Disaffected Teachers: Disrupting Normalized Feelings of Race and Gender in Teacher Education Research

• In Event: Teacher Identity and Agency in Racially and Politically Contested Contexts

Abstract

This study uses a lens of disaffection (Yao, 2021) to analyze how raced and gendered expectations for emotions influenced teachers’ pedagogy and perceptions of their profession. Seeking to centralize race and gender in our understanding of teachers’ emotions, we used disaffection as a frame to reinterpret prior data we had generated and analyzed separately. The two data sources were interview transcripts from ELA teachers who were teaching literary texts following the death of a loved one and focus group transcripts with queer teachers reading and restorying queer texts. Our analysis of unfeeling or disaffection spotlights the potential of antisocial disaffective practices–the refusal to feel–in resisting emotional classroom scripts, especially when teachers' lived experiences create tension for them in the classroom.

Authors

• Josh Coleman, Arizona State University

• Mandie Bevels Dunn, University of South Florida - Tampa