Face Threats and Emotional Regimes in Teacher Learning

• In Event: Affect and Sense-Making in STEM Teacher Learning: Toward Ecologically Valid Theories of Teacher Learning

Abstract

Purpose
Teachers’ collegial conversations can be important sites for negotiating and reinforcing powerful ideas about pedagogical responsibility (Authors, 2021). These negotiations sometimes result in deficit narratives about students and their families, even among well-meaning individuals (Horn, 2007; Yoon, 2016). In this paper, we study teachers’ assignation of responsibility in relation to their vulnerability during professional development (PD).

Theoretical Perspective
We use critical sociocultural theory (Esmonde & Booker, 2017) to understand three concepts. First, deficit narratives — person-centered explanations of school failure (Valencia, 1997) — are cultural and systemic, though individuals reproduce them (Adiredja & Louie, 2019). Second, vulnerability is an interactional achievement often stemming from face-threatening acts (Goffman, 1955), including face threats upon group identities (Mao, 1994). And, because emotion is socially and culturally embedded and experienced, rather than internally-driven and individual (Ahmed, 2004), teachers are subject to emotional regimes that govern how feelings should be expressed in particular contexts (Zembylas, 2005).

Data & Methods
This analysis draws from a longitudinal ethnographic study of teams of teachers known for their strong instruction and collegial relationships. Using fieldnotes, videos, and transcripts of conversations in which teachers debriefed videos of their classrooms with researchers, as well as supplemental data from classroom observations and other PD activities, we identified cases where teachers first critiqued their own teaching but then they or their colleagues assigned responsibility to students or families. For these “extreme” cases (Flyvbjerg, 2006), wherein otherwise asset-oriented teachers introduced deficit narratives, we used critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2014; Wodak & Meyer, 2014) to understand how contexts, affect, and ideologies shaped teachers’ talk-in-interaction. We attended to emotions that were expressed, and also those that research suggests might have been expected (e.g., Bellocchi, 2019; Tsang, 2011; Zembylas, 2005).

Results
In each case, the initial critique created a face threat to the entire teacher team, given their strong group identity as “good” teachers (Authors, 2021). Confronted with this collective face threat (Mao, 1994), teachers attributed responsibility for the perceived “failure” of the teaching to students and families, rather than to themselves.

For example, after watching one clip that the focal teacher described as “really bad instruction,” Kurt and his colleague described parents as lacking authority (“they’re not checking homework”), in effect, letting the teacher off the hook for his “bad instruction.” In another case, colleagues reassured Joanna that her actions were inevitable because students had missed the opportunities she provided.

By employing deficit narratives — i.e., assigning responsibility for learning to students and families — teachers preempted expressions of emotions such as vulnerability, shame, and frustration, which were discouraged under emotional regimes that valued dispassionate analyses of pedagogy, explicit articulations of teachers’ competence, and positivity.

Significance
The increasing popularity of collaborative PD demands attention to how emotions circulate during group learning. Particular emotional regimes may lead teachers to deflect face threats by assigning responsibility for learning to students or families. Therefore, disrupting deficit narratives requires not only educating individual teachers about their harm, but also shifting the emotional regimes that make deficit narratives such easy responses to face threats.

Authors

• Samantha Marshall, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author

• Grace A. Chen, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author