The emotional practice of teaching

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Introduction

At the dawn of a new millennium, change is on most people’s minds, not just the minds of Presidents or Prime Ministers. Education prepares the generations of the future, and educational change is therefore front and center of all the talk about change in general. Learning standards are being defined for children, professional standards are being drawn up for teachers, assessment reform is extensive, new technologies are being widely advocated and implemented, schools in serious trouble are being reconstituted so they can make a fresh start, and school partnerships are being promoted everywhere with businesses, communities and universities. A growing change literature is also helping people understand how teachers and schools cope with educational change, and what sense they make of it (see e.g., Fullan, 1991; Fullan, 1993; McLaughlin, 1990; Miles & Huberman, 1984; Louis & Miles, 1990; Sarason, 1990; Newmann & Wehlage, 1995; Hargreaves, 1997; Hargreaves, Fullan, Lieberman & Hopkins, 1998). Important as all this reform work is, many of those who initiate and manage educational reform, or who write about educational change in general, ignore or underplay one of the most fundamental aspects of teaching and of how teachers change: the emotional dimension.

Emotions are at the heart of teaching. They comprise its most dynamic qualities, literally, for emotions are fundamentally about movement. Emotions are basically “mental states accompanied by intense feeling and (which involve) bodily changes of a widespread character” (Koestler, 1967). The Latin origin of emotion is emovere: to move out, to stir up. When people are emotional, they are moved by their feelings. They can be moved to tears, overcome by joy, or fall into despair, for example (Hopfl & Linstead, 1993). Emotions are dynamic parts of ourselves, and whether they are positive or negative, all organizations, including schools, are full of them.

Good teaching is charged with positive emotion. It is not just a matter of knowing one’s subject, being efficient, having the correct competences, or learning all the right techniques. Good teachers are not just well-oiled machines. They are emotional, passionate beings who connect with their students and fill their work and their classes with pleasure, creativity, challenge and joy. Robert Fried contends that teaching is a passionate vocation (Fried, 1995). Good teachers, he says, are passionate about ideas, learning and their relationships with students. Woods and Jeffrey have shown that there is more to this view than conventional wisdom or romantic assertion, in their empirical study of what makes ‘exceptional’ teachers of young children especially creative. The teachers they studied did more than teach to set standards or use approved techniques. Their classroom relationships featured ‘interest, enthusiasm, inquiry, excitement, discovery, risk-taking and fun’. Their cognitive scaffolding of concepts and teaching strategies was ‘held together with emotional bonds’ (Woods & Jeffrey, 1996).

The emotions of teaching are by no means new terrain for educational writers and researchers.1 Max van Manen, for example, has described the tactful nature of teaching which occurs when the teacher “has the sensitive ability to interpret inner thoughts, understandings, feelings and desires of children from indirect clues such as gestures, demeanor, expression and body language” (van Manen, 1995). Tactful teachers, says van Manen, on reading the inner life of their students, know when to engage with children and their actions and when to keep a distance from them. They know how much to expect of particular children and intuitively sense what is most appropriate for them at any specific moment. Elliot Eisner has similarly drawn attention to how intuition and emotionality have a significant part to play in what he describes as the ‘connoisseurship’ of teaching. For Eisner, the mission of educational research is better suited to describing ‘the minor miracles of stunning teaching instead of prescribing how teachers should go about their work’ (Eisner, 1986). Adherents of the narrative tradition of inquiry in studying teaching have similarly emphasized how emotional qualities such as intuition and a caring disposition form an important part of teachers’ personal and practical knowledge. (see e.g. Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Elbaz, 1991; Clandinin, 1986).

The work of such influential writers has helped elucidate the emotional qualities of teaching, especially those qualities that represent teaching at its best — and they have helped build an alternative discourse of what constitutes the heart of teaching, and counterpose it to the more dominant discourses of educational reform and their preoccupations with knowledge and skill. Yet, drawing on predominantly philosophical, psychological and literary foundations, these writers have also tended to treat teachers’ ways of knowing (including emotional ones) as mainly matters of personal and moral choice, commitment and responsibility. This has been at the expense of considering how sociological, political and institutional forces shape and reshape the emotional landscapes of teaching for good or ill, in different ways under different conditions.2 Teacher development theorists who have adopted Daniel Goleman’s highly popular ideas on emotional intelligence, similarly tend to treat the development of emotional intelligence among teachers as a matter of individual competence or personal choice, and not also as a product of the circumstances in which teachers work (Goleman, 1995). For example of adoption of Goleman’s ideas to teachers development see Fullan (1997)and also Day (in press).

