Abstract
There is more to teaching than thorough subject knowledge and technical teaching skills. When teachers are asked about what they find motivating or satisfying in their jobs, they often spontaneously refer to feelings of joy, fascination, pride, wonder and enthusiasm, resulting from the fact that they work with “human material”, as they often call it. Teachers’ talk about their work immediately reveals that emotions are at the heart of teaching.
The first part of this chapter was originally published as “Teacher Vulnerability: Understanding its Moral and Political Roots”, in the Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 26, No. 3 (1996): 307–324.
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Notes
- 1.
The data were collected in 1990 and 1991 in four Flemish primary schools from ten teachers, with 15–25 years of teaching experience. From every school at least two teachers were included in the research group in order to get triangulated information about the school context. The procedure for data collection included a cumulative cycle of semi-structured biographical interviews, enriched with data from school and classroom observations and interviews with key informants (inspector, principal). Qualitative within-case and between-case analyses were used to interpret the data. For a detailed description of the research methodology see Kelchtermans (1994). The conceptual framework and major outcomes are presented extensively in Kelchtermans (1993).
- 2.
The concept of “self-understanding” refers to teachers’ sense of identity. I have, however, purposefully avoided the notion of “identity” because of its association with a static essence, implicitly ignoring or denying its dynamic and biographical nature (development over time). Instead, I have used the word “self-understanding”. The term refers to both the understanding one has of one’s “self” at a certain moment in time (product), as well as to the fact that this product results from an ongoing process of making sense of one’s experiences and their impact on the “self”.
- 3.
In the German psychological “Kritische Ereignisforschung” (research on critical incidents) this “emotional non-indifference” (“emotionale Nicht-Gleichgültigkeit”) is considered as a constitutive and distinctive characteristic that makes these events appear as pregnant and striking in the ongoing stream of daily experiences (Filipp 1990, p. 24).
- 4.
- 5.
Our findings confirm those of Hargreaves in his study of teachers’ feeling of guilt. Hargreaves identified “guilt traps” in teaching as a job that are “socially located at the intersection of four specific paths of determination and job motivation in teachers’ work: the commitment to goals of care and nurturance, the open-ended nature of the job, the pressures of accountability and intensification, and the persona of perfectionism” (Hargreaves 1994, 145 ff.).
- 6.
Regional Testing refers to a testing in which all the sixth-grade pupils of the different elementary schools in a certain region are invited to participate, yet without obligation and without consequences for either school or pupil. This cross-school test constitutes a basis for comparison of pupil results among the different schools. For sixth-grade teachers in Flanders, these tests are an important concern because they often feel evaluated themselves in their pupils’ results. School teams and principals often put some pressure on the sixth-grade teachers to prepare the pupils as well as possible in order to get a good result for the school (public relations).
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Kelchtermans, G. (2011). Vulnerability in Teaching: The Moral and Political Roots of a Structural Condition. In: Day, C., Lee, JK. (eds) New Understandings of Teacher's Work. Professional Learning and Development in Schools and Higher Education, vol 100. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0545-6_5
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