There is not difficult to feel this dilemma: on the one hand, teachers are regularly maligned in public discourses of education reform; and on the other hand, many teachers’
narratives such as action research or autobiography appeal against their oppressed lives in this situation. In my eyes, this is an interesting fact already discussed in many papers. In general, we can get a clear picture that many teachers do not really welcome educational reform and they feel it will weight their teaching loads. They get used to teaching with textbooks in the traditional way, instead of designing curricula and preparing extra instructional materials by themselves, because it will occupy their time. To put it differently, some teachers also express this paradox: if they want to transform their teaching or other issues in schooling, they will suffer some trouble from colleagues such as envy and bitter language. Thus, it’s crucial to focus on this contradictory emotion in the educational field:
schoolteachers tend to welcome educational reform in the abstract level, but they also develop euphemistic strategies to handle with this reform at the same time. Some papers use certain narratives (like action research or autobiography) coming from schoolteachers’ voices to offer deep descriptions about teachers’ everyday lives. They point out that teachers were restrained by a number of rules and they cannot conduct real instruction autonomy. They just repeat their old instruction style year after year.
Although many papers already describe schoolteachers’
everyday lives, I didn’t find any proper work focusing on emotion issues systematically. According to my literature review, only few master theses or dissertations focus on this issue. For instance, Chien (2005) uses teachers’ teaching journal writing on the Internet as an example to inquire the emotional issues of teacher-student interactions to understand how emotions influence teachers’ works and their life worlds. He major finding includes: it is always with certain tensions between working in an institutionalized school and the teacher’s educational ideals. This causes emotional reactions of miseries when teachers interact with their students. Negative emotional reactions also cause serious punishments and make hard memories in teachers’
teaching careers. In my own interpretations, the already pressured 'self' of the teacher who receives disrespectful,
unfair, invalidating treatment undergoes intense emotional pain. Thus, reflected time and again in descriptions of difficult and uncomfortable memories, teachers told of being
"angry," "hurt," "flabbergasted," "humiliated" and "fearful"
when the professional self was threatened.
As Hargreaves (1998) emphasizes, “Teaching is an emotional practice.” Teaching is not just a technical practice but also an emotional one. Teaching also both expresses teachers' own feelings, and affects the feelings of others.
Although emotion is a obvious topic for observation, outsider like researcher sometimes cannot figure out their emotional rule well or outsider also feels difficult to portray any detail about these rules. This is a reason why I think so highly of action research or autobiographical narratives, because in traditional academic writing, to address emotions is always insignificant matter—especially for schoolteacher’s emotion already marginalized within the hierarchy of the educational research.1In my opinion, the educational study is not only a pure macro-oriented focus such as analysis for policy and ideological formation; rather, it also must be in synchronicity with the actual socio-historical process and the baseline of everyday life in the micro level. Institutional analyses sometimes neglect the significance of action and interaction. That is, the day to day interactions and regularities from the hidden curriculum that tacitly taught important norms and values would be an important issue for research. For instance, the phenomenon of schoolteacher’s emotion has begun to attract a great deal more attention from educational researchers such as critical pedagogy or feminist pedagogy in recent years. One may feel disgust, loathing, or sentimental affection. These feelings are just as important as one’s beliefs in determining whether or not one consents to a given social structure or whatever.
We may say that emotional issues may be one of good windows to inquire schoolteachers’ everyday lives. In particular, the emotional narratives seem like Derrida’s idea
“supplement” for current blank page. We should discover the uncharted territory of what teachers are really feeling.
For this purpose, first I will review relevant theories in multiple disciplines to systematically theorize emotions as an important topic of educational research. Second, to understand emotions are inscribed in culture and ideology, as "embodied and situated." In educational issues, all emotionality experienced by teachers in their classrooms or schools 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
1 According to the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, any system of classification is an ordering, and ordering requires the rejection of
“inappropriate elements” (Douglas, 1966: 35). If an order or systematic pattern is to be maintained, we have to eject or exclude that which would challenge the pattern and its continuation. Krantz (2003: 228) criticizes that social theory and research have pretty much ignored emotion. The open expression of emotion is generally discouraged in the public, particularly Habermas, the most often cited scholar on the deliberative democracy,
"ought-not" teaching selves (Higgins, 1987).That is, emotions signal that something important to survival or thriving is at stake. 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).
