Teachers' work and emotions in the context of managerialist and neoliberalist education reform: The Hong Kong case

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Managing complex change: promoting meaningful professional development using action research to support international educational reform

Proposal

In the past decades, teachers are prone to the negative emotions such stress, depression, frustration, anxiety, and burnout all over the world because of managerialist and neoliberalist education reforms. As influenced by the perspective of critical theory, most of the existing studies have explained that the teachers’ negative emotions in teaching are structurally caused by the reforms through the processes of deskilling and work intensification. Nevertheless, the limitation of the explanation is that it overemphasizes the structural influence of managerialist and neoblieralist reforms to teachers’ emotions but overlook the agentive effects of teachers. According to social constructionist perspective of human emotions, one’s emotions are co-constructed by both agency and structure. Therefore, the existing studies may not provide a comprehensive explanation to the negative emotions in teaching since they tend to ignore the dynamic nature of emotion construction. Thus, the present study would like to investigate the dynamic nature of teacher emotion construction from a social constructionist perspective in order to overcome the limitation of the existing literature.

To achieve this goal, the study investigated 21 secondary schoolteachers in Hong Kong with qualitative interview research method. The research findings suggested that teachers’ negative emotions in teaching might relate to how they defined their work based on their major goal in teaching. In general, the teachers committed themselves to making a differences as their major goal in teaching by which they reflexively monitored and evaluated their behaviors in teaching. Based on the goal, they categorized their work into instructional work and non-instructional work. The former was defined as the work facilitating them to make a differences, while the latter was not. Thus, they generally felt negative in teaching because most of the time and energy of the teachers were occupied by non-instructional work leading to the negative emotions in teaching in the context of managerialist and neoliberalist education reform. Nevertheless, a close look at the findings revealed that, most of the non-instructional work defined by the teachers were not purely non-instructional. Most of the so-called non-instructional work should be instructional in nature or have instructional values, such as the work of organizing extracurricular activities. A further analysis of the interview data suggests that the teachers did not recognize the instructional values of the so-called non-instructional work because the education reforms replaced the educational values of the work with instructional values through a variety of accountability measures. As a result, the teachers were not only disempowered to exercise control over their labor process in teaching, but also disempowered to realize the educational values of their work. All these conditions of disempowerment made the teachers suffer from the negative emotions in teaching.

The study gives a detail description and analysis of Hong Kong secondary schoolteachers' work and emotions in the context of managerialist and neoliberalis education reform. The findings do not only have implications for Hong Kong education reformers, but also provide rich information for comparative research.

Author

• Kwok Kuen Tsang, Beijing Normal University