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Cambridge Journal of Education

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Thinking about Feeling: the emotions

in teaching
Jennifer Nias

Professor of Education, Faculty of Arts and Education ,

University of Plymouth
Published online: 06 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Jennifer Nias (1996) Thinking about Feeling: the emotions in teaching,
Cambridge Journal of Education, 26:3, 293-306, DOI: 10.1080/0305764960260301
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Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1996

293

Thinking about Feeling: the

emotions in teaching
JENNIFER NIAS
Guest Editor

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Professor of Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, University of Plymouth

INTRODUCTION
'I love teaching. I hate schools.' A primary teacher said this to me over 20 years
ago, explaining why she intended after child-rearing to return to teaching but
not in a conventional setting. This Edition addresses both the intensity of the
emotions revealed by her remark and the distinction that she makes between her
job and its context. It takes the view that as an occupation teaching is highly
charged with feeling, aroused by and directed towards not just people but also
values and ideals. It points to the increasingly political nature of teachers'
emotional responses to their workplace conditions. It suggests that behind
practitioners' affective reactions to both their work and the settings in which it
takes place lies their close personal identification with their profession. Yet it
also argues that identification is not enough; teachers grow and develop only
when they also 'face themselves' (to use the title of one of the three classic books
reviewed by Mary Jane Drummond).
In choosing the focus for this Edition, I have sought to draw attention to
several decades of neglect of a topic which is of daily concern to practitioners.
Despite the passion with which teachers have always talked about their jobs,
there is relatively little recent research into the part played by or the significance
of affectivity in teachers' lives, careers and classroom behaviour. Since the 1960s
teachers' feelings have received scant attention in professional writing. At
present, they are seldom systemically considered in pre- or in-service education.
By implication and omission teachers' emotions are not a topic deemed worthy
of serious academic or professional consideration.
This volume moves in a different direction. Drawing on international work
which addresses the concerns of teachers of students from pre-school to
graduate levels, it suggests that affectivity is of fundamental importance in
teaching and to teachers. There are three main reasons for making this claim.
First, teachers feel, often passionatelyabout their pupils, about their professional skill, about their colleagues and the structures of schooling, about their
dealings with other significant adults such as parents and inspectors, about the
actual or likely effect of educational policies upon their pupils and themselves.
This is not a romantic fiction dreamt up by 'progressive' writers and teachers.
0305-764X/96/030293-14 1996 University of Cambridge Institute of Education

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294 J. Nias
It is a living reality for teachers of all age groups, radically affecting their
professional efficacy and the development and exercise of the 'competences' by
which this is increasingly judged. Second, if one takes the view shared by all the
authors represented in this volume, that the emotions are rooted in cognition,
then one cannot separate feeling from perception, affectivity from judgement. It
follows that one cannot help teachers develop their classroom and management
skills without also addressing their emotional reactions and responses and the
attitudes, values and beliefs which underlie these. Abercrombie (1967; Nias,
1993) made this clear for the medical and architectural professions. Similar
practical and theoretical work is urgently needed in education, if we are to avoid
a false and arid division of action from cognition and emotion.
Third, neither cognition nor feeling can be separated from the social and
cultural forces which help to form them and which are in turn shaped by them.
The emotional reactions of individual teachers to their work are intimately
connected to the view that they have of themselves and others. These perspectives are shaped by early influences, as well as by subsequent professional
education and experience. All of these influences themselves have historical,
social and cultural roots and contexts which transmit belief systems and
perpetuate social and organisational structures. So, the unique sense of self
which every teacher has is socially grounded. In addition, sub-groups of teachers
in different countries and contexts have a sense of collective professional
identity. In short, individuals' feelings are mediated by such obvious and
immediate factors as personality, age, gender, domestic circumstances and state
of health, but the cognition on which they draw is socially and culturally based.
Further, this influence is reciprocal, i.e. the actions which teachers take in
response to what they feel affect the micro-political, social and political contexts
in which they work. Teachers' emotions, though individually experienced, are a
matter of collective concern: they are occasioned by circumstances which can be
identified, understood and so have the potential to be changed, and their
consequences affect everyone involved in the educational process.
In using this Edition to emphasise the importance of teachers' feelings, I
have deliberately sought for heterogeneity. I wanted to avoid a monocultural
bias, especially in view of the overtly emotional reaction of many UK teachers
to recent changes in the educational system in England and Wales. I also wanted
articles which focused on teachers of diverse age groups, and which were written
from varying perspectives. I reasoned that any patterns which emerged would be
more convincing if they occurred in several different countries or educational
contexts. In the event, the evidence in this volume comes from primary
(elementary) schools in England and Belgium, secondary (high) schools in the
USA, Australia and England and university education departments in the USA
and Canada. It includes the voices of teachers of all ages from pre-school to
graduate and of headteachers (principals) from English primary schools. The
authors, except Liz La Porte who teaches in an urban multi-ethnic Californian
high school, all work in higher education, but most of them have also taught in
schools. My reasons for not including articles by more school practitioners are

