Keywords

Introduction

Glenda’s eyes shone and she gesticulated animatedly as she spoke of Australian schools’ untapped potential to push the boundaries. The former school principal and education policy expert spoke with great enthusiasm about the link between schools and their communities. Then she sighed and said:

I’ve worked in a lot of large, complex schools with lots of large complex families. The cost to my wellbeing never occurred to me before, but the cost of trying to overcome obstacles in various government agencies had a cost to my health. I just got exhausted by trying to push those boundaries. I’m taking long service leave because I had to make a decision to get better. (Government employee, interview)

This interview with Glenda (a pseudonym), a person recognised as a leader in Australian education policy, was the departure point for this chapter. Glenda had a reputation as an energetic, experienced advocate for schools that can double-up as community hubs. She had worked in a government department credited with establishing several innovative projects that saw schools team-up with partner organisations to deliver efficient education infrastructure that could be used by the both the schools and the wider community.

How could a person so respected and successful feel so exhausted by their job? What are the tensions and contradictions for leaders when it comes to developing schools that attempt to offer more to their communities than ‘traditional’ schools?

The research presented here draws on a project that investigated the enablers and barriers to developing schools as community hubs in the Australian context. Initiating, implementing or sustaining a school as community hub is driven by a desire or need to ‘do things differently’ for broader benefit. Participants in our research often mentioned that innovative projects require a ‘champion'; someone who will strongly and consistently advocate for developing a school that is different. One participant observed “someone’s gotta drive the project”.

However, championing a project can come at a cost for those who take on the role, contributing time, energy and commitment to foster a shared vision, change entrenched attitudes, and manage and resolve conflict, doing this all with a smile.

The wellbeing of the professionals behind hubs projects was not initially focus of the research, however emotions associated with the challenges of ‘driving’ hub projects emerged as a theme in interviews and workshops. Maxwell and Riley (2017) suggest that the fine balance between “caring and managing” (p. 485) and presenting a calm face to all stakeholders is central to the school leader’s role. Specialists in adaptive leadership argue that leaders should be able to withstand uncertainty, frustration and pain without getting ‘too anxious’ themselves (Heifetz & Laurie, 2001, p. 128). Yet, Glenda’s experience highlights how the additional demands of dealing with a complex collection of government and community stakeholders involved in hub projects can stretch the most resilient and passionate leader.

Over the coming decade, Australia is estimated to require hundreds of new schools to meet the demand posed by population growth (Goss, 2016). Many of these schools will be conceived as community hubs due to emerging policy developments that include a focus on social infrastructure provision (Cleveland & Woodman, 2009; Lewi & Nichols, 2010), Furthermore, the role of building partnerships with communities is a pillar of the Australian Professional Standard for Principals (AITSL, 2014). Therefore, it is important to understand the emotional demands placed on school leaders when developing successful and sustainable schools that operate as community hubs. Having a more nuanced understanding of the psychological resources required to facilitate and implement such projects may inform ways to mitigate the burnout of project and school leaders and to deliver more hubs for community benefit.

This chapter examines the experiences of school leaders, project and hub managers, architects, policy makers and others involved in offering ‘more than a school’. Emotional labour (Hochschild, 2003) is the masking and management of emotions in response to the emotional demands of work and provides a conceptual frame to their narratives. First, we review literature related to emotional labour, emotional labour in educational contexts and specifically in schools as community hubs. Next, we present findings from workshop, interview and survey data related to the role of developing and sustaining schools as community hubs, focusing on the emotional demands placed on those tasked with delivering these projects. To conclude, we discuss implications and future research trajectories.

Emotional Labour

Emotional labour is the management and performance of emotions in the workplace. Hochschild’s early work focused on front-line service staff such as flight attendants and estimated that around a third of American workers had jobs that subjected them to substantial demands for emotional labour. Hochschild defines emotional labour as distinct from physical and mental labour:

The flight attendant does physical labor when she pushes heavy meal carts through the aisles, and she does mental work when she prepares for and actually organizes emergency landings and evacuations. But in the course of doing this physical and mental labor, she is also doing something more, something I define as emotional labor. This labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others… This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality. (Hochschild, 2003, p. 6)

Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour has been influential in analysing emotions in the workplace and has been applied to contexts as diverse as athletics coaches (Lee & Chelladurai, 2018), nurses (Theodosius et al., 2020) and men working in female-dominated professions (Simpson, 2004).

