Gender and emotions in relationships: a group of teachers recalling their own teachers

Abstract

This narrative inquiry analyses the memories of a group of female teachers telling about their own teachers. We ask how gender and emotions are intertwined to teacher–student relationships. Gender was present in the stories where the teachers described being a schoolgirl in relationship with a teacher and told about their teachers as women and men. The collective process of recalling evoked the emotions experienced as students, but these emotions were also interpreted in the present context. When recalling, the teachers were reconstructing the past in the light of the present and the future. The article highlights the significance for teachers reflecting on their own educational histories.

Keywords:

• emotions
• gender
• narrative inquiry
• teachers
• teacher memories
• teacher–student relationship

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Dr Tricia Connell from the University of Worcester, UK, for her comments concerning our article.

Notes

1. We see it as important to acknowledge the bodies in education (Mitchell and Weber 1999; Paechter 2006b). In our previous researches we have studied the embodied nature of teachers’ work (Estola and Elbaz‐Luwisch 2003), and how the teacher and the student encounter as bodies (Uitto and Syrjälä 2008). In this article we understand body to be significant from the perspectives of both gender (Paechter 2006b) and emotions (Gordon 2006).

2. The project in the course of which the material of this study was collected took place in co‐operation between the City of Oulu and the University of Oulu. The project was supported by the Finnish Work Environment Fund, the Academy of Finland and Emil Aaltonen Foundation.

3. Differently from the English language, Finnish only has one gender‐neutral third‐person pronoun. This makes the labelling all the more striking in our material: teachers were lexically referred to as ‘men’ or ‘women’.

4. A traditional Finnish song that was usually sung by men to women on particular occasions such as weddings.

5. It must be noted that the group of teachers primarily aimed at supporting teachers’ coping and renewal at work, and Elina’s memory should be understood as rising from that context as well.

6. The original Finnish idiomatic expression ‘heitti vähän toisella kädellä sitä hommaa’ and put slightly in another way ‘vähän toisella kädellä heittäjiä’ used by Virpi refers directly to the body. Word by word the translation into English of the expression would be something like ‘working with only one hand’.