The Double-Edged Sword of Obligation: Conflicting Commitments and Teachers’ Disengagement from the Profession
Author(s):
Melanie Janzen (presenting / submitting) Anne Phelan (presenting)
Conference:
ECER 2017
Network:
01. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations
Format:
Paper

Session Information

01 SES 06 C, Development Strategies and Retention, Stress and Disengagement

Paper Session

Time:
2017-08-23
15:30-17:00
Room:
K3.13
Chair:
Melanie Janzen

Contribution

          “Patricia” is an experienced grade one teacher. “Devan” is one of her students. Frequently violent and uncontrollable, Devan has to be physically restrained until calm. In such moments, Patricia calls the office to send help. No one ever comes. Feeling shaken after each of these episodes, she worries about her distressed relationship with Devan and about what the other children think when they witness such scenes. She worries about the safety of the students, the lack of support from the school experts (e.g. psychologists and social workers), how the other teachers and the principal judge her, and the curriculum that isn’t being taught. One afternoon, Patricia is rushed to hospital with chest pains. The diagnosis: badly bruised ribs, the result of Devan’s head banging against her chest while being restrained. The prognosis: immediate stress leave, followed by Patricia’s decision to leave the profession altogether. Devan and his classmates finish the year with a variety of substitute teachers and then two different term contract teachers.

          While some may read Patricia’s vignette as a rare and dramatic example of a teacher’s experiences, many more will see it as reflective of the teacher’s obligation in the everyday—the obligation to respond to a troubled student, to the other children and parents, to district demands, and to the professional others that surround the teacher. This poignant story illustrates how obligation, or the binding responsibility to respond to the other, both lends teaching its moral integrity but also takes an enormous emotional toll on those who attempt to teach according to their beliefs and values. The purpose of this three-year inquiry, and this paper presentation, is to explore teachers’ (dis)engagement from the profession as it relates to such attempts. Our research objectives are to:

1)  learn how teachers understand and experience obligation in teaching; and

2)  unravel the complex relationship between the emotional toll of obligation (i.e. teachers’ feelings of self-doubt, guilt, anxiety and shame) and teachers’ disengagement from the profession.

          Obligation is of particular importance today, given that the field of education is increasingly being restructured by ideologies of managerialism (Ball, 2003). This restructuring has resulted in increased standardization and greater demand for accountability (Hursch, 2005). However, these ideologies, because they minimize the moral integrity in teaching, can invoke feelings of self-doubt, guilt, anxiety and shame in teachers. These feelings can result in teachers disengaging from their profession, manifesting in burnout and ultimately, greater attrition (Crocco & Costigan, 2007). Teacher attrition has become a pervasive and international issue (for ex. Clark & Antonelli, 2009; Day & Gu, 2010; Ingersoll, 2002), and has negative implications for students’ academic success and well-being (Crocco & Costigan, 2007; Day & Gu, 2010).

            Except for Santoro (2011; 2013), there is little research that has shifted the perspective of teacher attrition from that of “teacher burnout” to that of “teacher demoralization,” which elucidates teachers’ sense of obligation and its subsequent emotional toll. Obligation is that which fixes us to a sense of responsibility and necessitates judgment (Caputo, 1993). Yet, the obligation imbedded in the demands of teaching invokes teacher anxiety: in recognizing one’s responsibility, and in the fear of failing to meet one’s obligation, in the concern of responding inappropriately, and in the worry of reprimand. Moments of obligation are visceral (Caputo,1993); requiring one to respond, yet void of anticipation and forethought, and exceeding accountability. It is the uncertainty that resides in obligation that induces an emotional toll, dramatically illustrating teaching’s occupational risk and reality (Britzman, 2006).

Method

As part of a larger, three-year, qualitative study (Author 1 & Author 2, 2015), we conducted in-depth phenomenological interviews with teachers who moved, left, or who considered leaving the profession in an attempt to trace the various events and issues that create a sense of moral disengagement. The interviews sought to solicit participants’ reflections on personal, social, and historical narratives related to their decisions to leave or stay in the profession. We define “leaving” as: moving from a current teaching position, school, or district; medical, stress or personal leave; quitting or resigning from the profession; or taking early retirement. We interviewed 24 teachers in total from two large urban centers in Canada. Participants were invited to respond to a list of prompts (similar to the methods used in Pitt & Britzman, 2006 and Pitt & Phelan, 2008), that included, for example, times when they felt frustrated by the expectations of others, had felt or being told that they have disappointed others, or had felt insufficiently prepared to support children. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. Working from the premise that affect and discourse are “indissolubly and tightly woven together” (Wetherell, 2013, p. 364), we conducted a collaborative interpretive analysis of the data, teasing out themes that illustrated the participants’ experiences of obligation. Reading our research data with and through theory helped us to illuminate and illustrate teachers’ experiences of obligation and the effects of the emotional toll of obligation on teachers’ disengagement from the profession. Guided by discussions of obligation in the humanities, the social sciences and the human services literature, our data analysis reveals the need to consider a broader and more balanced view of disengagement from the teaching profession; increased attention to what teaching does to and requires of teachers emotionally; a greater appreciation of what it means to work justly with and on behalf of vulnerable populations in an era of accountability and standardization; and, the provision of a language(s) through which teachers can reflect upon the common lives they lead, not only as professionals, but as human beings participating in a shared human reality (Greene, 1973).

