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.

Keywords:

• emotional labour
• teacher education
• sociology
• teacher narratives

Notes

1. This includes gaps between social psychological theories and macrostructural theorizing.

2. The terms ‘truth’ and ‘possibility’ are used instead of ‘role’ or ‘occupation’, to depict a phenomenon that is mobile, discursively emerging and open to iterative, albeit slow and sedimentary, change. The term ‘role’ might suggest a foregone conclusion and a foreclosure of multiple ‘teacher’ possibilities.

3. Interestingly, moral pride is an emotion that is generated by “appraisals that one is responsible for a socially valued outcome or for being a socially valued person” (Price Tangney et al. 2007, 360).

4. Bolton (2007, 21) states: “Though individuals perform emotion work and draw on symbolic representations of femininity and masculinity (gendered emotion codes), it is a situated ‘doing’ accomplished through the lived experiences of women and men within interactional and institutional arenas[…]However, it is necessary to note that masculine and feminine emotion codes do not speak with the same authority. The masculine emotion codes of control, discipline and rationality, which results in a goal-oriented, systematic approach to teaching, are emphasised and brought to the fore of contemporary teaching practice rather than the feminine emotion code of caring motivated by the desire and need to connect to another human being”.

5. The dichotomous notions of teacher as moral agent and teacher as economic instrumentalist have been critiqued elsewhere; Tsolidis and Pollard (2007) suggest student teachers may draw more strongly on the Foucauldian notion of ‘pastoral power’ as the means to legitimate their role by denying economic instrumentalism.