, corporate education reformers to limit the influence of, and ultimately defund, America’s public schools.
Dahlgren teaches a graduate-level course, EDU 591: Images of Public Schools and Teachers in Hollywood Films and Television, for students enrolled in the Master of Science in Education program Curriculum and Instruction in Inclusive Education. His chapter that provides a critical review of the “Teachers” series is part of that ongoing work.
“The Female Teacher on Television” examines ways in which the depiction of female teachers on television has developed from the medium’s infancy to the present time. Although teaching is a largely female-dominated profession, the first depictions of female teachers didn’t occur until many decades later.
Dahlgren and three other contributors analyze a variety of programs that span time periods, audiences and the genre to provide insight into the past, present and future trajectory of increasingly multidimensional portrayals of female teachers, according to the publisher’s website.
