Teachers’ Emotional Experiences: Towards a New Emotional Discourse

This edited book seeks to address the impoverished culture of emotional discourse in the teaching profession and teacher education. Teachers across the world live out emotional experiences in their professional lives (in the classroom, in the staffroom, online) yet the language available for talking about these experiences is fragmented and often inadequate. The book draws on a broad range of theories including psychoanalytic, critical, feminist, sociological and poststructural to expand a rich conceptual language for talking about teachers’ emotional experiences, originating from the authentic voices of teachers themselves. The book is unified by the inclusion of unpublished, first-hand accounts of teachers, drawn from the editors’ own empirical research interviewing a diverse group of teachers over many years. Each chapter includes a direct voice of a teacher telling their own story, in their own words, about an experience they found to be emotionally significant--the challenging, the sublime, and the downright distressing. Scholarly responses to each of these interviews weave a novel imagining for teachers’ emotional discourse within schools. The chapters discuss the complex contexts of teachers’ professional-emotional lives, such as neoliberal school systems, fraught relationships with leaders, contractualisation, toxic positivity, intractable behaviour problems and datafication. The book will be useful for education researchers, scholars of teachers and teacher education as well as teachers themselves, their families, and those who wish to work with and understand the complex dynamics of the teaching profession.

Saul Karnovsky is Senior Lecturer and Course Coordinator in the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia.

Nick Kelly is Associate Professor in the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.