Conclusions and Recommendations

Abstract

In Part I, I explained how classroom environments fundamentally changed over time, when teachers were no longer required to suppress the embodied affectivity of learning , by controlling and restricting students ’ emotions . In a new era of lifelong learning , teachers are now required, through their performativity , to encourage students to engage with their emotions so that, in turn, responses to these needs can be addressed. But the difficulty with these responses is that they are framed within a marketised, commercial model, in which only measurable outcomes are viewed as valid and worthy of analysis . This is because emotions are, by their very nature, subtle, ambiguous and unquantifiable. Inevitably, this approach brings tensions , as I have shown in the past two chapters, in the ways that both teachers and their managers often feel pressurised and undervalued when their capital and professional habitus are viewed as irrelevant. In this book, I have shown how, for complex reasons—in an interplay of micro- and macro-elements of the fields —the presence of an observer fundamentally alters the dynamic of a classroom . This is because the observer embodies a witness to an unarticulated personal act which paradoxically is not measurable, nor perceived as of great value . So, it is not necessarily the performativity that creates stress and anxiety in an observation; it is the perception of this performativity and how it relates to an individual’s wider understanding of their emotional labour in the classroom .