EDD5211 : Structure and Process of Schooling
Topic 2
Teachers and their Cultures
2.1
An Analytical Framework of Teacher’s Working Self-Identity
A. The Constituents of the Analytical Framework of Teachers’ Working Self-Identity
1. Interactionist’s conception of self-interaction process
a. Symbolic interactionist “saw the self as a process and not a structure.”
b. “The process of a self provides the human being with a mechanism of selfinteraction. …Such self-interaction takes the form of making indications to himself and
meeting these indications by making further indications. The human being can designate
things to himself – his wants, his pains, his goals, object around him, the presence of
others, their actions, their expected actions, or whatnot.”
c. “With the mechanism of self-interaction the human being ceases to be a responding
organism whose behavior is a product of what plays upon him from the outside, the inside,
or both. Instead, he acts toward his world, interpreting what confronts him and organizing
his action on the basis of the interpretation.”
2. Giddens’ conception of self narrative, ontological security and existential anxiety
a. Self-identity as coherent and continuous narrative one imputed to oneself
“A person’s identity is …to be found…in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going.
The individual’s biography, if she is to maintin regular interaction with others in the day-today world, cannot be wholely fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the
external world, and sort them out into ongoing ‘story’ about the self” (Giddens, 1991, p. 54)
b. A stable self-identity, i.e. coherent and continuous self narrative, would constitute a state of
ontological security.
“A stable sense of self-identity presupposes the other elements of ontological security - an
acceptance of the things and of others.” (ibid)
3. Arthur Frank’s equilateral triangle of self
a. Institutions
b. Discourses
c. Corporeality
B. Understanding the Institutional Context of Teachers’ Working Self-Identity
1. The institutional imperative of capitalist market: Educating producers and consumers
2. The institutional imperative of democratic state: Educating citizens in liberal democracy
3. The institutional imperative of education: Nurturing educated persons
C. Understanding the Discursive Context of Teachers’ Working Self-Identity
1. Discourse of professionalism
2. Discourse of unionism
3. Discourse of emotional labour
D. Understanding the Corporeality of Teachers
1. Intellectual being
2. Emotional being
3. Somatic being
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Corporeality
Dimension
Institutional
Dimension
Discursive
Dimension
Analytical Framework of Teachers’ Working Self-Identity
2.2
Identity Crisis of Teachers in the Age of Performativity
A. Conception of Identity Crisis of Teachers
1. Conception of self in symbolic interactionist perspective
2. Gidden’s conception of self-identity
3. Identity crisis can thus be defined as a state of ontological insecurity, which is derived from the
fragmentation and discontinuity of one’s self narrative.
B. The Age of Performativity
1. “Performativity is a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements,
comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change – based on
rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic). The performances (of individual subjects
or organizations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of ‘quality’, or
‘moments’ of promotion or inspection. As such they stand for, encapsulate or represent the
worth, quality or value of an individual or organization with a field of judgement.” (Ball, 2003, p.
216)
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2. The two most dominant fields of judgement in the performativity age and/or globalinformational age are the market and the state.
a. In the market, performances are judged by measured by criteria such as salability and
profitability
b. In the state, performances are assessed by criteria such as manageability and
controllability
c. In global-informational age, performance measures have to be translatable into computercompatible languages, e.g. quantifiable and calculable information
C. Teachers’ experience of loss of Identity in the age of performativity
1. Discontinuity and fragmentation of narrative of professional self
2. Discontinuity and fragmentation of narrative of the unionist self
3. The experience of existential anxiety
4. The loss of emotional security (Carlyle & Woods, 2002)
a. Loss of emotional skills: Inability of delivering emotional services of understanding and
empathy, motivation and encouragement, …
b. Loss of emotion regulation: Inability of controlling, regulating and recovering from
emotional stress
c. Loss of positive emotional experiences: Deprived of heart-lifting and satisfying experiences
in teaching
d. Emotional estrangement: Fall into emotional traps of indifference and apathy
5. Feeling of betrayal
a. “Betrayal is the intentional or unintentional breach of trust or the perception of such a
breach.” (Hargreaves, 2002, p. 397)
b. Interpersonal betrayal: It refers to a breach of trust by partners in a human encounter. As
in the case of teaching, teachers may feel betrayed by students, co-teachers, school
administration, and/or the government and its policy
c. Self betrayal: It refers to a breach of trust on one’s self-identity and/or a breach of a
fundamental value one cherished
(i) Guilt is a form of self betrayal of some normative codes one identified with.
“Guilt is anxiety produced by the fear of transgression: where the thoughts of
activities of the individual do not match up to expectations of a normative sort.”
(Giddens, 1991, p. 64)
(ii) Shame is another form of self betrayal, which upsets the status quo of the self and/or
disrupts the coherent narrative of one’s identity.