Hochschild wrote that emotional labour is not necessarily a bad thing as “no customer wants to deal with a surly waitress [or] a crabby bank clerk” (2003, p. 9). However, Hochschild questions the process of managing emotions, and the benefits and costs of doing so. There is indeed evidence that emotional labour comes at a cost. For example, studies have found connections between the emotional demands placed on nurses, the related emotional labour and nurses’ intentions to leave the profession (Theodosius et al., 2020).

As observed in Glenda's story, these emotional dimensions can impact wellbeing, job satisfaction, and decisions about staying in or leaving a profession.

Emotional Labour in Educational Contexts

The concept of emotional labour has been influential in analysing the work performed in educational organisations. After all, teachers are engaged in physical and intellectual labour, but they are ultimately “hired and monitored for [their] capacity to manage and produce a feeling” (Beck, 2018, para. 6). Emotional labour has been applied as a theoretical framework to analyse a variety of educational contexts from early childhood education (Taggart, 2011) to university lecturers (Constanti & Gibbs, 2004). Research has shown that emotional labour is one within a complex web of factors related to teacher burnout (e.g., Bodenheimer & Shuster, 2020; Crawford et al., 2018; Kelly et al., 2019) and is intertwined with teachers’ emotional investment in their work (Isenbarger & Zembylas, 2006; Wilkinson et al., 2021).

Leading a school requires balancing ‘self-care’, ‘care for others’, ‘being good’ and ‘doing good’ (Blackmore, 2011, p. 223) with being concerned with the development of knowledge, thinking and skills of students and staff (Wilkinson et al., 2021). In the Australian context, the need to support the wellbeing of school leaders is increasingly recognised in research and practice. For example, school leaders display significantly higher scores on emotional demands at work and burnout, and significantly lower wellbeing scores than the general population (Maxwell & Riley, 2017). Indeed, a 2018 survey of Australian school principals found that emotional labour demands were 1.7 times higher than the general population (Riley, 2018). Australian policies such as the Principal Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2018–2021 developed by the Department of Education and Training (DET, 2018) make clear that the impacts of these emotional demands are real.

Emotional Labour in Schools as Community Hubs

If the day-to-day work of delivering education requires emotional labour, then it is logical that initiating or sustaining ‘more than a school’ demands additional emotional labour from a wider range of people.

Scholars have examined the emotional demands placed on school leaders when working in innovative ways (Osborne, 2020) or establishing stronger links between schools and their communities (Forde, 2017). A school may have a strong focus on ‘community making’ (Wilkinson et al., 2021, p. 165) that is driven by its values. Such work requires identifying shared visions and values across diverse stakeholders with differing priorities and demands emotional labour to establish and sustain inclusive school cultures (Forde, 2017). School leadership is an “essential element” (Hands, 2010, p. 198) in brokering these relationships, building trust, and putting in the extra “energy and commitment” (Martin et al., 1999, p. 65) to make such partnerships work.

School leaders are not alone in experiencing the emotional labour of creating schools as community hubs. For a school developing an integrated service with early childhood professionals, the importance of trust may be “emphasised repeatedly” (Wong et al., 2012, p. 86) as the overall vision is negotiated to ensure a smooth client experience. As schools as community hubs often focus their efforts in areas of social vulnerability, school staff may need to conceal their stress as they support students or communities through traumatic events (Lawson et al., 2019). Furthermore, school designers appreciate that designing new facilities or physical environments involves some degree of change (Osborne, 2018), and the act of change demands emotional labour (Bryant & Cox, 2006).

Despite the emotional labour involved in establishing and sustaining learning communities, research suggests that seeing rewards—such as learners’ growth and thriving communities—may mitigate against burnout (Crawford et al., 2018). However, research to date has focussed on teachers and principals rather than the range of other professionals involved in delivering schools as community hubs. Establishing strong connections “between schools and the surrounding community requires a great deal of effort on the part of the individuals involved” (Hands, 2010, p. 190).

