What Do Teachers Feel During Their Teaching Day, And How Do They Manage Their Emotional Experience?: Selves, Sentiments, Emotions, and Energy Frederick F. Lighthall The University of Chicago (Emeritus) and Maureen S. Lighthall Harold L. Richards High School (Emerita) Prepared for the Second International Conference on Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, Herstmonceux Castle, UK, August 16-20, 1998

 

In Part I of this two-part paper we describe our corpus of data and experience, review some relevant psychological theory of self and emotionality, distinguish three basic modes or dimensions of emotional experience, and present and comment on excerpts from secondary teachers’ narratives of their emotional experiences in teaching. In Part II, we turn to implications of teachers’ emotional experiences for teacher education, commenting on changes implied for curriculum, and for teacher educators’ eliciting of apprentice teachers’ narratives of emotional experiences; and on new levels of interpersonal trust required by effective narration of, and reflection on, student teachers’ emotional experiences. We end the paper by examining the cumulative contexts of emotionality formed by a teacher’s relations with administrators, peers, parents, and others who become important for teachers.

I. Data, Theory, and Narrative Excerpts

Data

We draw on recorded and transcribed interviews of thirty secondary school teachers of English and of science, interviews lasting from 45 minutes to an hour and a half. We also draw upon recorded and transcribed "supper-time" interviews of Maureen by Fred extending over a three-year period of collaborative self study. Finally, we have studied narratives written by Fred’s student teachers (Masters level), selected from the last 15 years, narratives of their experiences as beginning secondary school teachers of English and mathematics.

Self and Emotionality

It is important to understand at the outset that a person’s emotionality has primary reference to the person’s immediate or considered sense of what is important to the person’s own well-being. We don’t get emotional over things or persons unimportant to us. Emotions signal that something important to survival or thriving is at stake. Psychologically and socially, that means emotionality signals that something has transpired that is important to the individual’s self, or more accurately, the individual’s selves or self system (Shweder, 1994; Markus & Nurius, 1986; Markus & Wurf, 1987).

More specifically, all emotionality experienced by teachers in their classroom has reference to their primary self and to their occupational selves -- the current teaching self, hoped-for teaching selves, feared teaching selves, and their "ought" and "ought-not" teaching selves (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Higgins, 1987). It is by means of these relatively slowly changing psychological (and socio-cultural) structures of selves that the person achieves cognitive and valuational -- and affective -- order in their life. Thus, teachers order their teaching lives in regard to who and what they are, their organized selves, and in regard to activities and feelings proper, and improper, for such selves.

The centrality of selves in all emotional experience implies that if we want to understand emotionality in teaching, we must understand the conditions of teacher’s selves. We do that through their narratives of their emotional experiences.

Dimensions of Emotionality

What kinds of conditions trigger teachers’ emotionality? What kinds of conditions confirm teacher’s selves, and what kinds of conditions disconfirm or threaten teachers’ selves? Recent psychological research (e. g., Frijda, 1994) identifies three major dimensions of emotionality: (1) emotions proper, as reactions to particular, non-routine events; (2) emotions of relations, that is, sentiments of liking-hating, trusting-mistrusting; and (3) moods, like pessimism or optimism about what or where one is in life.

Emotions, or emotional reactions, are misunderstood as simple affective states named by emotion terms such as anger, sadness, jealousy, or joy. Cross-cultural consideration of emotions (e.g., Lutz, 1988; Shweder, 1994) indicates, rather, that emotions are most comprehensively understood as experiences most validly captured by narratives which include a person’s (1) affective states triggered by (2) the person’s perceptions of events (3) construed by the person as having positive or negative relevance to the person’s self system, affective states (4) interpreted in cultural terms which guide (5) thoughts about the implications of the events and the affect for (6) action on behalf of the self system.

Sentiment is the affect of relationship, of who and what one likes, dislikes, or hates. When teachers speak of "loving" to teach a class, they express a positive sentiment toward that class; or "dreading" the presence of a student in class, they express a negative sentiment toward that student. Sentiments, then, have relatively enduring objects of positive or negative affection. As such, they have a definite reference -- to things, persons, ideas, or symbols -- that moods do not have.

Mood is the affective state resulting from one’s assessment of one’s self in relation to where one is, and where one is headed, in one’s life, or of what one has become. Mood refers to pervasive qualities of one’s life chances. Mood may be triggered by some small event, but the event’s emotional power comes from the meanings it calls up in the person regarding the person’s life or career as a whole.