Expected Outcomes

Our preliminary readings of the data focus on teachers who took early retirement from the profession, and indicate that, first, teachers feel deeply obligated to children; for many of those interviewed, “education is a promise, a responsibility, and a social obligation” (Britzman, 2003, p. 23). Specifically, teachers expressed obligation in terms of cultivating students’ intellectual growth, emotional wellbeing, and capacity for resilience. Yet, teachers also expressed frustration as their attempts to meet their obligations to children were often unnecessarily complicated by other professionals (e.g. principals, teachers, school psychologists) whose relationships with children were often distant. As teachers navigate this relational matrix we witnessed the intimacy of teaching vulnerable students and the limits of collegial relationships in sustaining good teaching and keeping good teachers in the profession (Berlant, 1988). Second, teachers’ sense of obligation arises from closely-held ideals and beliefs that constitute what Korsgaard (2009) terms “practical identity,” or the social role through which teachers find value, a life worth living, and action to be worth taking (Lear, 2011). Teachers spoke eloquently of the challenges of mandated standardized testing, behaviour control programs, and the lack of support for children most in need (those in foster care and/or living in poverty) which created a sense of compromise in regards to their own values, leading teachers to question these moments when their teaching seemed to fall short of their aspirations. Ironically, however, it was in these moments of deepest conviction, fundamental to the human condition (Hudak, 2013, p. 383), that teachers expressed feeling least like a teacher and most alone in the presence of professional others. These examples—the matrix of relationships and conflicting commitments—illustrate teachers’ experiences of obligation, suggesting a need for professional development that focusses on teachers’ educational commitments and the anxieties that result in trying to live accordingly.

References

Author 1, & Author 2. (2015). The emotional toll of obligation and teachers’ disengagement from the profession. The Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 61(3), 1-4. Ball, S. (2003). The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215-228. Berlant, L. (1988). Feminisms and the institutions of intimacy. In E. Ann Kaplan & G. Levine (Eds.), The politics of research. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Britzman, D. P. (2003). After-education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and psychoanalytic histories of learning. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Britzman, D. (2006). Novel education: Psychoanalytic studies of learning and not learning. New York: Peter Lang Publishers Inc. Caputo, J. (1993). Against ethics: Contributions to a poetics of obligation with constant reference to deconstruction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Clark, R., & Antonelli, F. (2009). Why teachers leave: Results of an Ontario survey 2006-08. Commissioned by the Ontario Ministry of Education. On. Crocco, M., & Costigan, A. (2007). The narrowing of curriculum and pedagogy in the age of accountability urban educators speak out. Urban Education, 42(6), 512-535. Day, C., & Gu, Q. (2010). The new lives of teachers. New York: Routledge. Hudak, G. M. (2013). Contiguous autism and philosophical advocacy: Socialization, subjectification, and the onus of responsibility. Philosophy of Education Archive, 379-387. Hursh, D. (2005). Neo-liberalism, markets and accountability: Transforming education and undermining democracy in the United States and England. Policy Futures in Education, 3(1), pp. 3-15. Ingersoll, R. M. (2002). The teacher shortage: A case of wrong diagnosis and wrong prescription. NASSP bulletin, 86(631), 16-31. Korsgaard, C. M. (2009). Self-constitution: Agency, identity and integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lear, J. (2011). A case for irony (Vol. 13). Harvard University Press. Pitt, A., & Britzman, D. (2006). Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning. In K. Tobin & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Doing educational research—A handbook (pp. 379-401). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Pitt, A., & Phelan, A. (2008). Paradoxes of autonomy in professional life. Changing English,15(2), 189-197. Santoro, D. (2011). Good teaching in difficult times: demoralization in the pursuit of good work. American Journal of Education, 118(1), 1-23. doi: 10.1086/662010 Santoro, D. (2013). "I was becoming increasingly uneasy about the profession and what was being asked of me": Preserving integrity in teaching. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(5), 563-587. Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and discourse—What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6(4), 349-368.

Author Information

Melanie Janzen (presenting / submitting)
University of Manitoba
Curriculum, Teaching and Learning
Winnipeg
Anne Phelan (presenting)
University of British Columbia
Curriculum and Pedagogy
Vancouver

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