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Thinking about Feeling 295

that most of the ones I know are too busy doing to have time to think about
what they are feeling, and that the intensity of their emotions is likely to obstruct
their ability to be objectively articulate about them. So, the voices of many
school teachers are to be heard in these articles, but most of them are reported
by ethnographic researchers.
These researchers are themselves human beings who bring their own
feelings to the task of writing. The affecivities reported here have been filtered
through the feelings of authors who while they were writing faced ill-health,
domestic upheavals, sudden bereavement and the pressure of multiple commitments. I shall argue later on that emotional control is a characteristic of
teachers, with both positive and negative effects upon their work. In this
instance it was positive. I am grateful that all the contributors completed what
they had undertaken in time to make this publication possible. There were times
when Barbara Shannon and I seriously doubted whether this would be so. In
addition, many of them obviously found their articles more than usually difficult
to write. One reason for this may be the real pressures, all over the world, of
working in an environment in which academic quality seems increasingly to be
judged by simplistic notions of productivity. Another, equally plausible, reflects
on the neglect of the topic by researchers and teachers. It is that, in the absence
of an established discourse or appropriate theoretical framework, contributors
found it hard, especially if they had left themselves short of thinking time, to
move beyond the descriptive or analytical to explore in generalisable terms what
Geert Kelchtermans calls the 'deeper layers of meaning' in their data. A third is
that the topic itself presents difficulties to anyone who is or has been a teacher;
serious consideration of others' feelings may lead one too close for comfort to
one's own.
I have also included in this volume extended reviews of some of the most
important books which have taken teachers' feelings seriously. Some of these
were published in the 1950s or 1960s and have tended to drop from view.
Others, such as Dadds (1995) and Croll (1996) are very recent. If Hargreaves
(1994) had not already been reviewed in this Journal, I would have included it,
since it too makes a significant contribution to our understanding of teachers'
emotions, notably guilt.
Despite the complexity and variety of ideas and data presented in these
papers and reviews, similar themes repeatedly recur in them. In the rest of this
Editorial, I focus upon three of these topics. First, I explore the reasons why
teachers are so emotionally engaged with their work. Next, I seek to explain why
the fiercest of their negative emotions aie currently caused by interactions with
peers or superiors rather than with students. Finally, I discuss the potential for
both individual and collective professional development offered by the shared
telling of autobiographical stories with an affective theme.
STRONG FEELINGS
Notwithstanding the traditional distrust of affect in teaching to which Nel

