Loss and Literature Instruction: A Study of English Teachers' Emotion Management

• In Event: Responding to Literature: Strategies to Raise Critical Consciousness

Abstract

Scholarship in English Education has suggested that English teachers can invite experiences of loss into classrooms as part of literature instruction (e.g. Dutro 2019). Drawing on feminist understandings of emotion, this interview study investigated what work teachers do in efforts to engage loss as part of literature instruction when they themselves are people affected by personal loss. Findings revealed that teachers do considerable emotion management to suppress their emotional responses to texts in the service of fulfilling professional norms about literature instruction. This study therefore attends to challenges teachers might face when asked to address loss as part of literature instruction and provides insight into how interpretive possibilities for literature learning might be further expanded.

Authors

• Mandie B Dunn, University of South Florida - Tampa

• R. Ashley Johnson, Florida Gulf Coast University