Methods and Findings

In May 2020, the research team facilitated an online workshop. The virtual format enabled the participation of 33 Australian professionals who have worked on school as community hub projects. Participants included government bureaucrats, school leaders, hub coordinators, planners, architects, health and human services providers, community groups, and a range of NGOs.

This interactive workshop involved whole group mode and small group discussions in six virtual breakout rooms. Discussions were spread across two sessions. The first session saw participants discuss the contribution their organisation could make to a new school community hub project on a greenfield site on the urban fringe. Participants discussed how their organisation would contribute to the project’s phases, and what would constitute success in such a project. The second session required participants to discuss the barriers that their organisation would typically face in the redevelopment of a school site for shared use. Participants were asked to consider what information would assist their organisation, and what lessons they had learned from their professional experience that might ease the path of others attempting similarly complex projects. The workshop discussions were recorded and transcribed, resulting in over 45,000 words of transcripts.

Surveys were sent to participants before and after the workshop, with the pre workshop survey including a plain language statement about the research together with a consent form, consistent with the University of Melbourne’s Human Research Ethics protocols. Insights from those surveys were integrated into the following analysis, as were the notes from each of the five facilitators.

Additionally, seven in-depth interviews were conducted with professionals who have worked establishing community hub projects with schools. These professionals included architects working in private practices who have lead school projects, an employee from an educational NGO, a representative from local government and one from state government. Interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed and analysed.

The workshop conversations, facilitators’ notes, pre-and-post workshop survey and interviews are a rich bank of narrative data. The data was examined closely to identify common themes, assisted by NVivo software. Over 40 themes were identified, and this chapter explores the sub-section of these themes relating to emotions and labour. Quotes have been edited lightly to enhance their readability, yet care has been taken to preserve the intended meanings of the statements.

Champions, Vision and ‘Shared Vision’

When reflecting on what made some community hub projects more successful than others, workshop participants felt that successful projects were underpinned by a ‘vision’ of the intended benefits. This was sometimes articulated as a ‘shared vision’, ‘clarity of purpose’ or ‘shared dreams, passions and ideas’. These common ideals were considered especially important when complications arose throughout the project phases. One participant reflected that within the process they were:

Trying to shift decision making away from an ego-centric model to one that’s really about children, families and the greater community. Trying to dissolve the barriers that people perceive between government departments. Using the power of narrative to establish a sense of working towards the same outcome. (Workshop participant, government health department)

When challenges arose within the projects, this vision was key to overcoming them. One participant said of the process “[it was] torturous at times because it has gone on and on … but it is working because of goodwill and passion for the outcomes”. Another commented that: “operational issues – from the milk usage to the cleaning – can be managed once a shared vision for the site is agreed. Everything is ‘figure-out-able’”.

Vision was sometimes seen to be championed by an individual person within a broader project, marrying vision with strong leadership. This person was sometimes a school principal, but could be from an education authority, local council, architecture firm or NGO such as Our Place. One participant said that the effort was collective yet “you’re still going to have somebody as the backbone”. Similar quotes include “you will need someone to drive the project in each school” and “hubs need to be driven by someone”.

Other participants, however, felt that it was important that responsibility for the overall vision did or should not fall to an individual person. This tension is captured in this interview with an architect:

Interviewer: What went well in that project?

Architect: Having someone leading the change, someone coordinating the project. That was the only way it worked.

Interviewer: Who was that person?

Architect: That was Glenda. And Susan. You needed someone who had a particular vision, a group that had a particular vision, and was prepared to execute it. (Architect, interview)

The architect initially credits Glenda as ‘leading the charge’ to create a successful school as community hub project. However, the architect pauses and mentions Glenda’s colleague Susan and the group that they work in. Plans needed to be in place to safeguard the vision if key people left the school or the project. Maintaining or securing the vision required.