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296 J. Mas
Noddings, Erica McWilliam and Peter Woods and Bob Jeffrey draw attention,
terms such as 'intensity', 'passion' and 'desire' abound in these articles. For
example, La Porte speaks of moments of 'complete happiness', Noddings of
'excitement', McWilliam's teachers are 'in love with' their subjects, Roger
Revell's primary headteachers know 'moments of great joy', Denis Hayes' of
'fulfilment'. By the same token, Jeffrey and Woods' teachers respond to the
process of an OFSTED inspection with resentment, anger and tears. Sandra
Acker and Grace Feuerverger's are 'dangerously stressed'. Judith Warren Little
describes despair, disappointment and loss, Kelchtermans notes incidents which
teachers experience as 'profound and disturbing'. In their essay reviews Mary
Jane Drummond and Marilyn Osborn establish that these feelings are not new.
Behind the ordered control and professional calm of all the teachers whose
voices are reported here bubble deep, potentially explosive passions, emotions
bringing despair, elation, anger and joy of a kind not normally associated in the
public mind with work.
Why is this so? Why do teachers have such a deeply emotional relationship
with their work? The articles in this volume suggest three main answers to this
question. First, and most obviously, teaching is a job which involves interaction
among people and inevitably therefore has an emotional dimension. Teachers,
like all other members of the people-based professions, bring their feelings into
school or college with them and have to learn to take this into account in their
dealings with others. The work of many teachers is unique, however, in that it
involves intensive personal interactions, often in crowded conditions, with large
numbers of pupils who are frequently energetic, spontaneous, immature and
preoccupied with their own interests. Moreover, the social context of teachers'
work requires them to demonstrate a capacity to control this effervescent
mixture and to direct it into culturally approved channels. Small wonder that
they feel, since the bulk of their working lives is spent in close, even intimate,
contact with other human beings for whose conduct and progress they are held
responsible.
Moreover, as Osborn, in her review of four classic books on teachers
reminds us, human relationships are not simply central to teachers' daily
experience. They can also become ends in themselves. There is an expectation
in many schools that the relationships developed in them will be part of
children's learning. By implication, teachers not only experience the emotionality of 'people work' but also carry a responsibility for its quality.
For many teachers the situation is more complicated even than this.
McWilliam, writing from a feminist perspective, challenges us to recognise the
fact that teachers deal not just face-to-face with pupils, but also body-tobody. Teachers, she argues, may use their bodily presence in the classroom to
seduce pupils into a loving relationship with knowledge. That teachers, especially men, sometimes abuse their corporeality is undeniable, but this should
not be a reason for excluding teachers' bodies from the educational process (as
in distance learning). Instead, we should accept that teachers of both sexes have
a right to enjoyment, even gratification, in their work and recognise that by

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Thinking about Feeling 297

tacitly rendering them 'immaterial' (i.e. of 'admitting impediments' to their

bodily presence) we lessen their capacity to share their passion with their
students. To legitimise the use in the classroom of the 'desiring teacher's body
[can result] in powerful pedagogy of a most elating and transformative kind'.
La Porte also accepts her corporeality as a teacher, though in a different
sense to McWilliam. Using tennis, in which she is a skilled and natural player,
as a metaphor she describes the improvement in her teaching since she learnt to
'relax from the neck down' (advice given her by her tennis coach). She analyses
the principles that inform her teaching (for example, a fierce conviction that
what she is teaching really matters to her pupils and that they will improve) and
then argues that, having internalised these principles, she 'feels' her teaching
rather than 'thinking' it. Her students' work has improved, her health, energy
and stamina have increased, she can now teach with an eye on 'the whole game',
'dancing from one situation to the next without missing a step'. All this has
developed because she has learnt the importance in teaching, and in her
students' learning, of the non-cognitive. In Alan Bennett's sharp-edged phrase
she is no longer simply a 'talking head'
A second major reason why teaching has a deeply affective dimension is
emphasised by several of the contributors, explicitly by Kelchtermans, Jeffrey
and Woods, Hayes and Revell and implicitly by Acker and Feuerverger, La
Porte and Michael Golby. Teachers invest their 'selves' in their work, often so
closely merging their sense of personal and professional identity that the
classroom or, in the case of primary headteachers, the school becomes a main
site for their self-esteem and fulfilment, Hid so too for their vulnerability. They
experience a sense of success or failure in relation to two main aspects of the job.
One is the exercise of professional skill. Self-esteem is closely linked to a sense
of professional efficacy. When teachers; feel they are effective, assisting the
learning of all pupils, keeping pace with their needs, handling the complex
demands of teaching with insight and fluid flexibility, they experience joy,
excitement, exhilaration and deep satisfaction. Indeed, Revell and Hayes both
show that in an attempt to recapture such moments, primary headteachers
continue to look for opportunities to do the kind of teaching that individually
they most enjoy, seeking the refreshment and reinforcement of successfully
exercising their craft skill. By the same token, teachers feel afraid, frustrated,
guilty, anxious and angry when they know that they are not teaching well or
when they encounter pupils whom they cannot help.
Teachers also experience self-esteem when they feel that they are acting
consistently with their beliefs and value:;. At the heart of personal identity lie
basic beliefs or assumptions about self and about significant and generalised
others. These beliefs help to form a set c f self-defining values which are central
to a stable sense of identity. Teachers do not feel good about themselves, as
Hayes, Jeffrey and Woods and Kelchternans show particularly vividly, if they
feel that they are acting, albeit under pressure, in ways which run counter to
these values.
The third reason for the intensity of teachers' emotions is an extension of

