(Yes, that Barbie!) In a 1990s storyline, Barbie decides to pursue a career as a teacher, even though she is already well-known as a model. Just as Pierce has trouble fitting both his lives into the larger frame of “teacher,” and we aren’t sure who Tane really is, so may novice teachers be forced to negotiate between what Sumara and Luce-Kapler name as “conflicting remembered, lived and projected senses of identity.” BarbieĪ surprising example of a character able to balance her life in and out of the classroom is Barbie. (Other research notes LGBTQ+ teachers struggle to find safe space in schools to be themselves.) The split identity struggles of Black Lightning and Johnny Thunder resonate with themes that education scholars Dennis Sumara and Rebecca Luce-Kapler have noticed in beginning teachers, who often join the profession experiencing a sense of “dissonance between their pre-teaching lives and their lives as experienced teachers.” Unsurprisingly, they find, this is especially true for teachers from marginalized groups, including racialized teachers, immigrant teachers and gay and lesbian teachers. Johnny Thunder’s students could be impressed by his superhero status, but his father disapproves of his daytime teaching career. Though he has his suspicions, Sheriff Tane never does discover his son’s secret identity, nor does he come around to respect his work in the classroom, a fact that leads his son to feel understandably confused about who he actually is. Janzen have examined how campaigns by governments that criticize teachers or the teaching profession, and seek to justify underfunding education, rely on gendered projections that suggest patriarchal surveillance over teaching devalued as “women’s work.” Tane’s father is also the local sheriff, and often humiliates his son for working as a teacher: “Teachin’s for womenfolk!” he says, “ An fightin’ for justice a man’s job.”Įducation researchers Shannon D. The comics’ narrating voice describes this confusion of identities as a “dual post as fighter with books and bullets for justice” in a 1951 issue of All American Western (Issue 120). Taneįirst appearing in 1940s western comics, much of cowboy superhero Johnny Thunder’s story line involves a struggle between his desire to enact vengeance and justice at gunpoint, and his wish to teach children about civic duty in the classroom as Mr. To greater or lesser degress, these may be at odds with mainstream western cultural expectations and cultural myths about teachers - such as the view that teachers are rugged individualists and self-made experts, as noted by education researcher Deborah P. In one story, after spending the night out as Black Lightning, he remarks, visibly exhausted: “ Schoolteacher Jefferson Pierce still has some English papers to grade before morning.”įor such characters, the stress of a double life reveals the impediments that teachers may encounter when trying to maintain out-of-school interests and identities. This double life, however, takes its toll, and leaves Pierce with hardly a moment to rest. ('Black Lightning', Issue 6, July 1995/DC Comics) Pierce to grade papers in the morning after a night as superhero Black Lightning.
Grundy doing something out of the ordinary, such as taking a skydiving class on the weekend or preparing a lecture for her students on women’s rights.Īs a professor who educates teachers-to-be about learning to build a sustainable teaching life, both in and out of the classroom, and a researcher who has examined teachers in comics, I read comics set in school with an inquiring eye about what readers are led to implicitly accept about the emotional lives of those who teach. Grundy of Riverdale High in the Archie comics - are immediately recognizable, you would be forgiven for thinking she has no life outside of her job.
Teachers in comics therefore rarely have much of an inner world.Įven if certain figures - such as Ms. Teacher characters in comics are almost as ubiquitous as flowing capes and tights - but they’re often relegated to the background of stories about the lives of students, like a piece of furniture or a potted plant.Īs a familiar example, the teachers in Peanuts never appear in the panels but are only implied as distant voices, while even Snoopy is given the odd thought bubble.