The Anxiety of Obligation: Shame and Shaming in the Lives of Teachers

• In Event: 77.035 - Balancing Doing Well and Feeling Well: Educator Anxiety and Responses to Evaluations

Abstract

What is the complex relationship between the emotional toll of obligation in teaching (e.g. teachers’ feelings of shame) and teachers’ disengagement from their profession? What does it mean for a profession to claim an identity through shame? Drawing on interviews with two Canadian high school teachers we analyze their experience of shame and its effects – feelings, thoughts and actions. Sara’s experience of shame empowered her to view herself and her work beyond mainstream paradigms while Tara’s case exemplified a shame that sought to define who she must become. Both forms of shame are borne of obligation but only one tries to repair rather than reproduce the hierarchies and exclusions that stratify the profession and educational institutions in our neoliberal time.

Authors

• Anne Mary Phelan, The University of British Columbia

• Melanie D. Janzen, University of Manitoba