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298 J. Mas
the second. Teachers feel particularly profoundly about their work because they
invest heavily in it. Most obviously, they work hard for and spend a good deal
of time with pupils or students. They often come to love them and though they
may dislike individuals, they rejoice in the growth and successes of them all and
grieve for their disappointments and failures. Golby documents the possessiveness which can result when teachers identify their 'central mission' as work with
particular classes or pupils. Revell points out that this possessiveness often
carries through into headship; heads talk of 'their' schools, regarding them as
canvases on which they can paint their ideals. Noddings, Little, McWilliam and
La Porte indicate that teachers may identify equally closely with a discipline or
body of knowledge and that in this case their particular passion is for students'
progress and learning in that field. Further, Little suggests that in secondary
schools some teachers may become emotionally attached to the structures (e.g.
departments) which give organisational expression and support to 'their' subject
knowledge.
Teachers also invest in the values which they believe their work represents.
As Kelchtermans makes clear, the professional self of the teacher includes 'task
perception', i.e. what the individual sees as the nature of the job, how he/she
defines its goals and priorities. Hayes' and Revell's studies of primary headteachers vividly illustrate the power of these self-defined priorities. Hayes' small
school heads applied for their jobs in part because they wanted to 'fulfil their
educational vision' and 'make a mark'. Similarly, Revell's headteachers were
deeply committed to their 'personal' work, tasks which helped to shape the
school as they wanted it to be. Both sets of respondents were bitterly frustrated
when the transactional and administrative aspects of their jobs prevented them
from pursuing their individual goals for the school, and were distressed, often to
the point of resignation or burnout, when they were prevented by the demands
of outside agencies (e.g. governors, OFSTED inspectors) from getting on with
what Revell's heads described as their 'real' work. Little's case examples show
a similar emotional commitment to individual, value-directed goals among
American high school teachers.
These goals are often ethical. Nicole, the Flemish elementary teacher at the
centre of Kelchtermans' study, was 'profoundly disturbed' by an incident in
which her capacity to make what she perceived as sound moral judgements was
challenged by a parent. What upset her for months after what appeared on the
surface to be a technical query was not that her professional skill had been called
in question, but that she was 'not trusted' to act in the best interest of her
pupils. In her terms, she was not therefore seen as a 'proper teacher'. Kelchtermans goes on powerfully to argue that behind teachers' emotional reactions to
apparently trivial incidents lies a moral perception of their task and therefore of
their 'selves' which is particularly vulnerable to challenge because it is supported
by neither shared technical knowledge nor agreed normative principles. Individuals have repeatedly to make decisions which are not just complex but are also
set in a morally ambiguous context. Inevitably, therefore, they fall back on their
own beliefs about what it is to be a teacher and act in accordance with this

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Thinking about Feeling 299

perspective. The depth of teachers' feeJngs, especially when their practice is

challenged, reflects not an immature emotionality but, on the one hand, their
attachment to their own moral values and priorities and, on the other, the
normative isolation in which they often work.
In this context, the case of 'care' is a special one, since it is often taken for
granted that teachers are ethically committed to 'caring' for their students. In
this Edition, only Acker and Feuerverger's paper directly addresses the topic,
though Drummond in her review explores the related notion of compassion as
teachers' ability to feel with others by drawing on their own feelings. Otherwise,
care tends to be an unquestioned backdrop against which other issues are
explored. Indeed, Osborn in her review claims that a 'commitment to caring'
has been a repeated finding of empirical research into teachers in the past 30
years. I have looked in further detail at this notion in Nias (1997).
Acker and Feuerverger look at university teaching as women's work,
arguing that their respondents, women academics in Canadian faculties of
education, took on a heavier load of 'caring' (i.e. taking responsibility for
colleagues and students, being conscientious 'department citizens') than their
male colleagues. The expectation that women in the 'caring professions' will act
in this way, i.e. in a low status, quasi-maternal fashion ('the caring script') has
been critiqued, they argue, from two main perspectives: that it disguises as
conscientiousness an improper degree of job intensification, exploiting women's
sense of guilt in the interests of deprofessionalisation; that caring is indeed a
female characteristic, but one which should be recognised, celebrated and
consciously adopted as a moral basis for practice. However, neither critique had
a significant impact on Acker and Feuerverger's respondents who in large
measure fell in with gendered expectaticns about the division of labour. They
expected to care for others, took pains to do so, willingly assumed a heavy
burden of nurturing and 'housekeeping1. In these respects they resemble the
school teachers whose work is the main locus of this edition. Where they differ
is in the fact that 'doing good' left them 'feeling bad'they worked harder than
their male colleagues, in more varied ways, but were treated inequitably by the
academic reward system. Acker and Feuerverger's suggestion is that women
who accept 'caring' as part of their personal or professional identity are
disadvantaged by the university system, by what it rewards and what it ignores.
Since schools, especially secondary schools, offer few material or status rewards
to 'caring' staff, yet teachers continue to feel deeply and unresentfully attached
to a caring ethic, we are left with several questions: have the members of
the school teaching profession, being predominantly female, unquestioningly
allowed themselves to be exploited?; have they willingly embraced and internalised a distinctively feminine ethic?; arc the intrinsic rewards of working with
children (as opposed to adult students) so strong that they offset the absence of
extrinsic rewards?; is 'caring' so much part of school teachers' self-image and
their task perception that they are committed to it, no matter what the reward
system of particular institutions? Further research is needed into the nature of
'care' as part of the teacher's identity and into its relationship to gender issues

