Smith ScholarWorks Theses, Dissertations, and Projects 2008 Emotions in the classroom Elizabeth D. Burris Smith College Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/theses Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Burris, Elizabeth D., "Emotions in the classroom" (2008). Masters Thesis, Smith College, Northampton, MA. https://scholarworks.smith.edu/theses/1310 This Masters Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in Theses, Dissertations, and Projects by an authorized administrator of Smith ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Elizabeth Diane Burris Emotions in the Classroom ABSTRACT This study explores the classroom emotional experience of five teachers. It is based on the assumptions that teaching is an emotional enterprise; that teaching necessarily involves “emotional labor,” or the work of emotion management; that attending to and working through emotions (a form of emotion management) can influence how teachers teach; and that doing this emotional labor in a group setting can be useful to teachers. An additional assumption is that psychoanalytic concepts can help frame teachers’ emotional experiences. The study looks specifically at how teachers’ awareness and understanding of emotions affect their experience of teaching and what it is like for teachers to develop this awareness and understanding in a group setting. The study’s participants were five self-selected teachers ranging in professional experience from pre-service to 20 years, from the elementary through high school levels, who voluntarily joined a teacher support group. The support group’s express purpose was to explore the emotions involved in teaching. The support group met for 1.25 hours weekly for three months. Each participant answered a pre-group questionnaire and a post- group evaluation and underwent four semi-structured interviews: three to collect stories of critical emotional incidents in their teaching and one to ask the research questions after the teacher support group had ended. In addition, the teachers kept an Emotion Diary in which they listed emotions they felt during the week, ranked the intensity of each emotion, and told the story of one or more of the emotional incidents. The findings demonstrated what emotions the five teachers expressed and how their stories changed (or not) over time, corroborating the teachers’ claims about their experience of teaching and of being in the teacher support group. The findings also indicated that, beyond feeling emotions, the teachers enacted their emotions in ways that suggested countertransference (and transference) played central roles in their teaching experience. The study looks specifically at how the two psychoanalytic concepts of the Third and the use of self help to explain some classroom phenomena. EMOTIONS IN THE CLASSROOM A project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work. Elizabeth Diane Burris Smith College School for Social Work Northampton, Massachusetts 01063 2008 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have been accomplished without the assistance of many people whose contributions are gratefully acknowledged. I wish to thank my advisor, Jill Clemence, for her keen attention to rigor and confidentiality. I thank Stewart Burns and Margi Wood for their practical support during the data collection phase. I thank Gail Newman for her help with some key references. I thank Dr. Richard Ford for his bolstering support and wisdom. And I thank the staff at the Neilson Library, particularly Pam Skinner, for their invaluable aid in sending books and articles to me quickly and kindly. I am grateful to and immensely admiring of the five teachers who participated in the teacher support group and the study. They taught me so much and made that learning process enjoyable through their rich personalities, good humor, courage, and warmth. This thesis is dedicated to them and to their professional colleagues who do not get the emotional support they need as they undertake one of the most difficult jobs a person can do. Finally, and mostly, I thank my family -- Brad, Mae, and Wilder -- who lived through my physical and mental absences while I worked on the MSW degree and this thesis. We all figured out how to be together lovingly in the midst of great stress. I feel so lucky to be connected to such strong, resilient, wonderful people. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... ii TABLE OF CONTENTS............................................................................................. iii LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 1 II LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................................... 6 III METHODOLOGY .............................................................................................. 37 IV FINDINGS........................................................................................................... 53 V DISCUSSION...................................................................................................... 166 REFERENCES............................................................................................................. 178 APPENDICES Appendix A: Screening Form...................................................................................... 185 Appendix B: Human Subjects Informed Consent Form ............................................. 187 Appendix C: Approval Letter from the Human Subjects Review Committee............ 190 Appendix D: Original Emotion Diary Template.......................................................... 191 Appendix E: Emotion Diary Template (Revised)........................................................ 192 Appendix F: Relationship Anecdotes Paradigm Interview Protocol for Teachers ...... 193 Appendix G: Pre-Group Questionnaire........................................................................ 194 Appendix H: Post-Group Evaluation ........................................................................... 195 Appendix I: Final Interview Questions........................................................................ 196 iii LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Emotions and Their Rankings in Bernadette’s Emotion Diary ........................... 56 2. Bernadette's Second Interview............................................................................. 66 3. Emotions and Their Rankings in Natasha’s Emotion Diary................................ 80 4. Natasha's Story-Reflection Pattern in Her Interviews ......................................... 81 5. Emotions and Their Rankings in Taylor’s Emotion Diary.................................. 111 6. Emotions and Their Rankings in Marla’s Emotion Diary ................................... 127 7. Sub-stories within One of Marla's Stories ........................................................... 131 8. Emotions and Their Rankings in Anne’s Emotion Diary.................................... 149 iv v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Although teachers and teaching have been studied for decades, teacher emotion has been notably neglected (Hargreaves, 1998, 2001; Meyer & Turner, 2002; Nias, 1996; Noddings, 1996; Sutton, 2004, 2005; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). Strands of educational research have certainly attended to aspects of teaching that involve emotions – aspects such as care (Noddings, 1984, 1992), personal practical knowledge (Clandinin, 1989; Elbaz, 1983), passion (Fried, 1995), autobiographical storytelling (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Noddings, 1996), flow (Coleman, 1994), and embodied cognition (Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Oliver, 1989, 1990) – but teacher emotions and the impact they have on teacher action have received little direct attention in the field of education. Researchers in other fields were well ahead of educators in this respect. Having acknowledged in the 1970s the existence of the “parallel process” in the field supervisor- student practitioner relationship – that is, the tendency of student practitioners to enact their relationships with clients in the relationships with their field supervisors (Fox, 1998) – social work researchers have begun exploring the role supervisors play in such emotion-infused enactments (Bogo, 1993; Dore, 1993; Fox, 1998; Ganzer & Ornstein, 1999). In the medical field, researchers have recognized the existence of countertransference feelings in nursing instructors (Paterson & Groening, 1996) as well as in physicians themselves as they interact with their patients (Balint, 1957). 1 Starting in the mid-1990s, with the publication of a special edition of the Cambridge Journal of Education (Sutton & Wheatley, 2003) that was devoted to the notion that “affectivity is of fundamental importance in teaching and to teachers” (Nias, 1996, p. 293), educators and educational researchers began to take note of teacher emotion. From calls for attention to emotions in mentoring (Holliday, 2005) and student teaching (Bullough & Young, 2002; Hawkey, 2006; Noddings, 1996; Sutton, 2004, 2005) to the acknowledgment of the influence emotions have on motivation (Meyer & Turner, 2002, 2006) to the claim that relationship is at the center of teaching and learning (Bingham & Sidorkin, 2004; Burris, 2005b, 2005c;