Teaching-Selves and Emotionality

Regarding a person’s teaching selves, then, we ask what kinds of events confirm or threaten the teacher? What kinds of relations confirm or disconfirm the teacher? What kinds of assessments of life confirm or threaten the teacher as teacher or person?

These questions can be reduced to one: What conditions confirm or threaten teachers’ teaching selves and thus trigger emotional experience? But the question of action is also necessary: What do teachers do in response to their emotionality and in response to the emotion-arousing conditions?

Some complications of teachers’ actual emotional experiences arise from the fact that these three dimensions of emotionality often interact to produce experiences that cannot be understood in terms of any one of these dimensions. For example, emotional events can arise in the context of a teacher’s sentiments toward a student, within the context of the teacher’s sentiments toward the class as a whole, all of which, in addition, can be affected by the teacher’s mood.

Three Excerpts from Narratives

Three excerpts from teachers’ narratives show the complexity of teachers’ experience and some of the different contexts of emotionality referred to above. In each, we designate with brackets aspects we later comment on:

Excerpt 1. Interview of Thelma Germaine, an experienced (8 years) teacher of English, teaching a class of seniors in an affluent suburb.

TG: I had another student in that same class, William, who was like an albatross around my neck. [1] I was constantly writing him up [1] and talking to the teachers: "What did you do with him?" I know he’d already been taken out of another teacher’s class last year and put into a different one because that teacher had difficulty getting along with him, and I was just beside myself because he drove me nuts. [1]

And I talked to Mom at parent-teacher conference and this had already been going on for months. And finally I told him, I said: "Look, here’s what I expect of you and we need to get along." And all of a sudden things would start working out and then he’d have a little slip-up where he’s yelling or swearing or doing something and I’d have to write him up. ...

So I said [to William]: "Well, you know what the consequences are, right?" And he said: "Yeah, I misbehaved so you’re probably going to write me up and send me to the assistant principal." So I didn’t even have to say it. I think he learned I meant this, I wasn’t going to let him off again. It was that time.

But I mean, I literally hated my job [2] for a while there because I.. I.. because it [William’s class] was at the end of the day. I hated looking forward to the end of the day....[2]

... usually if he does anything to embarrass me or cause a confrontation in front of the class, where now he is keeping all the other students from learning, then I write him up...

FL: And with William, after he’s acted up, what do you do with the feelings? You’ve got to go on and teach, right?

TG: Right. Well, um. Usually I try not to get frustrated, but often I’m sure the kids can read it on my face. I’m probably.. maybe not harsh but I’m much crisper, [3] like say I’m giving notes [having students take notes] or something I might go through it more matter-of-factly, I am much more rigid .[3] I don’t.. There’s not the excitement in my voice any more or in my teaching. I’m just going through it to get rid of it without blowing up at someone else. [3]

Comment: Sentiment and "Spillover"

[1]....an albatross around my neck... I was constantly writing him up...I was just beside myself because he drove me nuts. Here the teacher expresses the temporally sustained aspect of sentiment: Because of William’s disruptions, she has come to dislike William. He has become the predictable, and dreaded source of disruption for her, dragging her down. The emotion here is not related to an event or an act. It is, rather, related to a constant presence, a person, a student. As an expectable source of difficulty, William and the teacher experience any given individual interchange with tension, pre-primed to "see" the other’s action as a put-down or insult or threat. So, for the teacher, her negative sentiment toward William constitutes a context within which any act by William becomes interpreted, with the negative, "albatross" connotations providing a lens through which the teacher "sees" William’s actions -- and through which he "sees" hers. Sentiments, thus, are "longer" emotions than emotional reactions, and more powerful also by providing a context of disliking (or liking) for interpreting any given action.

[2].I literally hated my job...I hated looking forward to the end of the day. Here the teacher expresses another sentiment. Her negative sentiment toward William has ramified: she now hates her job, hates looking toward the end of her teaching day when she has to teach William’s class. William’s disruptions have made that class so difficult to teach for her that that whole teaching experience has darkened her outlook toward her job, toward teaching. We see in this example how sentiments toward a student can expand outward to the student’s class and to the teacher’s teaching in general. For this teacher, William’s class was her "class from hell" -- until she was able to turn William’s outlook and conduct around. But until that happened, her whole job had become literally dreadful -- a constant emotional darkness and drain.