How can we master the emotion deeply in schoolteachers’
everyday lives? Wentworth and Ryan’s (1992) idea “deep sociality” of emotion offers us a way of moving beyond micro-analytic, subjective, individualistic levels of analysis, towards more open-ended forms of social inquiry in which embodied agency can be understood not merely as meaning-making, but also as institution-making. This is because emotions are "cognitive," or "conceptual" shaped by beliefs and perceptions. What’s more, I think we should divide emotion into two sections: emotion to (acts in certain ways) and emotion from (oppressive structures, practices, and modes of thoughts). My focus includes rhetorical and action dimensions to emotional awareness, expressions, attributions of meanings, and interpretations. For instance, I will also explore an “emotional rhetoric” that frequently accompanies one’s talk about emotions or encounter relevant events. Finally, as I see it, the schoolteachers’
narratives have become a stereotype of universal anger or mope targeting education reform. I do not believe that this stereotype is completely accurate in the real word. My focus is not only on what social factors affect schoolteachers’
feelings, but also on how schoolteachers mobilize their feeling to creation a condition for social transformation. That is, my ultimate purpose is to answer “can one explain the possibility of resistance from a oppressed position through emotion mobilization?”, and to build up this model—the emotional requirement for subversive action: “structure of feeling” is an important social condition for intervention from anger to joyful/hopeful commitment to social transformation.
2. Theoretical Review
What is the proper definition for emotion? How can we analyze emotion more culturally with different traditions?
For example, Robin Collingwood (1958: 203-206) divides expressions of emotion into three sections: (1) physic emotion or feeling, (2) emotion of consciousness or attention, and (3) intellectual emotion. But the psychic level in its purity never appears in consciousness. Acts of attention engender consciousness by transforming brute feeling into what Collingwood calls “ideas.” Collingwood characterizes the general form of consciousness as that of judgment.
Consciousness is representational by virtue of being reflexive; that is, by virtue of a certain kind of self-consciousness. Thus, following by Collingwood, the organ that transforms feelings into ideas, makes them conscious, is the imagination: the imagination is that which
intellect is that which, in turn, subsumes those analogue representations under concepts. In this section, I will discuss key points for emotion from sociology, cultural psychology, cultural anthropology and feminism. All of these approaches help us to achieve cultural analysis. As Raymond Williams (1981: 12-13) states that culture is an aspect of the whole social order and cultures confer meaning. Cultures shape thoughts, feelings and activities by giving them intelligibility, but this does not mean that cultures shape individual attitudes and behaviors in a deterministic or exhaustive way. On the contrary, culture is endemic to everyday life consisting in practical, socially organized activities, cultural concepts, psychological phenomena, and human intentionality. Thus, emotion is cultural in my eyes because it is a meaningful expression through individual and collective action and interaction. We are supposed to talk about, think about, and imagine it seriously. Emotion is cultural because it connects with a distinct set of social practices. Emotion is cultural because it is associated with certain meanings. Emotion is cultural because it frequently appears in and is represented in everyday life.
(1) Sociological Perspective
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1979: 551 n2) defines emotion (feeling as interchangeable term) as bodily cooperation with an image, a thought, and a memory—a cooperation of which the individual is aware. Contrast to the assumption that emotions are natural responses arising from purely physical or psychological processes, sociologists attempt to make visible the ways in which positive or negative feeling or thinking is buried in words, social roles, social processes or social groups. They assume that emotional responses are preshaped and given form within a socio-cultural complex. That is, emotions are socially constructed, "interpreted, propagated, and deployed' (Jackson, 1993: 209). For instance, anger, hate, jealousy, love, compassion, indifference and disgust are all equally encouraged, elicited, forbidden or required in social life. In addition, Hochschild (1979) further points out two accounts of emotion: the organismic and the interactive accounts. The organismic viewpoint concerns the relation of emotion to biologically given instinct or impulse. In the interactive account, social influences permeate emotion more insistently, more effectively, and at mote theoretically posited junctures. To follow the interactive viewpoint, she also focuses on the term emotion management used synonymously with emotion work and deep acting in advance. Emotion work becomes an object of awareness most often when the individual’s feeling do not fit the situation. Hochschild means emotion work as the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling.