300 J. Mas
at work before we can answer the searching questions raised by this study of
women university teachers.

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HOSTILE PASSIONS
There has been a noticeable shift in academic emphasis since the books
reviewed by Drummond and Osborn were published. Anyone who listens to
teachers is aware of the frequency, affectivity and intimacy with which they talk
about their students. Anyone who knows teachers is conscious of the fear,
vulnerability, joy and excitement with which they daily face their pupils. Anyone
who works with teachers in England and Wales feels the resentment, frustration,
pain, guilt and anger of their response to current problems such as bullying,
excluding children from school or the need to distribute scarce resources
equitably. We can have no doubt about the central place occupied by students
in teachers' emotionality, in the present not just the past.
Yet in this Edition teachers' most extreme and negative feelings appear
when they talk about their colleagues, the structures of schooling or the effect
of changing educational policies upon them. It is not that they 'love children',
certainly not all children, all the time, as Golby's evidence confirms. Nor is it
simply a case of 'in here (the classroom) good, out there (the school) bad'.
Little's paper echoes the findings of myself and others (Nias et al., 1989, 1992;
Acker, 1990) that harmonious and active teams, or whole school staffs, can
enhance the classroom performance and self-esteem of their members.
Notwithstanding, the most intensive, hostile and deeply disturbing emotions described in these articles came not from encounters with pupils or
students, but with other adults, particularly colleagues, parents, school governors and inspectors. It is not clear why this shift should have occurred, nor
whether it simply reflects a change in research priorities. It does, however, open
up a fresh area of discussion and reflection for practitioners and academics alike.
Prominent among the causes of frustration and guilt mentioned by the
teachers cited here were activities and incidents which took teachers away, either
literally or mentally, from what they defined as their central purpose, helping
children learn. Such 'distractions', as Golby calls them, were not always directly
caused by the presence of other adults, but resulted from their policies or
requests for action (e.g. disciplinary interventions, record keeping, running
INSET activities and, in the case of headteachers, paperwork and site management activities).
Far more intense was teachers' and headteachers' reaction to what they saw
as 'intrusions' into their physical or professional territories. Though this reaction
came in part from a felt need for self-preservation, it could also be seen as a
possessive defence of the special relationship which teachers felt existed between
themselves and their pupils. Golby asked two experienced, committed women
teachers in English schools, one primary, one secondary, direct questions about
their emotional reactions to school life. The major source of their affective
satisfaction and emotional security was what Golby describes as 'the intimacy of

