Putting Data and Theories in Conversation: Methodological Implications for Researching Emotions

• In Event: Methodologies of Researching Emotions in Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

How one philosophically and theoretically defines emotions influences research on emotions. Defining emotions as verb or as collisions of contact between people presents opportunities to create innovative ways of researching teachers’ lived experiences. In this paper, the author demonstrates a theoretical tool created to study emotions as situated, embodied, and fissured: critical performative analysis of emotions (CPAE) (Author, 2010; 2013; 2014).
CPAE bricolages three theoretical perspectives:
1) Critical sociocultural theory focuses on agency, identity, and power (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007), in this case in relation to doing emotions. Emotions are situated because emotions happen in specific school contexts and power relations.
2) Narrative theory focuses on how interactions among people are produced and performed (Riessman, 2008). Emotions are embodied and performed dialogically among teachers and students.
3) Rhizomatic theory focuses on lines of flight or fissures between people (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Emotions sometimes are unexpected interactions that happen as collisions of contact between teachers and students.
While each of these theories are unique and possibly not traditionally viewed as harmonious, complementary aspects that, when joined together, help to gain a rich picture of what appears to be happening in classroom interactions.
The paper conceptualizes CPAE as a methodological tool to use for studying emotions. To help readers visualize CPAE, the author illustrates a CPAE with an interaction between a boy and his second grade teacher (video data from a larger four-year qualitative study) when he forgot to return a book to school.
Historically, emotions are viewed from psychological stances locating emotions inside a person (Hyson, 1994), sociocultural perspectives examining the social construction of emotions (Averill, 1985), and ethnographically through discourses of social practices (Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990). Missing is an explicit focus on the doing or performance of emotions in power-laden relationships. Emotions are made visible on our bodies through posture, facial expression, voice, and movement as well as through the performance of language. Researchers need to move beyond mainstream psychological, sociocultural, and discourse approaches to analyze teacher and student emotions. Although scholars (Boler, 1999; Micciche, 2007; & Zembylas, 2007a, b, c, d) provide strong theoretical and philosophical frameworks for thinking of emotions from feminist, critical, and poststructuralist perspectives, methodological tools that bricolage multiple perspectives are scarce. This paper aims to contribute a new way of researching emotions between teachers with students.
The philosophical and theoretical stance a researcher assumes directly shapes the methods of data production and analyses (Zembylas, 2007d). Scholars claim researchers need to think with theory as a methodology instead of formulaic interpretive methods disconnected from paradigmatic and theoretical assumptions (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; St. Pierre, 2011; 2014). The paper concludes with discussion about disrupting traditional ways of studying emotions, expanding theoretical and philosophical assumptions about emotions, and articulating implications for the research of teachers’ lived experiences with students. The author invites researchers to create innovative ways of thinking with theories to move research forward on doing emotions in schools.

Author

• Candace Ross Kuby, University of Missouri - Columbia