That is, to work on an emotion or feeling is the same as to manage an emotion or to do deep acting.
In classical sociology, Durkheim is more explicit about the role of emotions. Especially in his later works, he
strongly implicates emotions and collective sentiments in the creation of social solidarity through moral community.
Durkheim implies that “…what holds a society together—the "glue" of solidarity—and [Marx implies that]
what mobilizes conflict—the energy of mobilized groups—are emotions" (qtd from Collins, 1990). In advance, Chris Shilling (2002: 18-19) suggests that we should connect emotion with Durkheim’s social fact.2 Social fact may not appear to accord emotions much significance, but refers to a continuum of phenomena ranging from major institutional structures to types of feeling promoted by collective gatherings. In short, Durkheim represents the emotion in social or moral order. For him, the symbolic order is built around representations of what is sacred to group life; things set apart and forbidden from the profane, mundane world of everyday life.
In addition, Collins (1990) considers contemporary sociology such as symbolic interactionism has certain elective affinity with Durkheim. For instance, Goffman broaden Durkhiem in a way that shows how social order is produced on the micro-levels, and Garfinkel’s breaching experiments 3 reveal sacred object very much like Durkheim’s world. Collins (1990) also points out some limitations in studying emotions in this camp. For instance, Goffman focuses on the structure of micro-interaction, on its constraints, on the interplay between its subjective and objective components. Goffman is concerned with how ritual solidarity is generated in the little transient groups of everyday life, at the level of the encounter. Besides, Garfinkel demonstrates the most dramatically in his breaching experiments, in which he forces people into situations that cause them to recognize indexicality (i.e., they rely on tacit acceptance of what things mean contextually) and reflexivity (there are infinite regresses of justifying one’s interpretations). The reaction of Garfinkel’s subjects is always intensely emotional outburst.
(2) Cultural Psychology and Anthropology
Besides sociological perspective, cultural psychologist Carl Ratner (2000) gets ideas from Vygotsky to demonstrate that emotions are formed, reflected and functioned by cultural process. He considers that Vygotsky’s conception is more specific and comprehensive than the standard general definition of culture as the totality of socially constructed behaviors, beliefs and objects. Cultural phenomenon are humanly constructed artifacts rather than natural products, and that cultural phenomenon are social facts in Durkheim’s sense of being emergent products of social interactions rather than individual creations. Thus, Ratner points out that emotions are socially constructed artifacts which are
2A social fact is an abstraction external to the individual which constrains that individual's actions. That is, it is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an influence, or an external constraint.
3 Garfinkel’s experiments, violating the sacred object, call forth the same effects as would violating a ritual taboo for a tribal member, desecrating the
functionally independent of biological determinants. He also emphasizes that emotional characteristics reflect (recapitulate) the social organization of activities and the cultural content of concepts. In short, cultural psychology can be seen as a movement attempting systematically to analyze values and underlying presupposition taken for granted in the intentional world.