Ongoing commitment beyond the current people involved. It needs a long-term commitment from the school and/or its governing body. A project can't rest on the goodwill and foresight of others who will inevitably move on. There needs to be more than a “champion” model. (Assets & Infrastructure Manager, post-workshop survey)

Another respondent to the survey reflected:

Continuity of vision from all parties allows for continued operation of management and operation. This is vital when leadership changes, that the impetus is not lost of the overall vision. Ongoing support for the school in terms of funding and operating community hubs is vital, so that the ongoing operation is not seen as a burden over time. (Architect, Pre-workshop survey)

This tension between having a single person ‘championing’ a vision versus the notion of having a ‘shared vision’ is not unique to schools and is indeed explored widely in the business world. A ‘champion’ might otherwise be referred to as a ‘change leader’ someone who steers an organisation through periods of ‘business beyond usual’ (Osborne, 2020, p. 4). While some business scholars claim that embedding a shared vision is key to any successful organisational culture (Kouzes & Posner, 2009) others suggest that there are many kinds of ‘shared vision.’ For example, top-down attempts from charismatic leaders to embed their own values across an organisation are distinct from more democratic approaches that promote the active involvement of team members in the “development, communication, dissemination, and implementation of organisational goals” (Wang & Rafiq, 2009, pp. 12–13).

In the context of establishing and sustaining schools as community hubs, there is undoubtedly emotional labour involved in the development of a ‘shared vision’. As mentioned above, the time commitment required beyond that of an already demanding schedule puts pressure on professionals including school principals to support the expansion of a traditional school into the novel and expanded community hub desired. The challenge of an individual holding sole responsibility for the vision when combined with a leadership role will be discussed further below.

Changing Entrenched Attitudes

The traditional notion that a school’s role is limited to the provision of education was cited as a barrier by participants wishing to work in more innovative and/or holistic ways. Many participants emphasised the importance of challenging entrenched attitudes about how schools are usually designed, planned and managed. Phrases like ‘change the narrative’, ‘overcome the old mindset’ and resist ‘business as usual’ were used. This participant explains how they see this process:

People tend to get siloed into their own areas and find it hard to move into a more shared arrangement. It's all around stakeholder management - being able to bring the community along with the vision from day one, before we get too far to having a strong vision. There have to be reasons for people to want to change. Once people can see the reasoning, then they're more likely to join in. But we with found with these sorts of projects, you always end up having some detractors. It’s a matter of working with the people who are onboard and bringing the detractors along. Like any cultural change, I guess. (Architect, workshop)

When discussing the importance of changing entrenched attitudes, it was notable that participants used emotive language such as challenging, brave, try, ‘find it hard’, detractors, resistant, feels, motivate, ownership and willingness. These phrases render visible the labour that goes into building consensus and deftly managing emotions; both ones’ own and those of others.

When Glenda says that she ‘got exhausted trying to push those boundaries’ she is describing how tiring it was to continually come up against entrenched attitudes about schools’ role in Australian society. In other words, the emotional labour required to change people’s minds took a toll on Glenda’s wellbeing.

Conflict

Participants described instances of conflict, particularly in the early stages of establishing a school-community hub project. Interestingly, this conflict was regarded as an inevitable challenge when asking different organisations to collaborate on a novel initiative. One participant who was leading such a process had encouraged the project’s stakeholders to “discuss and debate and challenge each other”. Another participant said that “lack of agreed overarching community hub principles” was a challenge, and one that required intense discussion among participants, who required support to experience conflict and find a solution. One architect recalled working on a particular project where:

The Education Department were coming along [to project meetings] and doing a lot of hand wringing and ‘harrumphing’ about what we were doing. (Architect, interview)

Navigating conflict is a form of emotional labour, particularly if the individual needs to project one emotion (such as optimism or calm) while feeling differently. In this example, the participant describes ‘holding’ uncomfortable emotions while stakeholders negotiate:

My key comment is [about ensuring] the capacity of leaders within organizations to hold that chaos and discomfort for long enough for the solutions to emerge because they always do. If you hold that space long enough, the group will find a solution. … [A few colleagues and I] had full support from our chief executive to be a part of that chaotic discomfort (sic) conflict without feeling like there was an expectation that it had to be smooth the whole time. … I think really having the support of the leaders to say, yeah, we expect this to be rocky and we expect there to be conflict and escalate as you need. But also just be okay sitting in it. And … having an executive order or a Director General who says …I expected to have to meet with the ministers to get together to resolve something about this. And that is normal and accepted, [and] is not a sign of failure of the system. … Having that leadership with that sense of patience and an expectation that conflict is a part of the process. (Workshop participant, government children’s health department)

These quotes have demonstrated that professionals involved in delivering schools as community hubs experienced conflict, while working to establish shared visions and negotiating between stakeholders. While conflict may be a necessary and inevitable part of planning a school, navigating it requires emotional labour plus time, energy and commitment – which will be explored in the next section.