[3].Usually I try not to get frustrated, but often I’m sure the kids can read it on my face. I’m probably.. maybe not harsh but I’m much crisper... I might go through it more matter-of-factly, I am much more rigid .... I don’t.. There’s not the excitement in my voice... I’m just going through it to get rid of it without blowing up at someone else. Here the teacher describes how emotion aroused in one class can "spill over" into her teaching of the next class. An emotional reaction in teaching often has a life longer than the class, or the day, in which it was aroused. If negative, that "spillover" emotion cuts into the teacher’s attention, flow, and energy until, somehow, it becomes dissipated. Positive emotions, too, have spillover effects, giving teaching a "lift". What happens when several classes each present the teacher with negative emotional encounters? Instead of dissipating, negative emotion accumulates, having cumulative cutting power. What does that slashed teaching look like and feel like in the last periods of the teaching day?

Excerpt 2. From a narrative written by Jen Orlandi, a beginning teacher of English (Caucasian), teaching African-American Literature to a class of African-American students in a city high school.

I walked into my fourth period class dreading it. [1] The last few days in there had been pure hell and I had no energy for it. [2] The desks like always were arranged in a circle. I was sitting on top of my desk, swinging my legs, and explaining why we were shifting from discussions of community to working with writing detail. As I was explaining, I heard Maceo mocking me. If I said, "Writing is important to all cultures," Maceo would repeat the line, in an ultra-white accent, with exaggerated hand and arm movements. His tone was not that of most kids who mock me --their tones are genuinely trying to mirror my accent. Maceo's voice held anger and annoyance, feelings I didn't expect at that moment. I said, "Maceo, please stop you are being disrespectful."

"You are being disrespectful," Maceo mocked.

"Stop, you are being rude and you are hurting my feelings," I said in a deep, controlled voice. I really thought the Hurting-My-Feelings angle would work--I'd never known someone to blatantly hurt someone else's feelings after they actually knew that the someone's feelings were hurt. "You are being ruuuuuuuuude," Maceo cried. I stared at him in astonishment. I was being blatantly disrespected. He looked at his hands but knew I was staring at him for he said, "It's not personal, it's a dialect thing. It's a dialect thing Ms. Orlandi."

I said, my voice now unsteady, amazed that he wasn't shaken by me and sure that they whole class could hear the tears in my voice, "Maceo, if I started speaking in your dialect, you'd be offended."

He said, "It's not personal Ms. Orlandi. I mean, if you spoke like my other white teachers I wouldn't mind so much. But you don't. You speak like a hippie!" (Orlandi, 1996)

Comment: Sentiment and Energy

[1]. I walked into my fourth period class dreading it... The last few days in there had been pure hell. The sentiment of dread stems from a sense of hopelessness, of being trapped and vulnerable. It is the condition of being robbed of one’s agency -- one has lost control, one can do nothing. As a result, being in such a situation brings anxiety and hyper-vigilance of a defensive sort. All of this saps one’s energy from anything except defense. The subsequent narrative by Jen Orlandi explains how and why she got into dreading this class. It was an instance of sharp interpersonal conflict etched by ethnic differences.

[2]. ...I had no energy for it. Energy is inextricably connected with emotional experience. Every emotional experience has energy effects, positive or negative. It takes energy to respond to what one regards, rightly or wrongly, as a threat or insult or obstruction. And it releases or triggers energy when one experiences a special confirmation or affirmation of one’s self. Just as sentiments have received little attention regarding teaching, so too has been ignored the connection between emotion al reactions and sentiments, on one hand, and energy, on the other. If teaching takes energy, negative emotions and teaching compete. Since emotions are evolutionarly more basic, more primary, teaching loses in this competition. Positive emotions and positive sentiments become, in contrast, resources for teaching.

Excerpt 3. M. is a veteran teacher of high school English, teaching a class with a number of disengaged students.

M: I'm teaching two Indian [native American] poems... One is called "Weaving the Sky Loom" ... And the other is "I Have Killed the Deer" and it's about the oneness of nature, how everything that is alive.. I have killed the deer, I have crushed the grasshopper.. goes back into the earth.... I asked them to read it silently on their own and then answer the questions... So I didn't approach it terribly creatively or very well, and.. it's always kind of a throw-away, the poem is for me. So today I thought well, it's Friday, I want to do more with these poems than just throw them away... And my 7th period class is a very difficult class, with many talkative and uncontrolled kids...

