Beyond teacher cognition and teacher beliefs: the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching

Abstract

This article is an attempt to show the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching, and the importance of exploring teacher emotion in understanding teaching. A coherent account of teacher emotion must find a dynamic outside the cognitive, discursive or normative practices that have monopolized attention in research on teacher cognition and teacher belief. Thus it is argued that this dynamic can be found in the very character of emotional expression—what the anthropologist William Reddy (1997, 2001) calls emotives. This article makes the above case through the description of findings from a case study of an elementary school teacher (Catherine) who participated in a three‐year ethnographic project investigating the role of emotions in her teaching. Emotional suffering and emotional freedom are examined; such a theorization gives political meaning back to research on teacher emotions and allows us to discern the successes and failures of particular emotional regimes within a school culture.

Notes

1. thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.

2. By ‘emotion talk’ here, I refer to patterns of talking about emotions and their effects in close relationships; for example, developing the tendency to downplaying how one feels, especially when expressing such emotions is not considered ‘appropriate.’

3. The broad term ‘emotional freedom’ is used here to acknowledge Reddy’s contribution and provide some continuity to this discussion. Gradually I shift to using the term ‘spaces for emotional freedom’ to avoid an inflation of ‘freedom’ although I still use the term ‘emotional freedom’ in a few cases to avoid confusion. Nevertheless, ‘freedom’ here needs to be understood contextually, not as an absolute condition of acting without any interference but as a performance of challenging taken‐for‐granted emotional rules.

4. The students were required to take a state‐mandated accountability test. Those who failed this test had to attend remediation classes and, if necessary, repeat second grade. Catherine was well aware of this pressure and the fact that she was evaluated by her colleagues and the community almost exclusively in terms of these test scores. Thus over the years she developed her own system of assessment (both descriptive and quantitative) that was correlated with the district’s educational goals and values. In this way, she was able to demonstrate that, despite the absence of ‘drill and practice’ and ‘teaching‐to‐the‐test’, the performance of her students in the state‐mandated test did not differ significantly from the rest of the students, and in fact, often it was better. As a consequence, she was able to gain some friends among her colleagues and administrators.