Analyzing depictions of touch in early childhood textbooks

Early childhood contexts often enact 'common-sense identities' that create and sustain the notion that teachers of young children are expressly female and heterosexual. It has also been argued that touch is a key difference between men and women in early childhood classrooms. This exploratory study examined 10 early childhood textbooks to determine whether images depicting touch enacted these common-sense notions. To investigate whether implicit gendered messages existed within the texts, images displaying touch between teachers and children were grouped according to three main recurrent themes: teacher touching child, child touching teacher, and mutually negotiated contact