Title: Emotion suppression among schoolteachers: Factors and implications
Izhar Oplatka & Dafna Zilberman- Shemesh
School of Education
Tel Aviv University
Objectives or purposes
To trace modes of emotion suppression among schoolteachers in the era of
accountability and teaching as a public service. (1) What kind of emotions teachers
tend to suppress at work? (2) How do teacher suppress emotions? (3) What are the
factors affecting emotion suppression in teaching?
Perspective(s) or theoretical framework(s)
When teachers talk about their work they immediately reveal that emotions are at the
heart of teaching, i.e., that emotions play an important role in teachers' relations with
their students. But, the capacity of teachers to display or supress a certain emotion in
their work is not just a matter of personal disposition, but also of cultural influences
(Hargreaves, 2000; Zembylas, 2004), such as the culture of the teaching profession. In
fact, teachers' emotions are embedded in particular social, cultural and political
structures (Day & Lee, 2011). Emotion suppression, the focus of this study, involves
the covering of emotions that leads to inconsistency between the emotion one feels
and the emotion one displays. Teachers, like many other employees, have reported
suppressing emotions such as anger, frustration, or disgust.
Data sources or evidence
15 male and female school teachers participated in semi-structured interviews. They
were selected according to two criteria: (1) Teachers who are at least four years in
teaching; (2) Teachers whose colleagues report that they are less likely to display
positive or negative emotions in the teacher lounge or in their interaction with
students. We are aware, of course, that the informant's knowledge is subjective and
might be based on incorrect impressions. To solve this problem, we included in our
list of potential interviewee only teachers that two colleagues had recommended
interviewing them.
Methods, techniques, modes of inquiry, applications
The manual analysis of the interview data followed the four stages described by
Marshall and Rossman (2011): ‘organizing the data’, ‘generating categories, themes
and patterns’, ‘testing any emergent hypothesis’ and ‘searching for alternative
explanations’. This analysis aims at identifying central themes in the data, searching
for recurrent experiences, feelings and attitudes, so as to be able to code, reduce and
connect different categories into central themes. The coding was guided by the
principles of ‘comparative analysis’ (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), which includes the
comparison of any coded element in terms of emergent categories and sub-categories.
Results and/or conclusions
1. Teachers believe that a teacher must not display extreme negative emotions in
the class (e.g., anger, sadness, frustration, hate).
2. Teachers reported suppressing emotions when meeting the principal, students,
and parents.
3. Some teachers reported 'fabricating' emotions towards students and parents.
4. Among the determinants affecting teacher suppression are gender, age, career
stage, role perception, and fear of conflicts with the principal and the parents.
5. Few teachers claimed that teacher suppression may cause negative results
(e.g., health problems, shallow schooling process, moral dilemmas).
Relevance or importance to educational administration and leadership
The study may increase principals' attention to teachers' modes of emotion
suppression in an era of marketization and accountability, and provide them with
means to help them face the ethical consequences of this phenomenon.
Connection to conference theme
The study sheds light on plausible sources of ethical and moral conflicts in schools.