Teachers’ negative experiences and expressions of emotion: being true to yourself or keeping you in your place?

Abstract

This paper examines teachers' experiences and displays of negative emotion as a means of partially exploring how identities at work might be formed and regulated. It uses the concepts of emotional labour and subjectivation to interrogate the negative emotions teachers may experience and/or express at work. It suggests that emotion display rules are developed and come to partially define the teacher self in tandem with overlapping, synthetically discussed discourses of the teacher as moral/caring agent, expert and purveyor of social control/social efficiency. The field of emotional labour is explored here using diary entries of teachers who were between their second and fifth year of teaching in Irish primary schools. Teachers' experiences are read with less of a concern for the original 'authenticity' thesis of emotional labour in order to foreground an analysis of how certain truths about teachers' emotions are legitimated and solidified in the labour cycle. It is argued that spaces for multiple teacher identities and interrogation of emotional display must be carved out in teacher education. This space might include an acknowledgement of ambivalence towards the profession.

Relationships of surveillance, assurance and recognition: early career primary teachers’ engagement with discourses of accountability and performance

“…As a consequence, DEIS 2 cohort experienced less pressure to choose between their professional roles scores to parents, with Claire stating: 'you don't want to tell them [parents], you don't want to go on about how low [standardised test results] they are'. A sense of anxiety surrounding the 'level' of the class and their ability to master the content examined in tests is a constant site of emotional conflict for these teachers (Kitching 2009). The negative effect this emotional conflict can have on teacher motivation is reflected upon by Frances and Sarah, as they discuss the deflationary effect perceived poor results can have on their motivation: A friend in a very small country school said, 'oh I would die if [one of my students] got anything lower than a seven [STen score]' 2 and I could just see myself and the other girl that teaches in a DEIS Band 1 school and we were just looking at each other going 'we are failing as teachers'.…”

Teacher Beliefs and Emotion Expression in Light of Support for Student Psychological Needs: A Qualitative Study

“…A number of studies have examined teacher beliefs about teaching and learning in general, subject matter, self-efficacy, identity, and teaching roles [19,[55][56][57]. Pajares [58] recommends that teacher beliefs be narrowed further to specify their meanings.…”

“…Pajares [58] recommends that teacher beliefs be narrowed further to specify their meanings. For instance, this specificity may include teacher beliefs about their roles as friends, protectors, mentors, carers, controllers, gatekeepers, among others [55,59]; teacher beliefs about teacher-student power relations, e.g., teacher authority [60]; teacher beliefs about their professional distance, i.e., close or detached emotional understanding about students [61]; and teacher beliefs about their negative emotion expression, e.g., whether displays of negative emotions serve a purpose or are performative [55,60]. Educational research has shed light on relationships between teacher beliefs, teaching practices, and teacher emotions.…”

Knowing how to feel about the Other? Student teachers, and the contingent role of embodiments in educational inequalities

“…Our data provide further opportunities to move away from thinking of teachers' emotional labour as the manipulation of authentic and inauthentic feeling solely within bodies as self-contained organisms (Hochschild 1983;Kitching 2009;Lynch, Grummell, and Devine 2012), and towards an understanding of how affects circulate to shape matter such as bodies, images and texts, and the boundaries of the spaces they can occupy (Ahmed 2004a(Ahmed , 2004b.…”