Surviving Emotional Work for Teachers

Improving Wellbeing and Professional Learning Through Reflexive Practice

Jean Hopman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000201130
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Surviving Emotional Work for Teachers is a guide to improving teachers' wellbeing and practice through support of their emotional workload.

The book argues that teachers should be given a formal opportunity to debrief on challenging events, allowing them to reflect on and reframe these experiences in a way that informs future practice to prevent the emotional fatigue that can lead teachers to leave the field altogether. Each chapter opens with a teacher's story, acknowledging the emotional layers present in the scenario and what learnings can be drawn from it. Each of these stories features tension between what is expected of teachers, and how they are limited to act, which is further fuelled by underlying assumptions.

This is valuable reading for teachers at all stages of their career, whether preparing for the complex work ahead or making sense of past and current experiences. This book offers a reflexive process that teachers and schools can implement to facilitate the useful exploration of their emotion. Such a process is vital for the overall wellbeing of any school.

1
Introduction

The introduction features the story of Steven, the boy I could not love. There were reasons why I could not feel for Steven the way I could for other students I taught, but they were not clear to me at the time. It took years of uncovering complex layers to the story of Steven before I made sense of the experience and consequently myself. My relationship with Steven spurred a doctoral study into the emotional consciousness of teachers, on which this book is based. The foundations of the research are explained, and the contents of each chapter are introduced.

1.1Jean’s story—the story of Steven

I was teaching a year three class and I had a particular student, Steven, who frustrated me no end. At the time, I felt he might have been the laziest person I had ever met. He refused to put pen to paper. He was an intelligent boy with no sign of any learning difficulties. Rather than work he preferred to call out across the classroom, fling his writing implements around and make fart noises. His classmates would sometimes engage with and even encourage his behaviour, but for the most part they found him irritating and immature and distanced themselves from him. He was rather overweight for his age and always looked scruffy with his shirt hanging out. The school had a fairly strict uniform policy. It seemed as though I was constantly reminding Steven how to dress himself, how to behave in class, how to get along with his peers. Sometimes he would return from the bathroom with an odour and I had to counsel him on the importance, and technique, of wiping one’s bottom properly. I was patient with him and although frustrated I still spent a lot of time trying to cajole him into action. We had some fond moments throughout the year—moments where we shared laughter together—but at the end of the year I saw little to no progress in Steven’s academic, social or personal development. I felt he was my first failure.

About eight years after I shared a classroom with Steven I had a conversation with a teacher colleague who had also taught Steven in those earlier years. My colleague and I were talking about the close relationships that we develop with our students and I labelled this closeness as a kind of love. I had loved all of my students, including the ones that were sometimes difficult to teach. Then it occurred to me that I had loved all but one, Steven. I talked about this with my colleague who told me that although Steven was difficult to teach she still had loved him in a way.

The incongruence between how my colleague and I felt about Steven baffled me. Why was it that I could feel love for all of my other students, even the ones who were difficult to teach, some who were much more difficult to teach than Steven, but not Steven? I reflected upon these questions for some time. I talked more to my colleague and others who had also taught Steven and it occurred to me that my colleagues all spoke of Steven in a similar way—they spoke of their frustration yet fondness of him. Steven had a level of helplessness that was beyond expectations for his age. His other teachers described teaching Steven as like ‘mothering’. The process was exhausting, much more than the usual teaching that might go on between teacher and student, but they still felt a kind of love for him. It was in this realisation that I made a connection. The year I taught Steven was also the year I discovered becoming a mother was an unlikely path for me. A dawning came over me that what Steven was demanding of me was a kind of ‘mothering’; a nurturance that mothers might give much smaller children.

Why he needed and demanded this level of nurturing had to do, I believe, with his family situation. He was the long-awaited child born to an up until that point childless couple. I had a good working relationship with his parents but in interactions with Steven and his parents I could tell that he was their prize; their coveted baby that would always remain so. He fulfilled this role and as I was responsible for him at school that year he demanded me to respond to his position as ‘the baby’; however, I could not. I was in the process of coming to terms with the possibility of never being a mother, I carried immense loss and grief and had to distance myself from ‘mothering’. I was a teacher not a mother. I had to protect myself from any feelings that might be associated with mothering, such as love, that would exacerbate the feeling of loss. While I could love my other students because they needed me to be their teacher, I could not love Steven because he needed more. Also, he represented that long-awaited baby that, at that point, I believed I would never know.

It was Steven’s story and others like it that made me want to understand better the dynamics between teacher and student and to understand student behaviour better, so I furthered my study in the area of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. I felt like I had new tools to understand my students and their experiences in the world. I worked as an education counsellor, mostly with families, as a bridge between home and school. I wondered how useful my toolkit might be for teachers in general and went about setting up a doctoral study. I started out wanting to explore the teacher–student relationship, but what I came to realise was that there could be very little understanding of the teacher–student relationship without an understanding of oneself first. You—the teacher—should be the source of reflection before sense can be made of the complicated relationships and emotion that develop in classrooms and schools.

I carried around feelings of guilt about failing Steven for eight years after teaching him. To me, it felt like a failure in the sense that I could not progress him, could not love him—I struggled even to like him—and could not be a mother. Through reflection and multiple discussions with colleagues, I learned the reason I was unable to love Steven. I was then able to forgive myself. If I had had these realisations while teaching Steven, would the outcome have been different? Would I have been able to love him realising that I did not have to play the role of mother? Would I have been able to progress him academically? Would our t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Who are teachers and what do they do?
• 3 Telling a student they’ve failed and coping with the fallout
• 4 Navigating the emotional rollercoaster that is ‘muck-up day’
• 5 What happens when a student’s question crosses a line
• 6 Responding to physical violence in the classroom
• 7 The dilemma of textbook selection
• 8 Questioning the school’s uniform policy
• 9 Conclusion
• Index