The focus on this paper is how parents see the situation of male kindergarten teachers in Austria.

This research is part of a FWF-sponsored research at the university of innsbruck called "public fathers - men in the pedagogical work with children" with Josef Christian Aigner (2012). This part had the focus on parents, the others had the focus on the male kindergartenteachers, the situation in Austria and the vocational training of male kindergartenteachers. So this total research had a big range of perspectives.

The fraim of this research has three theoretical domains. The perception of parents on the ability and competences of male kindergarten teachers should always be related with these three approaches: Historicality, Gender and Professionalism.

First this should shown in a historical way up to the present age. This includes anthropological details (e.g. the situation of paedagogics in greece during the ancient times up to Rousseau, Froebel and Korczak). Male Kindergartenteachers are not that foreign species as some people think. A historical view shows a lot of male representatives in the pedagogics.

Nevertheless the profession of kindergartenteacher is a female occupation. So the second focus of this research is on gender and the abilities of men and women in education.Up to the concept of "Geistige Mütterlichkeit" (Henriette Schrader-Breymann) it is important to analyse the ability and skills of education from a gender perspective. Is it necessary to be a woman to understand and educate/teach children? A historical view about the women role in the education and the development and change during the last years shows the necessity of men AND women in the education.

The third focus and relation to male kindergartenteachers is professionalism. It is necessary not only to talk about the number of male kindergartenteachers. The important thing is to register that male (and female) kindergartenteacher work in a professional way. To see this occupational field in a professional context, the EPIK-model (Schratz, 2011) was used to analyse the parental reactions and their statements about the effect of male kindergartenteachers. The EPIK-model includes five domains: reflection, teamwork, personal mastery, the ability of difference and the awareness of profession.

So the main issue in the research was to ask, how parents feel  during thinking about male kindergartenteachers and what is their opinion about suitability of male kindergartenteachers. For this empirical research parents had been asked with questionnaires and interviews because parents play such a pivotal role in their daily interactions. The statements of them were reflected with historical and latest considerations on the field of suitability and professionalism.

The analysis of the parental statements took place in international conext, too. To draw comparisons there were sifted studies from germany (Cremers & Krabel, 2012; Krabel, 2006), england (Cameron, 1999) and Norway (Emilsen, 2012). At least this empirical research compares results with historical, gender and professionalism contexts, but also with findings of other studies in europe.

This research is an empirical research with a mixed methods design. After examination european studies and collaborate in the FWF-project it was important for an extensive view to do a mixed methods design. The first step was the quanitative method of questionnaire (n=143). This survey was analyzed with SPSS and for the significance it was uses the Mann-Whitney-U-Test and the Kruskal-Wallis-Test. Following the qualitative methode was guided interviews (=27). The analysis was done with qualitative content analysis (Mayring). The categories are experiences with male kindergarten teachers, the importance of gender in the education, emotions of parents with male kindergarten teachers, possible dangerous, activities of male kindergarten teachers, differences between male and female kindergarten teachers, types of male kindergarten teachers and other matters. It was difficult to combine results from two different methods. So the combination was the comparison of the sampling and the qualitative and quantitative results and to analyse the differences and the equality of results. The random sampling have been parents which had or had not experience with male kindergartenteacher. The focus was, that there are representative parents from small/big kindergartens, from kindergartens from town/country, from public and private kindergartens, kindergartens with special pedagogical tendency and parents which are older/younger and different conditions.

A central finding of the study is that parents are primarily satisfied with males in kindergartens (e.g. bringing in other aspects, promoting the development of identity, breaking down role stereotypes), but also express minor reservations (e.g., undertaking certain duties; parents’ initial surprise during first encounters). Another result is, that parents see the necassery of male kindergarten teachers. But they don´t realize their whole professionalism. There are domains which notice parents a lot (like teamwork or the personal mastery), but there are also domains which are not realized that much. These results demonstrate the need for adequate acting and re-acting of female and male professionals as well as the need for further consideration of professionalisation within this field of education

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