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Thinking about Feeling 301

teaching children'. Problems arose when other peoplecolleagues, parents,

OFSTED inspectorsbreached, or threatened, the tight boundaries that they
had drawn around this central area of their work. Then they felt anxious,
impatient, distressed, depressed and angry.
However, the negative emotions aroused by people or incidents that take
teachers away from teaching or intrude upon their relationship with students are
as nothing to the 'profound disturbance' of Kelchtermans' Flemish teacher,
challenged by a parent, to the emotional devastation documented by Jeffrey and
Woods before, during and after an OFSTED inspection of an English primary
school, to the maelstrom of disillusion, loss, bitterness and resentment that
Little encountered among three 'disappointed reform enthusiasts' in re-structured American high schools. In none of these cases could the authors easily
account for the depth of emotionality which they encountered. To be sure,
Jeffrey and Woods and Little both noted anger, guilt and frustration stemming
from the kind of 'distraction' noted above and from the intrusion by others into
the special territorial intimacy of teaching relationships. But these interferences
or interventions were not sufficient by themselves, anymore than the technical
questioning of a Flemish mother was, to explain the passion of teachers'
reactions. Accordingly, all three sets of authors set themselves the task of
exploring the deeper levels of teachers' understandings in these situations. Their
rich and complex explanations are of ccurse in one sense context specific, but
they contain common elements to which it is worth drawing particular attention.
First, all three of these cases involve loss. In many of the cases that
Kelchtermans discusses (not just that of Nicole), teachers had experienced, or
anticipated experiencing, loss: of status, of valued collegial relationships, of
self-confidence, of reputation. For Little's teachers too, loss was central.
Through the reforms for which they initially showed such enthusiasm they lost
leadership roles, friends, good collegial relationships, valued schedules and
spaces. To compound the situation they all felt, as the reforms continued, that
their ideals were being compromised, their influence diminished, their administrative and community support withdrawn and their autonomy undermined. Of
these, the most crucial were ideals. As Little says, the highest stakes for these
teachers lay in 'attaining a Utopian vision or preserving valued traditions'. When
these stakes were lost, little remained.
Jeffrey and Woods assert an even more radical loss: that of self. The process
of OFSTED inspection, they argue, is consistent with a government policy
which aims to deprofessionalise teachers and reduce them to technician status.
As a result of the inspection, these teachers 'felt mortified and dehumanised,
[that] they had lost their pedagogical values and holistic harmony as persons,
[that] in consequence their commitmert to teaching had changed'. Kelchtermans' interpretation of Nicole's loss is consistent with this view; the questioning
of her educational judgement was an assault upon the moral correctness of her
task perception and so upon her personal and professional identity. Although
Little does not use the concepts of self and identity, it is possible to see them
in her emphasis upon ideals and in her claim that individuals' capacity to

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302 J. Mas
recover from loss may rest on the existence of opportunities for them to exercise
further influence, elsewhere in the school or outside it.
Loss of control was also important. Nicole needed to feel in control of her
teaching. Jeffrey and Woods' teachers were thrown into disarray and self-doubt
by new professional requirements and the implication that they were no longer
allowed to make decisions about their own practice. Little's 'disappointed
reformers' had lost control of many areas of their professional lives and could
not re-establish it until they had negotiated countless practical details with their
colleagues. To make matters worse, their sense of losing autonomy outside the
classroom was compounded in time by the feeling that they were losing control
over their own professional skills within it and over their pupils.
It was not, however, the loss of control per se which stimulated extreme
emotional reactions among these teachers, and others whose voices are reported
in these articles. Rather, it was this loss in the context of the importance
attached by the teaching profession and by the public to teachers' capacity
to control their pupils and themselves. In her review, Drummond repeatedly
draws attention to teachers' sense of fear and to their anxiety and, although
these emotions have, she argues, several origins, this is implicitly one of them.
Golby notes the close control his two teachers were proud to have achieved over
their emotional lives. Revell comments that 'heads celebrate their joys publicly,
but suffer anguish by themselves', Noddings deplores the excessive detachment
and concealment of feeling implied by professionalism in teaching. Small
wonder then that an erosion of control should arouse feelings of anxiety, guilt,
confusion and anger. It is surely no coincidence that La Porte feels that her
teaching has improved and that she has enjoyed it much more since she learned
'acceptance'; she has stopped trying to control everything that happens in her
classroom.
A third characteristic of these three cases is that they involve diminished
privacy, itself another form of loss. Individual practice was exposed most
obviously through the OFSTED inspection, but part of Nicole's distress was
caused by the involvement in her teaching not just of a parent, but also of her
principal, the inspector and the Ministry. Little too draws attention to the public
nature of the conflict, humiliation and defeat involved in her teachers' negotiations with their colleagues. This is a theme which emerges in other articles as
well. Hayes' respondents, for example, were very aware of their visibility as
teaching heads of village schools, Acker and Feuerverger's university teachers
were conscious of increasing scrutiny of their academic record and their practice.
However, the fact that these teachers felt more vulnerable as their work
became more publicly exposed does not by itself account for their heightened
emotionality, since there is no evidence that any of them needed to fear
exposure. Rather, as Kelchtermans suggests, fear of criticism should be seen as
a sign of the individual teacher's professional and normative isolation and, as a
consequence, of their reliance for validation, approval and self-esteem on the
opinions of those with whom they come into contact.