“Shame bears directly on self-identity because it is essentially anxiety about the
adequacy of the narrative by means of which the individual sustains a coherent
biography.” (Giddens, 1991, p. 65)
2.3
Teachers and the Institution and Discourse of Professionalism
A. The Work Culture of School Teachers
Three Modes of Work Control and Work Culture in Capitalist Economy
1. Capitalist, the Managerial Class and Entrepreneurialism
2. Proletarians, Factory Workers and Unionism
3. Intellectual Workers, Free Practitioners and Professionalism
B. Professionalism as Teachers’ Work Culture
1. Theoretical Perspectives in Study of the Profession
a Functionalist Perspective: trait model
b. Interactionist Perspective: labeling theory
c. Conflict Theory: power model
d. Historical-Developmental Approach
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2. The Essence of the Profession: a sociological debate
a Professional Knowledge
(i) Respectability: abstract principles:
(ii) Applicability: practical skills
(iii) Credibility: socially recognized
(iv) Indispensability: societal relevance
b. Professional Ethics and Conduct
(i) Code of ethics
(ii) Code of practice
(ii) Community sanction
c. Professional Autonomy
(i) control over the technical content of work
(ii) domination in professional-client relationship
(iii) domination in the social organization of work
(iv) monopoly in the supply & demand for the professional service
d. Professionalization as an Anglo-American Disease
3. A Synthesis of the Debate :
Professionalization as a process of institutionalization of professional knowledge to different
domains of a given occupational group. And the outcome of the process is conditioned by the
particular historical and sociopolitical context within which the occupational group finds itself.
The institutionalization process includes the following domains.
a. Institutionalization of the professional knowledge and the procedure of its acquisition
b. Institutionalization of the professional working environment
c. Institutionalization of the system of professional-career advancement
d. Institutionalization of the supply and demand for the professional service
C. Is Schoolteacher Professional ?
a. Professional Knowledge: the uncertain profession
b. Professional Autonomy: the encroached and heteronomous profession
D. Professionalism in the Age of Performativity
a. Encroachment of judgements of capitalist market
b. Encroachment of judgements of competition and evaluative state
c. Reinstating professionalism as the third logic to the face of the education reform of
performativity
2.4.
Teachers and the Institution and Discourse of Unionism
A. Definition of Union and Unionization
“Trade Unions refer to all organizations of employees -- including those of salaried and
professional workers, as well as those of manual wage earners -- which are known to include in
their objects that of negotiating with employers with a view to regulating the wages and working
conditions of their members.”
(The Dept. of Employment & Productivity, U.K.)
B. Functions and Natures of Trade Union
a. Self-insurance of livelihood and job security
b. Safe-guarding working condition
c. Striving for collective bargaining power and waging militant action
d. Emphasis on solidarity and craftsmanship/ masculinarity
C. The Political-Historical Context of Unionization
a. The rise of factory production and wage-labourer
b. Deskilling
c. Alienation
d. Socialist movement
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D. Difference between Unionism and Professionalism
a. Manual Labour vs. Non-manual Labour
b. Masculinarity vs. Intellecturality
c. Solidarity vs. Individuality
d. Collective Action vs. Professional Competence & Autonomy
F. The Causes of Teacher Militancy :
a. Sense of powerless
b. Thesis of status discrepancy (R. Corwin)
c. The thesis of social imagery (G. Bain et al.)
d. Disillusionment with the ruling ideology (B.C. Duke)
G. Unionism and Professionalism: A means for an end?
"To the American Federation of Teachers, professionalism is not possible without unionism, i.e. it is
impossible for teachers to become true professionals unless they have the power to influence
strongly both the conditions under which they work on and the definition of what constitutes sound
educational practice. in other words, AFT does not take the stand that professionalism and
unionism are incompatible. On the contrary, AFT has been committed to a linkage between the
growth of power through teacher unionism and the development of excellence in professional
practice."
(Kemble, 1980, p. 156)
H. Unionism in the Age of Performativity
1. The fundamental change in the class relation in global-informational capitalism
a. The globally mobile bourgeoisie
b. The locally pin-down proletarian
c. Retreat of the welfare state and the emergence of the competition state, whose policy
stance works in favor of the interest of the global capital
2. The erosion of the political muscle of unionism
a. The impact of off-shoring and outsourcing on the solidarity base of unionism
b. The impact of flexible working force on the bargaining power of unionism
c. The rise to power of neo-liberal and neo-conservative government
2.5.