So ... I looked at these kids, who had been so uncooperative, essentially, here they are, pretending that they're being cooperative... and I thought, to go through the poem, I've Killed the Deer, which actually means something significant to me, because I had just scattered David's ashes, I just, out of the blue, I don't know, I was kicking myself later for doing it [1], I just said, "Well this poem is important to me because I just, I don't know if you know, but my son died last year, and this summer what I did was scatter his ashes." [2] And of course I had their full attention.

And rather than just stop with that bombshell, I thought I should say a little more, and I said, ‘Well, I'll say a little more about that, ah, we went to New Hampshire, to the mountains, to a mountain stream which was very beautiful, ah, it was on a rainy day, but the rain stopped when we did this and it was beautiful and terrible, and the stream was beautiful, with lots of rocks and rushing water. And so this poem has meaning for me." ....

There was a pause ... and I said, "Well, I don't think I want to read this poem. Will someone read it for me?" ... I chose ... a quiet girl... We went through the questions in the book. We made our way through it...

Bailey McDill’s normally a girl who is very competent. I'd say she is probably the most academically competent girl in the class. She's a big, imposing Black girl with a lot of presence. And she wants to sit in the front because she wants to be right up there... And I asked her something [about the poem] and she said, ... "I'm too shook up to think about it." [3] [M. describes how she then moved on to an unrelated exercise on metaphors.]

I was happy, and I think they all were, to leave the poem alone. It was pretty hot... we didn't want to go digging in the poem. [4] We answered the questions and we got out of there.

F. ... you couldn't read it. What did you think was going to happen if you did read it?

M. Well, I didn't want to get, ah, overly emotional. [5]

Comment: Emotional Curriculum, Emotional Disclosure, Emotional Danger

[1]. I was kicking myself later for doing it. Recounting this emotional experience, the teacher, before narrating the emotional event itself, indicates her reaction of punitive self-correction that she administered to herself after the event. She had done something wrong, and as it turned out, something fearful to her (elaborated in the full narrative). So we learn that the experience she is about to narrate contained an act she regretted, which is yet another emotional experience. Actions in response to emotional events can trigger yet other emotions. Often, emotional reactions are not experienced in isolation, but in series.

[2]."Well this poem is important to me because I just, I don't know if you know, but my son died last year, and this summer what I did was scatter his ashes." Two things are important here. First, we see that a segment of curriculum can evoke its own emotional reaction in the teacher. And second, we see the teacher disclosing not only the fact that the poem is important to her, but also the very personal and emotional reasons why: it connects with her own son’s death and the scattering of his ashes. The teacher’s initial impulse is to make the poem as meaningful and intense for the students as it is for her, and let’s the students in on the intensity of her own emotional connection. But that inclusion, itself, brought up an emotional response. The issue that this disclosure of emotion brought up for this teacher was whether, and when, such disclosures become too "hot," too much for teacher or students to handle.

[3]. I'm too shook up to think about it." The student expresses an emotional feeling of being too upset to "think about it", the "it" being undefined: the poem? the death of the teacher’s son? the scattering of a person’s cremated ashes? the death or scattering of ashes of someone close to her? In any case, the student’s words are taken by the teacher as a signal that she had trespassed into pedagogically dangerous territory.

[4]. I was happy, and I think they all were, to leave the poem alone. It was pretty hot... we didn't want to go digging in the poem. Having recognized her trespassing into a danger zone, the teacher, and students, "were happy" to move away from these emotional matters, to something cooler, safer. Safer, perhaps, in the short run? But in the long run? If emotions function to signal to us that something important to our lives has just happened or promises to happen, do we dare take on, or support, the attitude so prevalent that negative emotional experience is dangerous to share or explore?

[5]. I didn't want to get, ah, overly emotional. To be sure, becoming overwhelmed by emotion -- when one cries and cannot think or do anything but experience being emotionally overwhelmed -- that state of mind and emotion disrupts plans and flow of teaching. For M. to have stayed with her emotion could well have brought her to be overwhelmed "in public," in front of her class. And that would have disrupted her intended flow of instruction. It also would not have felt positive at the moment. But if she had allowed her grief to overcome her, might that not have set the occasion for a richly meaningful interchange with her students about loss, grieving, emotion, and emotional sharing? After all, death, loss, and grieving are not unknown or unfelt by adolescents. And by and large they have precious few occasions for sharing that kind of experience and associated meanings with adults in any kind of educative way. It is also true, of course, that each person will have his or her own particular resources and readiness for such sharing, and none of us will be ready to do so on all occasions.