In an age when the work of teachers is being restructured all around them (often in ways that make it much more difficult), overpersonalizing and overmoralizing about the emotional commitments of teachers without due regard for the contexts in which teachers work (many of which are making teachers’ emotional commitments to students harder and harder to sustain), will only add to the intolerable guilt and burnout that many members of the teaching force already experience.3 Although teachers are always prone to fall short emotionally, because people expect too much of them — to be “kind and considerate, yet demanding and stern”; or “optimistic and enthusiastic even when harboring private doubts and misgivings”, (Jackson, Boostrom & Hansen, 1993) — there are also very specific conditions which can magnify these imperfections (or minimize them instead). Understanding what shapes the emotional lives and work of many real teachers, not a few atypical or idealized ones, (Hargreaves, 1996), calls for a more sociologically and politically informed perspective than most of the literature on teaching and teacher development has so far been able to offer.

A second and important strand in studying the emotions of teaching which addresses one of these basic contextual factors — that of gender — has been contributed by feminist writing. This articulates the caring orientation which many women teachers in particular take towards their work, in a profession where women are numerically but not politically dominant. This caring orientation has been explored in terms of teachers’ relationships with students, (see e.g., Noddings, 1992) parents (see e.g., Henry, 1996), and each other.4 Feminist writers point to how essential caring is to good quality teaching and learning, yet how ignored and marginalized it is in the official politics of educational reform and administration. Even among these writers, however, only a few acknowledge that in contexts of an over-rationalized reform agenda which is unsympathetic to the needs of teachers, this caring orientation is not simply a cause for romantic celebration, but can also turn against teachers as they sacrifice themselves emotionally to the needs of those around them, in policy conditions which make caring more and more difficult (see, Acker, 1992; Blackmore, 1996).

In addition to these different strands of work which highlight various aspects of the emotions of teaching, emotional issues also crop up incidentally or as minor themes in studies of particular aspects of teaching such as the nurturing orientations of entrants to elementary teaching, (Book & Freeman, 1986), the problems encountered by beginning teachers (Bullough, Knowles & Crow, 1991; Tickle, 1991), or the causes and manifestations of teacher stress (Dinham & Scott, 1996; Woods, Jeffrey, Troman & Boyle, 1997; Traver & Cooper, 1996).

Until very recently, however, there have been few sociologically informed analyses which put a prime emphasis on teachers’ emotions in the context of how teachers’ work is organized, and how it is being reorganized through educational reform. Jackson described the terms of loving endearment in which elementary teachers described their relationships with students, but also dismissed them as at times amounting to little more than ‘sticky sentimentality’ (Jackson, 1968). In his classic study, Schoolteacher, Lortie noted how teachers found most of their prideful moments in their successes with individual students (Lortie, 1975a, Lortie, 1975b). It is only much more recently, though, in the worldwide turmoil of educational reform, that the wider emotional lives of teachers have begun to surface more explicitly and extensively in sociological studies of schooling — in accounts of the needs that beginning teachers have for emotional support as they enter a job that is increasingly complex and demanding; (Tickle, 1991) of the emotional risks of collaborative teacher research (Dadds, 1993), of the emotional havoc that external inspection processes wreak upon teachers; (Jeffrey & Woods, 1996); and of how and why teachers experience guilt, (Hargreaves, 1994), self-sacrifice (Blackmore, 1996), and senses of loss and bereavement for things they once valued (Nias, 1991) in contexts of rapid, imposed and highly rationalized educational reform. Interestingly, most of this critical literature on the emotional disturbance that teachers experience during times of reform has surfaced in England and Australia where the reform process has been more politically transparent, more persistent and more intensively applied than in North America (where the literature on teachers’ emotions has tended to be more celebratory or exhortatory).5

These most recent studies provide the first pieces of an explanation of how contemporary educational reform efforts impact on the emotions of teaching and learning. Aside from these few analyses, though, emotions are virtually absent from the advocacy of and the mainstream literature specifically concerned with educational change and reform. Strategic planning, cognitive leadership, problem-solving, teacher reflection, higher-order thinking, and standards-based reform have virtually nothing to say about them. Even the idea of organizational learning which is on the very cutting edge of change theory, is almost exclusively cerebral in its emphasis.6 In so much reform-centered and change-centered writing about teaching and leading, it is as if educators only ever think, manage and plan in coldly calculative (and stereotypically masculine) ways. It is as if teachers (and indeed students) think and act but never really feel.

