Yuwei Xu | worldofworknetwork

DR YUWEI XU

Research Coordinator (South)

Institution: University of Portsmouth (Lecturer)

Discipline: Sociology of Education and Childhoods

What’s your research about?

My research centres around the broader issue of men’s and women’s employment in non-traditional occupations and with a particular focus on men’s employment in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) workforce. In a global context of calling for more men to work as ECEC practitioners/teachers, my PhD project is aimed at addressing three research questions including: 1. Whether or not men and women practitioners/teachers would interact with children differently; and if so, how are those differences manifested?; 2. What are practitioners’/teachers’ and children’s perceptions of their (gendered) interactions with each other?; 3. What are the impacts of cultural discourses on gender and ECEC? To answer those questions, I investigated the gender dynamics of teacher-child interactions in ECEC settings in Edinburgh, Hong Kong, and Tianjin, China, using multiple qualitative methods such as observations in 17 classrooms cross-culturally, interviews with both male and female teachers, and pictorial conversations with children aged 3-6 years old.

Tell us something interesting about yourself?

I am a world traveller who has been to over 20 countries and 110 cities so far and will continue my explorations of the world in my whole life.