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This paper is part of a wider, innovative study of Teacher's Lives and their wellbeing. A previous paper has already focused on understanding the nature of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and particularly the implications of this understanding for commitment to teaching (Morgan, Kitching and O'Leary, forthcoming). This paper proposes the concept of emotional propriety for teachers as an extension of Hochschild's emotion work thesis. Hochschild posits three types of emotion 'acting' in the workplace: surface acting, deep acting, and internalisation of role-emotions. Our qualitative analysis of almost 40 teachers' professional diaries revealed rich information about the nature of negative emotions within workplace subjectivities. They suggest that emotions are not simply reactions to structural constraints, rather these emotions can constitute and reinforce the teacher role even at the surface level. A more complex theory of teacher emotions is used to question the norms of the teacher role/emotion rules and provide a framework for rethinking teachers' emotions. We may suggest a matrix of teacher emotions where role and the other, multiple subject positions teachers occupy intersect at various points both within the individual and in relation to others. The teacher may partially invest parts of his/her 'identity' in his/her role as well as accommodate or resist certain teacher roles. The discourse of the teacher in control and as moral guardian both regulates and produces teacher and students roles and emotions, while teachers' and students' subjectivities interweave, conflict with and at times synonymise themselves with those roles.'Diary' methods, which are sometimes called 'experience sampling methods' have been used in work studies with police, accountants, nurses, soldiers, and in the study of work-family interaction, but rather less in classroom settings (Van Eerde, Holman & Totterdell, 2005). These approaches are deemed to be especially appropriate where there are difficulties about reconstruction of events, especially private complex events which may be susceptible to personal interpretation and where the pace of events might be likely to likely make to difficult to create the constituents in retrospect. The focus of diary studies has frequently been on emotions, moods, job satisfaction, depression and feelings of intimacy (Bolger et al, 2003). Thirty-nine teachers (out of a sample of 150 newly-qualified teachers) volunteered to complete diaries on a weekly basis, over the course of five weeks. The reason for selecting a weekly interval was through a balance of considerations of getting regular information without making demands that would be impossible. They were asked to (i) describe the incidents that had happened during the week that made them feel good (and experience satisfaction) in their work as teachers, (ii) indicate similarly which incidents caused them to feel bad (and experience dissatisfaction), and (iii) rate the importance (1-10) of each incident they described. Follow-up interviews with teachers participating in the diary study were used for the purposes of triangulation.Diary entry: 'On Tuesday I felt like I spent the majority of the day demanding their attention, telling/persuading them to be quiet. I am getting fed up of playing manipulation games to get them to pay attention. Listening is a basic skill/requirement for school, not something I should only see on the promise of a reward. I was frustrated today and this doesn't disappear when the bell goes'. It is worth considering that teachers may use their negative emotional 'responses' as pedagogical tools. Emotional 'rules' in education are constructed through the norms of the teacher role, making some rules present and others absent (Zembylas, 2003). It is legitmate practice, for example, for teachers to use emotions as pedagogical and regulatory tools, e.g. communicating disappointment to students in an effort to 'motivate' or chastise them. Thus emotions, and particularly notions of disappointment-guilt-morality are harnessed and used as teaching and regulatory mechanisms. Teachers must prop up and communicate certain behavioural expectations to their students, and the moral discourse employs emotions to achieve this aim. The downside is that genuinely felt emotions, 'real' disappointment, arguably become self-defeating for the teacher as they are fed back into responses to students that reinforce the teacher role. This is an example of how teachers both submit to and master the emotional propriety discourse simultaneously. This endless cycle of self-defeating emotional exchanges solidifies the teacher role. The morality-through-emotion tool backfires, and the teacher is consequently restricted from expressing e.g. 'hurt', ensuring the continuity of emotional propriety. This view has important implications for the wellbeing of teachers. In terms of reducing negative feelings, problem-oriented strategies (tackling the problem) and emotion-oriented strategies (reducing the emotional distress, e.g. by venting/acknowledging emotions) can only be viewed as temporary, reactionary strategies, as they view structural problems as external to emotion. Opening a greater space for thinking about emotions may encourage greater awareness for teachers of their emotional states. But this framework does more than that: it encourages teachers to think differently about emotions, to see how their emotional states can reinforce structural constraints, to ask how discourses on emotions and the various norms in their schools have shielded them from their desires, and also installed those desires as what they presume themselves to be.Selected ListBritzman, D. (1990) Practice Makes Practice: A critical study of learning to teach, Albany: State University Press. Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialisation of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Søreide, G. E. (2006) Narrative construction of teacher identity: positioning and negotiation, Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 527 - 547 Youngblood Jackson, A. (2001) Multiple Annies: Feminist Poststructural Theory and the Making of a Teacher, Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 52, No. 5, pp. 386 - 397. Zembylas, M. (2003) Emotions and Teacher Identity: a poststructural perspective, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 213 - 238.This paper will be submitted for publication to an international journal on teacher education.
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