Even where feelings are acknowledged in discussions of how schools and other kinds of organization work

the people presented are emotionally anorexic. They have ‘dissatisfactions’ and ‘satisfactions’, they may be ‘alienated’ or ‘stressed’, they will have ‘preferences’, ‘attitudes’ and ‘interests’. Often these are noted as variables for managerial control …. We find little or no mention of how feeling individuals worry, envy, brood, become bored, play, despair, plot, hate, hurt and so forth (Fineman, 1993).

Emotions are usually acknowledged and talked about within the educational change and reform literature only insofar as they help administrators and reformers ‘manage’ and offset teachers’ resistance to change, or help them set the climate or mood in which the ‘really important’ business of cognitive learning or strategic planning can take place. The more volatile, passionate emotions (which are also the less easily managed ones), like joy, excitement, frustration and anger are kept off the educational agenda in favor of ones that encourage trust, support, openness, involvement, commitment to teamwork and willingness to experiment. Reformers and many change-managers tend to acknowledge the importance of teachers’ emotions only when they can be treated as a gentle sedative (through collaboration, team-building, stress-management, wellness, etc.), and not as an unpredictable (yet potentially empowering) stimulant.

Educational change initiatives do not just affect teachers’ knowledge, skill and problem-solving capacity. They affect a whole web of significant and meaningful relationships that make up the work of schools and that are at the very heart of the teaching and learning process. Educational change efforts affect teachers’ relationships with their students, the parents of those students, and each other. Teachers make heavy emotional investments in these relationships. Their sense of success and satisfaction depends on them. This paper focuses on one of the most significant emotional aspects of teaching; the emotional relationships that teachers have with their students. What is the nature and importance of these relationships? How do teachers feel about educational changes and change processes in terms of their impact on these relationships? Addressing these questions adequately calls for a specifically sociological and political understanding of emotions in teaching — of how emotions are embedded and expressed in the human relationships of schooling, and in the context of social and political forces that shape or otherwise affect these relationships in times of dramatic social change. The following section sets out the beginnings of such a conceptual framework.

Section snippets

On Understanding Emotion

Although there is a large philosophical and psychological literature on human emotion, sociological inquiry has focused upon it as a major topic of investigation only much more recently. There is insufficient space to discuss all the key issues raised by this literature, including the relationship of emotions to the self, the different ways in which emotions are displayed in different groups or settings, or the emotional dynamics of power relationships, for example.7

Methods

Empirically, this paper examines some aspects of the emotions of teaching and educational change among 32 Grade 7 and 8 teachers in four school boards (districts) close to the city of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. The teachers had all been identified by administrators in their school systems as having a serious and sustained commitment to implementing common learning outcomes (or standards), integrated curriculum and alternative forms of assessment and reporting in their classes. These reforms

Students as an Emotional Filter

Many teachers’ relations with their students are significantly emotional in nature. Indeed, like many elementary teachers, a number of the teachers we interviewed spoke of these relationships in terms of love (Nias, 1989). One teacher described her basic teaching technique as ‘I love you to death and work you to death and we can still have fun doing it’. Another proclaimed:

I love children. I love all ages. I have great deal of trouble with teachers who say ‘Oh I only like grade 1’s. I won’t

Feelings About Structure

How the teachers in our sample felt about something as seemingly abstract as the structures in which they work, was very much influenced by whether they felt these structures would benefit their students and their relationships with. The majority of teachers’ remarks about structures and structural change came from the district where the most systematic attempts had been made to build curriculum integration, to establish a core-block of time for integrated studies within the timetable, and in

Feelings About Pedagogy

Pedagogy is one of the great rhetorical battlegrounds of educational reform. Many studies portray classroom teachers as still being predominantly wedded to traditional methods of teaching, such as lecturing, seatwork and question-and-answer methods (see e.g., Hargreaves, Earl & Ryan, 1996; Goodlad, 1984; Tye, 1985). Conversely, there has been an international assault on the supposed pervasiveness of and excessive adherence to groupwork and project work in elementary (primary) and intermediate

Feelings About Curriculum Planning

Few areas of teachers’ work seem as ostensibly unemotional as planning. Yet, for the teachers in our study, curriculum planning was not constrained by stilted formats, excessively packed with overly detailed targets, or mapped backwards from abstract ends. Rather, teachers started with knowledge and feelings about their students, with intuitive understandings about what would be likely to excite and engage those students, and with their own passions and enthusiasms about ideas, topics,

Conclusion

Teaching cannot be reduced to technical competence or clinical standards. It involves significant emotional understanding and emotional labor as well. It is an emotional practice. The teachers in our study valued the emotional bonds and understandings they established with students, and valued the purposes of educating their students as emotional and social beings as well as intellectual ones. Teachers’ emotional commitments and connections to students energized and articulated everything these

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