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Thinking about Feeling 303

Yet here we confront a paradox, most clearly revealed in Hayes' paper. His
small school headteachers took on their jobs with a strong sense of idealism.
They wanted to create schools which realised their own educational values and
they worked extremely hard to achieve this. However, they soon had to concede
that they were unable to cope with all ihe many demands of the job. Yet they
were highly sensitive to the damage which publicly exposed inadequacy might
inflict upon their sense of self-esteem and their future job prospects. So,
increasingly they sought confirmation from community-based reference groups
that they were doing their job in a suitably committed and successful way.
Ultimately, their need for approval by these groups outweighed their idealism.
They lowered their standards, while developing strategies which preserved their
reputations in the eyes of, for example, parents and governors. Little's teachers
faced a similar dilemma: should they fight for their ideals (their 'selves') and so
lose status and career (social recognition of those 'selves') or should they accept
the loss of public esteem and influence involved in staying to fight for the
reforms that they believed in? In short, the paradox is this: teachers' idealism
leads them to invest their moral and professional 'selves' in the job. However,
this very investment makes them vulnerable to criticism from others, which may
in turn lead them to sacrifice their ideals.
It is this paradox, that teachers who make a high self-investment in work are
often dependent for self-esteem upon the approval of others, which helps to
explain a fourth common theme in the cases studied by Kelchtermans, Little
and Jeffrey and Woods. They all involved a high degree of contestation, of
individuals reacting angrily against perceived challenges to cherished beliefs. In
all of these cases, teachers struggled to preserve the recognition which they
needed to support an acceptable sense of self. They defined their purposes and
values in individual ways, but none of them could work productively in
situations in which they lacked social approval for these definitions. Such
approval accordingly became an important condition of their work and so open
to debate and negotiation. Put another way, behind the passion of these
teachers' reactions to challenge lay the very 'passion for teaching' which had led
them into and kept them in the job. In a very real sense their fight was for
self-preservation. We can best understand the depth and intensity of teachers'
negative feelings towards the 'intrusions' and 'challenges' of other adults, if we
see their reactions as political, in the broadest sense, and in particular as part of
the struggle for recognition involved in tie 'politics of identity' (Calhoun, 1994,
p. 20).
This political and micro-political aspect of teachers' work may also account
in part for the resentment and anger shown by Acker and Feuerverger's women
academics, who did not feel that their 'caring' self-image was supported
or rewarded by the university, and for the importance of what Little calls
'niches', professional communities, however small, where individual purposes,
cultures (shared beliefs) and organisational structures coincide. In such contexts, individual values are validated by others but are also given institutional
support. Viewed this way, teachers' feelings become an index of their capacity

304 J. Nias
to achieve the workplace conditions which they feel to be necessary for good
job performance. In this sense they are inseparable from issues of power.
Teachers' emotions are, it seems, increasingly to be seen as hard-edged, not
soft-centred.

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TELLING STORIES
To accept that there are elements of power, conflict and politics behind
teachers' feelings is to shed a new light upon the third theme which recurs
repeatedly in this Edition: the importance and value of teachers' stories.
Noddings argues the case for the inclusion of teachers' stories in teacher
education, especially those which portray feeling and which show how good
teachers come to terms with and productively use their emotions. But she also
shows how stories may help teachers and university students to greater cognitive
insight into and enriched theoretical discussions of teaching. La Porte claims
that she has grown in understanding of herself and of her practice by telling her
professional development as a story. Several of the other authors, notably
Kelchtermans, found as they undertook their research that facilitating teachers
in the telling of their career stories helped the latter to understand and interpret
their experiences more deeply and in different ways. Teachers can grow personally and develop professionally through making a narrative whole of their lives,
identifying the 'chapters' and sub-plots within it and reflecting upon the
significance of what has been said, left unsaid or never experienced. In this
sense, telling stories is akin to the search for self and self-understanding to which
the books reviewed by Drummond repeatedly return.
However, autobiographical reflection has a value beyond the growth of
personal understanding or individual professional development. These articles
repeatedly make the point that teachers' most positive feelings come from their
work with students and that the enjoyment associated with this often leads them
into territoriality and possessiveness. Golby questions whether the intense
relationship which can result is in the best interests of pupils, a challenge which
takes us back to McWilliam's claim that teachers have a right to enjoy their
desire and their capacity to seduce students into love of knowledge. Golby also
suggests that the controlled and proprietorial attitude of some teachers to 'their'
pupils (or, Noddings and Little would argue, to 'their' discipline) may restrict
the range of their emotional responses both to students and to other adults. So
there is potential benefit for both students and teachers in the sharing of
teachers' 'stories', provided that this is done in ways which encourage a
reduction in individuals' isolated sense of responsibility, lighten their associated
burden of guilt and help them towards La Porte's enriching sense of 'acceptance'.
Sharing 'stories' may have other beneficial effects. These articles have
shown how vulnerable teachers and headteachers are to criticism from
significant others, how dependent their self-esteem is upon social recognition,
yet how emotionally difficult and draining they find negotiation with colleagues

