Though a clear need exists for policymakers, school leaders and communities to better understand how to support the profession, accessible and actionable research in this area has proved thin on the ground. Well, until now.
A new book based around research involving interviews with 42 Australian teachers, has lifted the lid on a societal and systemic failure to address the emotional realities of the profession.
Titled Teachers’ Emotional Experiences: Towards a New Emotional Discourse, the academic text reveals how social and political pressures, intensifying workloads and low professional status are all heavily impacting teacher wellbeing and reshaping the profession.
Dr Saul Karnovsky, from Curtin University’s School of Education, is co-editor of the book and says while teachers pour their emotions into their work every day, from the classroom to parent meetings, until now we’ve lacked the language to discuss these experiences meaningfully.
“The book elevates teacher voices to explore the realities of their working lives and spark new conversations about how we can care for and support educators in ways that go beyond simple fixes,” Karnovsky shares.
“Teachers are not just feeling burnt out, they’re navigating an emotionally complex profession that reflects broader societal issues.”
Five years in the making, Karnovsky is hopeful that the text will find its way to teachers through schools – and ideally to policymakers and into departments of education – to shine a light on teachers' emotional experiences and all the nuance, complexity and challenges that teachers face when they confront difficult emotions.
Based very specifically on the teacher interviews, each of the chapters confronts a particular emotion and drills down into it.
An academic contributor, who has a particular specialty and expertise in that area, then generates insights, shared understanding and a discussion, and “really raises a conversation about these more tricky and challenging feelings that teachers have to confront, sometimes daily”, Karnovsky says.
The chapters discuss the complex contexts of teachers’ professional lives, including neoliberal school systems, fraught relationships with leaders, contractualisation, toxic positivity, intractable behaviour problems and datafication.
“What we try to do is tell stories about teachers that are really meaningful and hopefully that can grab people when they confront it, because it’s a real person, it’s not just a number or some data point or statistic, this is somebody real, a teacher who has experienced this in quite a profound way and then how do we unpack that.”
Dr Saul Karnovsky says he hopes the book will spark new conversations about how educators can be cared for and supported in ways that go beyond simple fixes.
Karnovsky says while there has been a great deal of research about teachers’ emotions and numerous large-scale surveys delving into teachers’ happiness and sense of satisfaction, far less has been done at the grassroots level.
“There’s not enough research about schools that might be doing this kind of unpacking and decompressing and debriefing with teachers,” he explains.
“So, for example, a chapter in the book focuses on a teacher who has to deal with the sexting issue of a young secondary student and before the age of consent, obviously.
“This is quite a moral issue for the teacher to confront – ‘how do I deal with this? What do I do with these feelings? It’s quite ugly and uncomfortable that I’m having to manage this myself?’ and ‘gosh, have I just seen child pornography without actually consenting to it?’ because it was a sexually explicit image that was shown to this teacher without their consent…
“These are the kinds of grey areas that just are under-explored and under-researched and under-talked-about in the profession and in the community.”
Based on his research, Karnovsky says the main emotional challenges faced by teachers can be divided into two groups.
The first is around teachers being what’s now termed (from COVID) ‘frontline workers’, where teachers must bear witness to the ‘worst of the worst’ of what’s happening in families and school communities.
“So it’s the vicarious trauma that they experience through that, the having to deal with and grapple with very tricky, complex issues and problems and confronting realities of things occurring in our community and the emotions that arise from that, where teachers feel ... helpless to support the student.
“It’s, like, ‘what do I do?’, ‘How can I get the student the support that they need?’ and ‘what happens when they go back home and then I feel guilty that maybe I’m not doing enough as a result?’ or ‘I have to look after myself and I have to keep this at arm’s length’.
“And there’s guilt that arises from that as well.”
The other group of emotions are those that arise out of the structural work conditions that shape teaching; that with teachers’ mounting responsibilities, oftentimes they don’t have the time or the training to manage those and are increasingly treated not as professionals, nor as intelligent caring practitioners, Karnovsky contends.
“They’re restricted in their work, they often feel alienated from leadership, who tend to drive everything that’s happening in the school, and teachers just have to do what they’re told and same with policymakers as well.”
The academic says one of the real standout emotions explored in the book, one that comes up again and again, is teachers talking about being ‘demoralised’.
“Teachers are feeling demoralised by the things that they have very little influence or control over that they know doesn’t serve them or their students very well – processes and standardised assessments and curriculum that is completely divorced from those young people’s lives and context.”
Increasingly, he says, teachers are being encouraged to use standardised explicit teaching methods.
“So not only will you teach what we tell you to teach, but also in the way that we tell you to teach, which is incredibly problematic because it’s a double barrel of standardised practice, in that teachers’ agency and autonomy and creativity is diminished.
“Teachers feel that ‘there’s just too much to do in a day I can’t do it all, I’m working long hours and then still don’t feel like I’m ever caught up’ and feelings of emotional exhaustion and burnout are arising from there.”
To learn more about Teachers' Emotional Experiences Towards a New Emotional Discourse, or to purchase the book, click here.