II. Emotion and Teacher Education

My Own S-STEP: Fred

In the course of examining my own teaching with my student teachers -- they, after all, are the most informed persons about the effects of my teaching -- it hit me that while the narratives of their own apprentice teaching that they brought into class discussions and into their papers were without exception full of emotion, my own educational psychology curriculum entirely omitted teachers’ emotionality. In that regard, my own practice simply mirrored the whole field of educational psychology. In contrast to that void, research and theorizing on emotions, sentiments, and moods had become intensely active in anthropology, sociology, and various subfields of psychology. Clearly, the direction to reform my own teacher education practice was to draw on these fields, to transform what they had to offer into an educational psychology of teachers’ emotional experience, particularly the experience of novice teachers.

These foregoing narratives of emotional experience, then, constitute a new curriculum for my course -- and for teacher educators who want texts that legitimate and induce a focus on the emotional dimensions of teaching. But curricular reform can never be isolated: Once I bring such narratives into the classroom and encourage the students’ own narratives, the students and I confront new difficulties. We require a new dimension of trust and intimacy between us. It is we, in our relationship together, that have to create and maintain a risk-taking that is authentically mutual. And that truly goes against the grain of the normal professorship -- certainly at The University of Chicago. It changes the normal professor from being midwife to one’s students’ ideas, connections, and skills to allowing one’s students to be midwife to one’s own new ideas, connections, and skills -- all in the context of a new intensity of emotional experience. A mutuality of risk taking, of giving birth, of taking the role of being dependent on the other for support of self.

But where do we, students and professor, find out how to build a new level of emotional trust to sustain open facing of emotional difficulties and vulnerabilities -- and triumphs? As I look around the world of family, tribal, religious, and international conflict, I see that we are not alone in lacking knowledge and skills of mutual risk taking of the kind that puts our emotional vulnerabilities in the hands of the Other for the Other’s supportive midwifery. But we are a small group and we have much in common as resources. One of those commonalities is that we both recognize that teaching brings intensely emotional experiences, negative and positive. And a second resource is that we both understand, deep down, that those experiences impell us to find others who will listen as we tell our emotion stories, as we seek confirmation that we are not, after all, as inadequate as we feel or that we have a right to celebrate our triumphant feelings when we have overcome some teaching barrier.

All of which suggests a very specific instructional demand for teacher educators. Given that our apprentice teachers are experiencing emotions, and given that emotions impell a telling of them, we must support that telling. That is, part of our interchanges with them must include -- not just allow, but legitimately demand of both student and teacher educator -- their and our narratives of their and our emotional experiences in teaching. But that turns out to have its own difficulties.

Naive vs. Prompted Narratives

The trouble with most of our narratives of emotional experiences is that the narrative is burdened with the same outlooks, biases, self-defenses, and gaps in perception that were part of what caused the experience to unfold as it did. To learn from the telling -- and that, after all, is one core purpose of the telling -- we have to "see" in a different way those very events that constituted the experience. But on our own we are caught in our own perceptual biases. So, for a narrative to contain the stuff for us to understand it in a different way than it was originally experienced and in a way to be seen in new ways, we have to introduce something new. The narrative needs to be pushed beyond the story that we or the student apprentice wants and begins to tell, beyond our naive narrative to an expanded narrative with enriched "stuff" -- added details of the actual experience that our or our apprentice teachers gloss over, ignore, discount. This added stuff is not made up, it is all there, but in the naive version is crowded out by what the teller has tacitly concluded are the essentials of the experience.

The expanded narrative, then, is the naive narrative plus an experience-based, professional prompting. The experienced, professional aspect stems from hearing many naive narratives (or the instructed equvalent of passed-on wisdom) in which the teller’s thoughts and actions at the time of the experience by-passed or denied realities that, with prompting, the teller can easily report and now, with hindsight, see as crucially relevant. (And this by-passing of realities in the experienced situation is as true of triumph narratives as of failure narratives -- where the teller is mystified why the experience went to well, and leaves out of the telling crucial actions, thoughts, or perceptions they engaged in but perceived as unrelated or minor.)