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Thinking about Feeling 305

and other adults. In short, many teachers have an ambivalent relationship

with the other adults with whom they come into contact. They need their
support and reinforcement and, as Golby suggests, pupils would benefit if there
were more 'whole-school' approaches to many educational policies. Yet individuals often react restrictively and defensively in their interactions with peers and
superiors. Shared analysis in what Golby calls 'a deeply reflective and mutually
respectful' fashion of individuals' 'stories' about the structures and traditions
within which they work can help them to identify and understand different
perspectives. It can also provide a forum for disagreement and challenge and so
for the practice of the interpersonal skills involved in negotiation and debate.
Lastly, provided that individuals share a common commitment to cognitive
exploration of deep layers of meaning within their 'stories', the shared construction and discussion of their narratives can help them deal productively with the
'politics of identity'. It can encourage understanding of individuals' social,
historical and biographical contexts, facilitate, however painfully, the articulation of reasoned differences, help the development of common technical knowledge, beliefs, values and moral principles. It can begin to empower individuals
and groups, for the affect revealed in the making and telling of stories can
become a productive starting point for collective action.
In this Edition we have 10 'stories' distilled from the experience of many
teachers of varied age groups in five countries. Each is different, but together
they give a rich account of the emotions in teaching. Teachers have hearts and
bodies, as well as heads and hands, tho ugh the deep and unruly nature of their
hearts is governed by their heads, by the sense of moral responsibility for
students and the integrity of their subject matter which are at the core of their
professional identity. They cannot teach well if any part of them is disengaged
for long. Increasingly, social and political pressures give precedence to head and
hand, but if the balance between feeling, thinking and doing is disturbed too
much or for too long, teaching becomes distorted, teachers' responses are
restricted, they may even cease to be able to teach. Teachers are emotionally
committed to many different aspects of their jobs. This is not an indulgence; it
is a professional necessity. Without feeling, without the freedom to 'face
themselves', to be whole persons in tho classroom, they implode, explodeor
walk away.
But the emotions are not simply in teaching. They are also a response to the
conditions under which it takes place, and especially to the increasing frequency
with which individual teachers have to defend their sense of who and what they
are. Teachers cannot call upon agreed technical or moral principles to justify the
rightness of the professional judgements or the ethical priorities which are
central to their working 'selves'. Instead, they have to rely on validation by
others, although of its very nature this is open to challenge and debate. The
more profound and personal their commitment to particular ideals, goals or
priorities, the more extreme their reaction when these are threatened or contested. Passion in teaching is political, precisely because it is also personal.
So we are left to face a pressing anxiety about the future: if teaching as work

306 J. Nias
is successfully deprofessionalised, as many argue is the present intention of
government policies all over the world, it will necessarily also be depersonalised.
Without personal commitment, it becomes unbalanced, meagre, lacking fire
and in the end therefore unsuccessful. To place the development of teachers'
affect in the forefront of our concerns is ultimately to safeguard children's
education. I cannot see much evidence that this is happening. Can you?
Correspondence: Jennifer Nias, Faculty of Arts and Education, University of
Plymouth, Douglas Avenue, Exmouth, Devon EX8 2AT, UK.

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CALHOUN, C. (Ed.) (1994) Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford, Blackwell).
CROLL, P. (Ed.) (1996) Teachers, Pupils and Primary Schooling: continuity and change (London,
Cassell).
DADDS, M. (1995) Passionate Enquiry and School Development: a story about teacher action research
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HARGREAVES, A. (1994) Changing Teachers, Changing Times: teachers' work and culture in the
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