What Might We Learn about Teaching by Collecting "Data" about Emotions that Teachers Experience in Connection with their Teaching?

Frederick F. Lighthall, The University of Chicago

Maureen S. Lighthall, Polaris School for Individual Education, Chicago

Paper presented at the International Conference,

Self-Study in Teacher Education: Empowering our Future,

Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex, England August 5-8, 1996

 

What Might We Learn about Teaching by Collecting "Data" about Emotions that Teachers Experience in Connection with their Teaching?

First, what do we mean by the term, "emotion?" Do we mean experiences labeled by such terms as anger, sadness, disgust, joy, envy, or fear? Perhaps yes, if we want to confine ourselves to English speaking cultures. But no, if we want to examine emotional life in ways compatible with experiences in other cultures. This "no," is because emotion terms do not translate even approximately across cultures or languages. We CAN start with these emotion terms within our culture, but we may miss the boat if we do so. The "boat" is the richness of definition of "emotion" that comes by standing back and finding a definition that accommodates the variety of emotionality across cultures, accommodates it by going "beneath" emotion terms to specify basic components of emotional experience.

 

So who is doing this "going beneath," this excavation of emotion components? A small group of "culture-wise" psychologists known as anthropological psychologists. Unshackled from the psychologists’ experiment or questionnaire as a form of inquiry, and shackled instead to the living-in-and-conversing-in-the-language approach of anthropology, they place emphasis on culturally situated selves, culture-specific schemas of construing and perception, and the unfolding of experience in time, captured in narrative forms. Consider Richard A. Schweder’s (1994) definitions of emotion, and what they hint we might learn by studying teachers’ emotions:

 

... "emotions" are neither "concepts" nor "things" nor "terms... They are complex narrative structures that give shape and meaning to somatic and affective experiences -- feelings of the body (e.g., muscle tension) and of the soul (emptiness), whose unity is to be found ... in the types of self-involving stories they make it possible for us to tell about our feelings. (Shweder, 1994, p. 37) 1

 

Shweder is at pains to shift us out of our word-centered view of emotion, elaborating his definition further:

 

"Emotion" terms are names for particular interpretive schemes ... of a particular story-like, script-like, or narrative kind that any people in the world might (or might not) make use of to give meaning and shape to their somatic and afective "feelings. More specifically, "feelings" (both somatic and affective) [e.g., feeling nausea, racing heartbeat, breathlessness, or affects of "joy," "rage," "sadness"] have the shape and meaning of an "emotion" when they are experienced as a perception of some self-relevant condition of the world and as a plan of action for the protection of dignity, honor, and self-esteem. (Shweder (1994), 32-33)

 

Emphasized in these definitions of emotion that I, for example, might experience are the meanings I ascribe to feelings that come up in me in connection with conditions of the world that I perceive as involving me in some way, meanings that both explain why I feel this way and that suggest or justify actions I might take ("plans") to change my relation to the conditions I perceive. The meanings, says Shweder, are in narrative form: "I am feeling this way because of what just happened. This event makes me feel X, and makes me feel like doing Y, as just about anyone in my position would feel and act."

 

So emotions are about events that are important to oneself (as threats or confirmations), events which are seen to trigger feelings -- or feelings that become explained by events -- where the events, feelings, and import, together, suggest or impel an image of changed conditions (or self) to be effected by some action. No part of this complex called emotion is to be mistaken for emotion, says Shweder; emotion is the whole of it since all these aspects typically arise together. The whole thing together becomes a narrative structure Shweder refers to as an "emotion story." To understand emotion in teaching, then, we must understand emotion stories, accounts of feeling arising in connection with events perceived as self-involving conditions with attendent images of changed conditions resulting from action.

 

Following this definition, we would not start with any of our emotion terms. That is, we would not simply ask teachers to tell us if or when they felt anger, or guilt, or sadness, etc. We would start, rather, with teachers’ "self-involving stories," with questions like:

 

Can you tell me about your teaching recently

· where you were coping with some difficulty that arose to untrack or disturb your teaching?

· where your teaching went particularly well, where it was really gratifying to teach?

· where you experienced either positive or negative emotions about how things were going?

· where emotion was aroused more than usual?

 

Maureen, my wife, teaches English (American and English Literature and writing) in a small high school. This year she teaches five periods in the school day, from period 1, starting at 7:30 AM, to period 8, the last period in the day. She has more kindly schedules in other years, but generally 5 periods a day, with three separate "preparations." We have been talking about the high and low points of her teaching day, at supper time, pretty regularly for 20 years. This year we decided to examine our conversations from the perspective of emotionality. We have recorded about 60 episodes of her teaching that involved more or less intense, more or less identifiable emotions. Fifty-two of the episodes have been transcribed, we have read them over, and we will provide and comment on narratives of two emotion episodes that capture the complexity and issues of emotions in teaching.

 

Simultaneously, I have been teaching two courses at the University. One (educational psychology to and for teachers in preparation -- during their practice teaching) requires the teachers in preparation to write narratives of their teaching experiences, and to examine the narratives from three of some ten perspectives. They write two of those papers. A number of them narrate experiences that were intensely emotional for them. We will provide and comment on two of these narratives. The second course is a research seminar on emotion in teaching and teachers. Students prepare and carry out three interviews with teachers about their teaching, guided by ideas about emotion from Shweder and others, notably E. Tory Higgins, a social psychologist, and Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist. We have expanded somewhat Shweder’s definition to accommodate initial results of our various interviews to include at least 13 components of emotion:

 

1. The PERSON experiencing (or undergoing) "emotion," i.e., the individual having the emotional experience.

2. An internal (psychological) or external (environmental) EVENT that changes the person’s feelings and interpretations of self and/or the world.

3. The person’s perceptual/affective CONTEXT brought to bear on the event.

4. The person’s perception of the event as establishing, representing, or promising SELF-INVOLVING CONDITIONS of the person’s world.

5. AROUSED FEELINGS somatic (headache, nausea) or affective (feeling empty, lost, depleted).

6.SELF -- actual, possible, obligatory, or presented selves.

7. NARRATIVE or emotion story by which feelings become linked in meaning to self, self-involving conditions, and responsive actions.

8. IMAGES of possible and/or desired conditions that restore or support self.

9. ACTION PLANS -- projected actions to neutralize feelings or change conditions.

10. ACTIONS taken in response to the feelings, conditions, and plans.

11. PERCEIVED CONSEQUENCES of the actions.

12. EXPRESSION AND HANDLING of feelings aroused.

13. NORMS of experiencing and of expressing feelings and of handling residual, unresolved feelings.

 

We look for these elements in our narratives of emotional experiences.

 

We will present and illustrate theoretical frameworks we have found useful, then encourage small group participation addressing the following kinds of question:

 

1. What kinds of emotion do our student teachers experience in their practice teaching, and how do they manage and express these emotions?

2. What norms do we as teacher educators intend, and model, regarding the experience, expression, and handling of emotion in the course of teaching?

3. What strategies do we, should we, and should we not encourage in our student teachers, to handle, dissipate, augment, or capitalize on emotions undergone in teaching?

4. Since appraisal of conditions is crucial in determining the nature of emotions, what appraisal strategies regarding classroom interactions and events do we, should we, and should we not encourage in our student teachers?

 

We conclude by describing avenues of collaborative research suggested by our work so far.

 

References

Higgins, E. Tory 1987. Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect. Psychological Review, 94, 319-340.

Hochschild, A. L. 1983. The Managed Heart. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Shweder, R. (1994). "You’re not sick, you’re just in love": Emotion as an interpretive system, In Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson (Eds), The Nature of Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 32-44.