Time, Energy and Commitment

While a traditional school delivered by a government department can be planned, built and opened relatively quickly, additional time and energy were required when working in non-traditional school projects that saw collaboration between organisations that don’t usually work together. Earlier in this chapter, a participant described the negotiation between stakeholders as “torturous” because it went “on and on”. Glenda described a school project where the planning discussions “went on and on and on and on and on, and round and round in circles” for a decade, before being finally opened. Another agreed, commenting that “it took a lot of time and energy for the three parties to get an understanding of what a hub might be.”

With longer time frames, commitment was therefore seen as essential in the establishment of schools as community hubs. At times, commitment could refer to the commitment of funding or other resources but at other times it specifically meant emotional commitment – tenacity or determination. Glenda said described taking a group of stakeholders to an exemplar school:

We had them all sit and discuss and debate and challenge each other. In that group, it does take a commitment from those people! You need to sell (the idea) early to show that there's going to be great benefit to us all if we all persevere and respect each other. We're not going to find solutions that suit all of us. But overall, we'll find solutions. (Glenda, workshop)

Commitment was mentioned again later by Glenda, who described two close colleagues in her government department as being ‘two of the strongest’ and yet:

None of them have the same knowledge and understanding and commitment that I do. I go, 'We can find a solution for that!' and they say [hesitantly] 'Oh, I don’t know…'. (Glenda, Interview)

It is perhaps understandable that Glenda, as an informal ‘change leader’ (Osborne, 2020) would need to demonstrate commitment, but it is notable that a broad range of professionals involved in such projects also had to show additional commitment to working on an innovative school project.

These insights corroborate Canadian findings that fostering stronger connections between schools and communities requires extensive commitment and effort of all those involved (Hands, 2010). Research has shown that partnerships are typically developed during teachers’ personal time during lunches, preparatory periods, and after school hours, since there is often no time allocated for partnership development during the workday (Hands, 2010). While the participants in this chapter are not just school staff – but include government representatives, school leaders, hub coordinators, planners, architects, health and human services providers, community groups, and a range of NGOs – it is interesting to see this alignment of Hands’ research with an Australian context.

The Role of the Principal

The attitude of the school principal was identified as an important factor in a hub’s success, despite the best efforts from a wide range of other professionals involved in establishing such projects. Principals were sometimes already appointed and able to provide input on the designs of new projects, whereas in other instances may join the school after partnerships have been established and capital works have finished. One architect felt that having a principal involved in the design process could create difficulties:

One thing we did find frustrating was that some school principals have a certain view about the way schools are done and they have probably far too much say about how individual schools are designed and run. (Architect, interview)

The ideal principal was described as someone who would ‘buy-in’ to the concept of the community hub, and who would act as a ‘project champion’ advocating for an innovative way of working:

The appointment of a principal who connects and supports the vision is critical. The best plans, design, construction, programming can come undone if the school culture doesn’t support the Community Hub. (Anonymous, post-workshop survey)

A change in school leadership could mean a disruption in the management or governance of a successful community hub. Citing a particular example from their experience, one participant reported that:

Access to [shared facilities in which our council has invested] declines over time unless the principal wants to actually continue it. The next principal comes in who has not been in a school with shared facilities: ‘Who are these people wanting to use my oval on Tuesday nights?’ (Former principal, now director in state education department, workshop)

The workshop included an ex-principal, who articulated how running a school as community hub can place additional demands on a principal:

As an ex-principal, it’s a difficult job. It’s a really, really big job running a school of two thousand kids. But there’s a fine line about when you start getting to other issues around what my role is. I went to university to become a teacher. I’m a principal. I engage with my community. But am I also responsible for drug rehabilitation programs on my school? Am I responsible for domestic violence counselling? When does that stop... what does that actually mean from an industrial point of view about what my role is?” (Former principal, now director in state education department, workshop)

This principal is making explicit the emotional labour involved in running a school where the remit has expanded from school’s traditional role of providing education to a more expansive, holistic remit of supporting children and families’ wellbeing. There is an unresolved tension about whether principals are best suited of the role of ‘change leader’ when it comes to establishing schools as community hubs, or whether this runs the risk of having them leave the project and take their passion elsewhere.