Teachers and the Institution and Discourse of Emotional Labor
A. Understanding the Nature of Emotional Labor
1. The work of flight attendants
a. Creating sense of comfort and hospitality for customers
b. Enhancing customers’ status and heightening their sense of importance
c. Delivering smiles and emotionality of niceness and kindness
d. Producing relationship of trust and empathy
e. Providing personalized and customized service
2. The work of bill collectors
a. Creating sense of discomfort and fear on debtors
b. Deflating debtors’ status and degrading their self-esteem
c. Delivering sternness, meanness or even hostility
d. Producing distrustful and unsympathetic relationship
e. Providing impersonalized and anonymous service
3. Definition of emotional labor
“Between the extremes of flight attendant and bill collector lie many jobs that call for emotional
labor. Jobs of this type have three characteristics in common. First, they require face-to-face
and voice-to-voice contact with the public. Second, they require the worker to produce an
emotional state in another person - gratitude or fear, for example. Third, they allow the
employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional
activities of employees.” (Hochschild, 1983, p.147)
4. Reflection on teaching as emotional labor
1. Between the extreme of flight attendant and bill collector, where would you locate teachers
in the continuum of emotional labor.
2. How would you characterize the emotional-labor face you put up in front of your students
or in school?
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B. Understanding the Emotions in Teachings
1. Working definition of emotion:
a. Emotion is not only a psychological phenomenon, but also social as well as political and
cultural phenomenon.
b. “Emotions are complex cognitive structures linking feeling, thinking and action, giving
shape and meaning to somatic and affective experience. (Carlyle and Woods, 2002, p.
xiii)
c. Emotion is “a social construction, and one’s experience and display of emotions reflects
the totality of a person’s experience, which includes organizational culture, gender, race,
class, education, and personality.” (Winograd, 2003, p. 1643)
2. Teaching (as well as learning) as emotional practice
a. Emotional practice, as defined by Denzin, is “an embedded practice that produces for the
person, an expected or unexpected emotional alteration in the inner and outer streams of
experience. …Emotional practices make people problematic objects to themselves.
Emotional practices radiates through the person’s body and streams of experience, giving
emotional culmination to thoughts, feelings, and actions.” (Denzin, 1984, p. 89; quoted in
Hargreaves, 1998, p. 838)
b. Teaching and learning are in essence emotional practices:
“Learning is not simply about comprehending the abstract content of ideas; it is about
discovering ourselves in relation to new ideas. It involves surprise, revelation, delight, and
sometimes outrage. It requires the cultivation of felt appreciation. It sometimes involves
risking exposure, humiliation, or changes in beliefs that gives comfort. When education
has happened well, we do not simply emerge knowing the world; we also come to love,
resent, endure, care, and be thrilled about things in ways we did not before.” (Rosiek,
2003, 399)
c. “Teachers’ work includes dealing with students’ affective, as well as cognitive, response to
the subject matter being taught. Teachers frequently need to anticipate students’
emotional response to specific topic and task.” (Rosiek, 2003, p. 400) For examples
(i) Will a specific science inquiry lab be too frustrating given students’ prior knowledge?
(ii) Will a social studies topic be too controversial and/or sensitive to frame a
reasonable class discussion?
(iii) Will the blank page at the beginning of a writing assignment be so intimidating for
students with mediocre writing skills that they will amplify their difficulties by
procrastinating?
3. Teachers’ emotional understanding and emotional geographies
a. Accordingly, one of the primary component of pedagogical knowledge is emotional
understanding
Emotional understanding, as indicated by Denzin, “is an intersubjective process requiring
that one person enter into the field of experience of another and experience for herself the
same or similar experience experienced by another. The subjectivity interpretation of
another’s emotional experience from one’s own standpoint is central to emotional
understanding. Shared and shareable emotionality lie at the core of what it means to
understand and meaningfully enter into the emotional experiences of another. (Denzin,
1984; Quoted in Hargreaves, 1998, p.838)
b. Hargreaves, therefore, underlines that “emotional understanding and misunderstanding in
teaching result from what we term emotional geographies of schooling and human
interaction.” (Hargreaves, 2000, p. 815)
“Emotional geograpgies …consist of the spatial and experiental patterns of closeness
and/or distance in human interactions and relationships that help create, configure and
color the feelings and emotions we experience about ourselves, our world and each
other.” (Hargreaves, 2001, p. 1061)
c. Emotional geographies and distances in teaching
(i) Geographies of sociocultural distance: “where differences of culture and (social class)
can all too easily make teachers on the one hand and oparents and students on the
other, alien and unknowable to each other.” (Hargreaves, 2000, p. 816)
(ii) Geograpgies of moral distances: “where teachers’ purposes (especially moral
purposes) are at odd with those they serve and where there are no mechanisms to
discuss or resolve these differences. (ibid)
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(iii) Geography of professional distances: “where teacher professionalism is defined
according to a ‘classical’ masculine (or rationality-emotionality division) model of the
professions, that creates a distance between teachers and the clients they serves,
and that is especially perjudical to feminine ‘caring’ ethics of teaching.” (ibid)
(iv) Geographies of political distances: “where hierarchical power relationships distort the
emotional as well as cognitive aspects of communication between teachers and those
around them. (ibid)
(v) Geographies of physical distances: “where fragmented, infrequent, formalized and
episodic encounters replace the possibility of relationships between teachers and
students, or teachers and parents )especially secondary schools) with strings of
disconnected interactions. (ibid)
d. Teacher and student interaction are not only cognitively related but moreover emotionally
loaded. Long-lasting bondages between teachers and students are often based on
remembrance of emotional rather than cognitive experiences.
