Learning the ‘Emotional Rules’ of Teaching: Constructing the Emotionally Authentic Professional Self

Abstract

The authors of this chapter have significant professional experience within the field of pre-service teacher emotional experiences. Both authors have worked as teacher educators for a substantial part of their careers, which has afforded several insights into the emotional life worlds of pre-service teachers. Acting as facilitators for professional experience units has provided a space for witnessing the ways pre-service teachers come to explore a constellation of feelings associated with learning to teach. The central argument of this chapter has emerged from the reflexive practice of the authors, predicated upon a profound dissatisfaction with the context of reform impacting on teacher education courses and schools generally in Australia. Numerous critics have argued that in Australia, as in the United Kingdom and the United States, teacher education courses have been subsumed by a ‘technocratic instrumentalism’. This new paradigm has reshaped what is of value in education, namely, rational performance-based targets achieved via the standardisation of curriculum, teaching methodologies and large-scale testing regimes. In line with these priorities, teacher education has been reshaped in profound ways. Increasingly, technical skills take precedence over context sensitivity or insights gained through the constructed nature of language, culture, identity and the historical assemblage of the teaching profession itself.