For Jerome Burner, cultural psychology neither dismisses what people say about their mental states, nor treats their statements only as if they were predictive indices of overt behaviors. What is takes as central, rather, is that the relationship between action and saying (or experiencing) is, in the ordinary conduct of life, interpretable. It takes the position that there is a publicly interpretable congruence between saying, doing, and the circumstances in which the saying and doing occur. That is to say, there are agree-upon canonical relationships between the meaning of what we say and what we do in given circumstances, and such relationships govern how we conduct our lives with one another (Bruner, 1990: 19). In other words, cultural psychology will not be preoccupied with behavior but with action, its intentionally based counterpart, and more specifically, with situated action—action situated in a cultural setting, and in the mutually interacting intentional states of the participants. Thus, cultural psychology emphasizes emotion as “…emotions are characterized by attitudes such as beliefs, judgments, and desires, the contents of which are not natural, but are determined by the systems of cultural belief, value, and moral value of particular communities” (Armon-Jones, 1986: 33)
In the similar way, Lyon (1998: 42) states that anthropological understanding of emotion have generally been achieved through more detailed and refined cultural analysis 4 . Lyon also points out that the cultural anthropological study of emotion seeks at base to understand the ways that innerness is shaped by culturally laden sociality. This view closely follows the work of Clifford Geertz in its insistence that meaning is a public fact, that personal life takes shape in cultural terms that individuals are necessarily and continually involved in the interpretive apprehension of received symbolic models. That is, emotions are central to the understanding of the communicative and associative functions of the body.
Emotions activate bodies in ways that are attitudinal and physical and that have implications for the way individuals together create a common design, purpose, or order (Lyon, 1998: 53).
In this vein, emotion must occur in a social-relational context, and it is also the pivot upon which cultural ritual turns. As Geertz (1973: 449) argues in Balinese cockfight, ritual display serves as a kind of sentimental education in its use of emotion for cognitive end. Ritual is performative as well as representational, and ritual refers to the norm
4 Please also refer to Michelle Rosaldo’s (1984) “Toward an anthropology
which is the prescribed code that societal members must follow. In my opinion, the action or ritual of the norm also accounts for “common script” the term used by Evring Goffman (1959). He pointes out that culture frames social interactions and is reshaped by these interactions. Culture further establishes the roles that individuals might adopt as they engage in any social interaction. Thus, culture is not only a stage upon which the actors weave their narratives, but culture is also the script inscribed norms into actors’
bodies.
(3) Feminist Approach
Finally, feminism is also an important approach to debate emotional issues. Feminist treatments of the question of emotion (e.g., Jagger, 1989) have tended to portray emotions not as chaos but as a discourse on problems. Certain feminists have contested both the irrationality and the passivity of feelings by arguing that emotions may involve the identification of problems in women's lives and are therefore political. Talk about anger, for instance, can be interpreted as an attempt to identify the existence of inappropriate restraint or injustice. By extension, talk about the control of emotions would be, in this feminist discourse, talk about the suppression of public acknowledgement of problems. Thus, Megan Boler (1998) defines "feminist politics of emotion" as the explicit analysis, and resulting in individual or collective actions, that challenge the historical and cultural emotional rules which serve to maintain patriarchal hierarchy, particularly with respect to the arbitrary gendered division of public and private spheres.
In general, a feminist politics of emotion examines specific strategies for women to exorcise the internalized effects of women’s subordinate status within patriarchal ideologies by means of developing alternative emotional responses, expressions, articulations, identities, and visions.
As Fisher (1981: 20, 23) points out that "feeling helps us [women] define what the world is like and how we want to change it....The exploration of feelings and experiences can help us define the basic arena for feminist theory and the basic direction for feminist action." The best example comes from Sue Campbell’s (1994) work, which builds on recent feminist philosophical analyses of bitterness to complexify
"experience" and "emotions" by situating them within collaborative social contexts that cannot be reduced to either individualized expressions of emotion, nor to simply rational/irrational experiences. Campbell reclaims bitterness as a "legitimate and rational" response to injustice or oppression. Further, to be told "you’re bitter" is a dismissal and a silencing. Even if you then articulate your reasons for being bitter the other is no longer listening. If instead we recognize that bitterness is collaboratively and publicly formed, it does not make sense to require the bitter individual to justify her reasons. Rather, what is called for is a full social accountability on everyone’s part for the
emotions, but rather understands emotional expressions as concretely situated particular historical or socio-cultural relationships. Thus, in feminist debates, an emotional experience is not simply reflective of one’s individualized experience but rather reflects the interactive dynamics of power between persons.
In the educational field, Weiler also suggests that the
In the educational field, Weiler also suggests that the