Naive narratives of apprentice or experienced teachers often omit, strange to say, the particular curriculum they were teaching at the time of the experience. Or they omit what to the rest of us hearers is a glaring ethnic difference, or what the other "uninvolved" students in the classroom were engaged in at the time, or previous encounters with the same "difficult" student, or the kind of preparations that preceded a baffling experience of pedagogical success. So the other students and teacher educator must take on the role of supportive midwife of an expended, contextualized narrative. Once we can do that, then we all have in hand the "stuff" to be reflected upon. That expanded narrative is the historical account of the unfolding emotional experience. The major purpose of obtaining and reflecting on it is to understand where its twists and turns occurred, where tacit choices were made, where construals were made, and how each of those tacit "choices" might now, on reflection, be seen to have alternative possibilities for effective teaching. In this light, then, the skills of prompting a naive telling of emotional experiences to expand its reality inclusion become crucial as part of the process of professionally guided reflection on emotional experience in teaching. For any teacher educator who sees his or her students’ emotional experiences in teaching as important to bring into collaborative reflection, those prompting skills become implicated as part of a teacher educator’s self-reform. And, since mutuality of telling such experience is important as part of establishing the necessary trust, the teacher educator’s students will have to be helped to learn the arts of prompting -- prompting to expand the teacher educator’s own narratives -- if the teacher educator’s narratives are to move beyond his or her own naive level.

Successive Contexts of Sentiment

We have indicated how a special level of mutual trust between apprentice teacher and teacher educator becomes necessary for apprentice teachers to narrate their emotional experiences. Being inexperienced, they will have more negative than positive emotional experiences, but sharing either type of experience in the teaching class (or discussion section) requires trust -- trust that one’s peers will accept one’s experience as part of normal learning and not be judgmental, trust that the teacher educator or assistant will not be threatened, and instead will be empathetic and see the experience from the apprentice teacher’s side and both supportive and helpful in his or her prompting. But trust is itself a special kind of emotion: At base, trust is the sentiment of safety in a relationship. It is the feeling toward another that one can be who one is in the presence of the other without being harmed -- in this case, embarrassed or humiliated by nonacceptance of one’s emotional experience.

It may be, indeed, that what we refer to as the feeling of "trust" is a master sentiment, in the sense of being the basic feeling toward another to enter into a working relation. It is important, then, to understand that "trust" is always circumscribed. We may trust a surgeon to perform surgery on us by virtue of being reassured about the surgeon’s competence, but we do not trust that surgeon to draw up a will or to advise us on stock purcheses or on child rearing. We trust another person within a context of purposes or functions or roles. So the student teacher must develop trust that the teacher educator will handle empathetically, supportively, yet forthrightly and insightfully the student teacher’s narrated details of the student teacher’s emotional experience. It is not all the qualities of a therapist that is called for, aiming at changing personality dispositions. Rather the qualities called for include the kind of empathy necessary to any psychotherapy but where that empathy is directed to the focal task of reflecting on the expanded narrative of the emotional experience to understand how that particular teaching experience unfolded, how those twists and turns of perception, feeling, appraisal, and action that made up the experience might have been done differently with more educative effect -- and affect.

Part of such an examination of an emotional experience will be expanded to include the sentiment-relation between the teller of the experience (the student teacher) and the others who were involved in the experience (frequently the student teacher’s students). What levels of trust or mistrust, liking or disliking characterized that relation at that time? But sentiment relations go well beyond the apprentice teacher’s relation with his or her students. That relation -- between the apprentice teacher and his or her classroom group, sub-groups, or individuals -- becomes one context for events in the classroom. For example, in the first excerpt above, where William, William’s class, and Thelma Germaine’s whole teaching job became dreaded for her, she reached a point where she could not feel safe while teaching. Teaching the kids and classes other than William’s did not make up for the battering her teaching self took when teaching William’s class. Each of her relations -- with William, William’s class, and her teaching job -- had turned to dread. All of those relations turned on her relation, her teaching relation, to William. But her emotional experience in teaching also depended in important degree on her relation to other persons. Given the quality of Thelma Germaine’s experience as narrated in the first excerpt, what additional qualities would be conferred if her relation with her school administrators, particularly those she depended on for dealing with William’s disruptions, were (a) very positive and supportive or (b) very negative, unsupportive, untrustworthy. The teacher’s relations with administrators in their role as "disciplinarian," as reinforcing instructional order is a context that colors, positively or negatively, the teacher’s perceptions, assessments, actions, and emotions in the classroom itself. Other sentiment relations that operate as forceful contexts are between the teacher and the curriculum being taught, colleagues, students’ parents, and home.

