Being a ‘fun’ teacher: An interaction ritual chains approach

Abstract

In this article, I leverage the sociological insights of Randall Collins to examine contemporary accounts of “fun teaching” in teacher education: the pervasive mood of “fun,” “energy,” and “enthusiasm” in North American education faculties and popular teacher professional development literature. Focusing on Collins’ micro-sociological account of emotional energy in face-to-face interaction, I ask: What are the situational dynamics of “fun” teaching? Why have the related discourses of “fun,” “energy,” and “enthusiasm” become the obligatory mood of teaching and teacher education? As a starting point, I examine the highly-trafficked teacher professional development resource, Teach like a PIRATE (Burgess, 2012), and consider how an interaction ritual chains approach helps us understand underlying conceptions of “fun” as a situational dynamic. I conclude by outlining the implications of our current focus on “fun teaching” in a digitally-mediated world for scholars working in teacher education.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 One familiar criticism of Collins’ framework of interaction ritual chains is that it can list towards reductive explanations for complex, multi-scalar phenomenon. Schwalbe (2007) for example, takes issue with Collins’ claim (in summary) that “people don’t smoke because they’re seduced by advertising and get addicted to nicotine” but rather because of “emotional energy derived from the ritual of smoking” (p. 213). A useful corrective to this (potential) reductionism is to conceptualize interaction ritual as participating in a multi-scalar assemblage of practice, where the attendant focus in microsocial analysis is on the exigencies of the face-to-face, but where those interactions are always embedded in contexts and with materials which exceed the situation itself at multiple levels of scale (cf., Nichols & LeBlanc, 2021; Wortham, 2012).

2 Amongst an array of Teach Like a PIRATE products advertised on his website, one can hire Burgess to deliver a keynote titled “Make Your Own Snow: Unconventional Ways to Disrupt the Status Quo & Crush It as an Entrepreneur”, wherein he outlines “how branding, community building, and a renegade approach to business completely disrupted the educational publishing world and took Dave Burgess on an entrepreneurial journey from classroom teacher to New York Times Best Selling author and CEO of a multimillion-dollar corporation on the INC 5000 list of fastest-growing privately held companies in the United States.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert LeBlanc

Robert Jean LeBlanc, PhD (University of Pennsylvania), is Associate Professor of ELA/Literacy and Board of Governors’ Research Chair in Literacy Studies at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada), and Coyle Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Literacy Education. He conducts research on literacy, classroom interaction, and English education. His work has appeared in journals such as Research in the Teaching of English, Written Communication, English Journal, Language & Communication, Literacy, Classroom Discourse, Linguistics and Education, The Reading Teacher, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, English in Education, and Language Arts. Contact him at [email protected].