e. Teaching is an emotional investment. The more a teacher is committed to her teaching,
the heavier her emotional investments will be. Hence, teaching is an emotion-intensive
endeavor. As a result, teachers especially committed teachers are emotional vulnerable. It
leads Nias (1996 and 1999) to conclude that teachers are confront with paradox
“Teachers’ idealism leads them to invest their moral and professional “selves” in the job.
However, this very investment make them vulnerable to criticism (or simply rejection) from
others, which may in turn lead them sacrifice their ideals” (Nias, 1996) or suffer from work
stress or even burnout (Nias, 1999)
3. Feeling rules and emotion work in teaching
a. Hochschild (1979) underlines that in most social situations there are describable and
socially shared “guidelines that direct how we want to try to feel.” (p. 563) In funeral, the
feeling rule is of course to try to feel sad, while in wedding, the feeling rule is to try to feel
joyful.
b. In order to comply to feeling rules of specific social situations, people may have to perform
‘emotion work’. By emotion work, it refers to “the act of trying to change in degree or
quality an emotion or feeling. To ‘work on’ an emotion or feeling is … the same as ‘to
manage’ an emotion or to do ‘deep acting’.” (p.561)
c. What are the feeling rules in teaching
Ken Winograd has summarized five feeling rules at work in a US elementary school in
which he has spent a year as teacher. These rules are (Winograd, 2003, p. 1652)
(i) Teaches have affection and even love for their students.
(ii) Teachers have enthusiasm or even passion for subject matter, and teachers show
enthusiasm for students.
(iii) Teachers avoid overt displays of extreme emotions, especially anger and other dark
emotions. They stay calm and tend to avoid display of joy and sadness.
(iv) Teachers love their work.
(v) Teachers have a sense of humor and laugh at their own mistakes as well as the
peccadilloes of students.
d. Teachers’ emotion work
In Winograd’s reflection on his field experience, he summarized the categories of emotion
works he deployed in order to comply to the feeling rules at work in school
(i) Deep acting
- Physical manipulation
- Self-exhortation
- Cognitive heuristics
(ii) Surface acting
- Faking it
- Rationalization
C. Emotion Experience of Teachers in Education Reform of Performativity
1. Emotional experiences
a. Guilt
b. Shame
c. Work stress
d. Burnout
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D. Manuel Castells’ Conception of Power of Identity
“All identities are constructed. The real issue is how, for what, by whom, and for what. The
construction of identity uses building materials from history, from geography, from biology, from
productive and reproductive institutions, from collective memory and fropm personal fantasies,
from power apparatuses and religious revelations. But individuals, social groups, and societies
process all these materials, and rearrange their meaning, according to social determinations and
cultural projects that are rooted in their social structure, and their space/time framework. … I
propose a distinction between three forms and origins of identity building:
1. Legitimizing identity: introduced by the dominant institutions of society to extend and rationalize
their domination….
2. Resistance identity: generated by those actors that are in positions/conditions devalued and/or
stigmatized by the logic of the domination, thus building trenches of resistance and survival on
the basis of principles different from, or opposed to, those permeating the institutions of
society…
3. Project identity: when social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to
them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by so doing, seek the
transformation of overall social structure.” (Castells, 1997, p. 7-8)
Additional Readings
Castells, Manuel (1997) The Power of Identity. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Hargreaves, Andy (2001) Emotional geographies of Teaching. Teacher College Record 103 (6): 10561080.
Hochschild, Arlie R. (1979) Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. The American Journal of
Sociology, vol85 (3): 551-575.
Nias, Jennifer (1999) Teachers’ moral purpose: Stress, vulnerability, and strength. Pp.223-237. In R.
Vandenbergh and A.M. Huberman (Eds.) Understanding and Preventing Teacher Burnout: A
Sourcebook of international Research and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosiek, Jerry (2003) Emotional scaffolding: An exploration of the teacher knowledge at the intersection
of student emotion and the subject matter. Journal of Teacher Education Vol. 54 (5): 399-412.
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Structure & Process of Schooling