Teachers are considered a representative of knowledge, authority, and power. Walkerdine (1990) thinks that being a female teacher is actually “an impossible fiction.” In Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching, Grumet (1988) applies the bitter milk as a metaphor to reveal the paradox of being a female teacher. The dominant view of the teacher as a rational and instrumental actor ignores gender dimension of how teaching job is being constructed and its impact to female and male teachers respectively(Dillabough, 1999). Studying what teaching means to women does not merely focus on the issue of unequal or injustice of representation between male and female teachers. More importantly, teaching viewed as a discourse provides us to explore how gender ideology becomes a natural process. Taiwan’s rapid socio-economic and political development in 1980s created a new social context in which civil society was revived and state’s authority was challenged. Social movements in 1980s can be seen as a phenomenon that society’s individuals struggled to redefine their social places in a new social context. The corrected-ness of gender stereotypes, ethnic discrimination, political ideology and national aspiration in the contents of elementary and middle school curricula reflected the themes of women’s movement, aboriginal human-rights movement, political victims human-rights movement, indigenous cultural movement, and so on. The emergence of educational reform in the early 1990s, in a way, is a response to the transition of society. Teachers are the core and target of this movement. Among them, elementary female teachers are about 70% of the total population of elementary teachers. Secondary female teachers are about 60% of the total population of secondary teachers. It is in this context that the paper discusses the construction and de-construction of teaching identity of elementary and secondary female teachers under the impact of educational reforms since 1990s in Taiwan. From poststructuralist perspective of feminism, the paper explores the contradiction and resistance of female teachers who are situated in multiple subject positions due to drastic social and educational change.

Methodology of this research is qualitative-oriented. I interviewed 6 female teachers, 4 are from elementary school and 2 are from secondary school. The interview questions are not structured but directed to explore questions, such as: ”what constitute your experiences of being female teachers in the process of Taiwanese educational reforms since 1990s?”’, “As a female teacher, how your experience is formed in the process of Taiwanese educational reform?”, “How do you make sense of such educational reform movement as relating to your daily life in school and your identity as being a female teacher?” By collecting above interview data, I analyze how gender code in female teachers’ daily life is produced and competed, and how subjectivities of female teachers are constructed through such an open but contradictory process of discursive practice of educational reform.

In the paper, first, I discuss post-structuralist ways of seeing the relationship between discursive practice and subjectivity. Second, I introduce the socio-political context of educational reform in Taiwan and relate it to the international reform trends. Third, I then discuss what and how experiences of female teachers are constituted under the impact of such reforms since 1990s. Fourth, I analyze the multiple contradictions of female teachers’ subject positions in the discourses of educational reforms by introducing their coping strategies and resistance. Finally, by concluding above discussions and analyses, I point out that female teachers are put in a dilemma between being a caretaker-like teacher and a research-oriented professional. As the reform agenda set the ground of teachers as an agent of educational reform, female teachers are already exhausted by resolving their dilemma. (By concluding above discussions and analyses, I try to propose possible ways of becoming women-teacher-subject who not only takes but also problemtize gender and teaching issues in order to participate and destablize discursive fields of educational reform and make visible the implicit gender issue in their identity construction of being a caring as well as professional teacher in schools.)(Was in already)