When those relations are positive, they convey a context of confidence for the teacher, a context of resources to draw on as occasion arises. But when a teacher’s relations with one or more of these important people or groups becomes strained or negative, that has an impact on the teacher’s life and teaching in at least two ways. First, when relations with a significant administrator, say, become strained, that tends to demand chronic attention by the teacher: he or she worries about that administrator’s perceptions, interpretations, and reactions. The teacher becomes vigilant, resulting in a chronic distraction for the teacher, an intrusion into the teaching day of a new worry. That all takes energy away from teaching. What happens to a teacher’s attention and energy, then, when relations with more than one of those significant people turn negative?

Suppose, for example, that a teacher’s home life is chaotic, the teacher’s relations with colleagues and administrators are at best cool, the teacher is teaching a segment of the curriculum out of obligation only, the teacher’s students’ parents have often proved unsupportive, even hostile, and that the teacher’s class is like Thelma Germaine’s, easily turned chaotic by a single student’s antics. Now suppose one of those students begins to disrupt the teacher’s class once again. That student, unwittingly, will be faced with a teacher whose attention and energy has been depleted, who feels unusually vulnerable, and whose general mood is negative. Now suppose the opposite, that all of those relations are positive and the same student begins to disrupt the teacher’s class in the same way. That same student is now confronted with a teacher who acts out of a context of relative confidence and energy, without distracting worries.

If sentiment relations -- between the teacher (novice or experienced) and the many significant persons in the life of any teacher -- have an important impact on the classroom energy and emotional experiences of the teacher, then those sentiment relations become an important focus of teacher education. Those relations become one focus of attention for the teacher educator as he or she prompts the student teacher’s narrative. The task of building positive relations with all of those who are important becomes immediately implied by these emotional dimensions of teaching, at the center of which, in each case, is the sentiment polarity of trust-mistrust, safety-danger. Each of those relations becomes either a threat or a resource to the teacher as he or she encounters difficulties in teaching. Trusting relations tend to release energy. But mistrustful relations drain energy and bring the burden of worrisome distractions.

So the teacher educator is faced with another task: Helping the student teacher understand how to form positive professional relations with those who can exert contextual force on a teacher’s emotional experience. And reflexively that implies that the teacher educator who takes that task seriously will arrange time, place, and circumstance to reflect on his or her own relation-making with his or her own students. Experience indicates also that "circumstance" should, for optimum learning, include one’s own students as participants in that examination. That, of course, takes trust, the gradual construction of which comes with increments of risk taking of personal narratives of emotion stories.

Open Session Discussion: Issues

We will provide more detail for these and other excerpts from student teachers and from high school teachers of English and of Science as a basis to discuss issues of interest to those attending our session, including the following:

• What kinds of interpretation of events and persons are implied or expressed in these (and your own) commentaries on emotional experiences in teaching?

• How do teachers manage their emotionality, and the conditions of emotionality, in productive and unproductive ways?

• What impact do positive and negative emotional experiences have upon teachers’ cumulative sentiments toward teaching and upon their teaching energy?

• In what ways may teachers productively express their true emotions to students?

• What changes in teacher education, and perhaps changes in the preparation of teacher educators, may be implied in our accounts of teachers’ emotionality?

 

References

Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality . Garden City, New York: Anchor Books.

Frijda, N. H. 1944. Varieties of Affect: Emotions and episodes, moods, and sentiments. In Ekman, P. & Davidson, R. J. (Eds.) The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions. New York: Oxford University Press, 59-67.

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

Lutz, C. A. 1988. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll & Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Markus, H. & Nurius, P. 1986. Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41, 954-969.

Markus, H. & Wurf, E. 1987. The dynamic self-concept: A social psychological perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 38, pp. 299-337.

Orlandi, J. 1996. An episode of disrespect in student teaching. Educational Psychology term paper, Master of Arts in Teaching Program, The University of Chicago (with permission).

Shweder, R. A. 1944. "You’re not sick, you’re just in love": Emotion as an interpretive system. In Ekman, P. & Davidson, R. J. (Eds.) The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions. New York: Oxford University Press, 32-44.