Discussion

This chapter opened with a quote from Glenda, a former school principal and education policy expert taking leave from her role in government due to her concerns about work-related burnout. While Glenda is recognised as having outstanding leadership skills, this has come at a personal cost. This chapter has illustrated the emotional demands of navigating the complex partnership brokering and relationship building involved in making schools as community hubs happen. As Glenda herself says, “it is tiring trying to wave the flag and be optimistic”.

In the context of our project, with its focus on infrastructure, these findings are a reminder that excellent facilities alone do not make an excellent school as community hub. Rather, successful school-community hub projects are underpinned by emotional labour—the ability of project leaders and stakeholders to emotionally navigate the inherent complexities of working with diverse views, novel partnerships and varying ideas of what constitutes success.

While the emotional labour of school leaders has been documented in existent scholarship, our research indicates that there is significant emotional labour performed by a broader range of professionals including architects, planners and policymakers such as Glenda.

The emergent themes have highlighted four key areas for future research and policy attention.

First, mediating or advocacy organisations can support positive outcomes and help to alleviate conflict in projects where schools are seeking to partner with organisations. In the Australian context, non-government organisations including Community Hubs Australia and Our Place advocate for community-focussed schools as do government divisions such as the former ‘Community Hubs & Partnerships’ team in the Queensland state government. Apart from evaluation data on specific projects, there is little research in the Australian context on how intermediary organisations ameliorate the potential of school as community hub projects.

Second, dedicated personnel resources such as ‘hub coordinators’ make a real difference. Our research has demonstrated how these dedicated resources can help alleviate the burden on principals and teachers. However, little is known about the experiences of the people in these roles. What makes a good hub coordinator? How many schools have them? What do hub coordinators themselves think about the factors that shape successful school as community hub projects? Further research with hub coordinators could be instructive, particularly in augmenting teacher training as explained above.

Third, teacher training creates excellent teachers yet does not necessarily prepare them to be hub coordinators who work in community-facing ways when the community extends beyond the confines of the school community of students, parents and teachers. Indeed, one principal highlighted this issue by stating “I went to university to become a teacher”, feeling ill-equipped to offer additional care to students and their families. Australia’s higher education sector, responsible for delivering teacher training, needs to equip teachers and school leaders to work effectively in these emerging school models that have a greater emphasis on collaboration and student wellbeing. There is an opportunity to explore the interface between teaching roles and hub roles, possibly by considering pathways for further skill development of teachers and allied professionals.

Fourth, the gendered aspects of education infrastructure projects merit further exploration. Gender was not a focus of this project nor of this paper. However, it is worth noting that teaching is a vastly female-dominated profession with approximately 70% of primary and secondary teaching staff being female (ABS, 2019). By contrast, other industries involved in funding, planning, designing, building and managing schools as community hubs are not. For example, the Australian architecture profession is male dominated (Matthewson, 2017). What are the experiences of emotional labour during school-community hub projects for people of different professions and genders?

Conclusion

Successful schools that operate as community hubs rely on the establishment and communication of shared visions, the creation of trusting partnerships and the deft management of conflict, resistance and entrenched attitudes. These projects can create the conditions for thriving communities and contribute to a sense of job satisfaction and meaning for the professionals involved in delivering them. Yet, Glenda’s story shows that being a project champion or informal change leader can come at a cost, particularly when the role involves challenging entrenched attitudes and motivating others. While it was very common for participants in our research to express the idea that ‘all projects need a champion’ there was little regard for how draining this role can be. Furthermore, emotional labour was performed by a wide variety of professionals involved in the project design and delivery. There was also an unresolved tension between participants’ expectations that projects have a single ‘champion’ versus having a ‘shared vision’ held by the whole project team.

As more Australian schools strive to operate as community hubs, both the hard resourcing of these projects (funding, staffing, infrastructure) and human resourcing (fostering the wellbeing of all those involved) is imperative to ensure more learners and communities can enjoy the benefits.