Increasing teacher and leader professionalism through emotion management and engagement

Citation

Oplatka, I. and Arar, K. (2018), "Increasing teacher and leader professionalism through emotion management and engagement", Journal of Professional Capital and Community, Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 138-141. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPCC-07-2018-036

Increasing teacher and leader professionalism through emotion management and engagement

Emotion and its display are critical and fundamental to human activity in all organizations (Berkovich and Eyal, 2015; Hargreaves and Fullan, 2013; Sebrant, 2014). It is defined as “an awareness of four elements that we usually experience at the same time: appraisal of a situation, changes in bodily sensations, the free or inhibited display of expressive gestures and a cultural label applied to specific constellations of the first three elements” (Hochscild, 1990, pp. 118-119). Yet, emotions are generally of short duration and are associated with a specific stimulus, as opposed to “mood” which is more enduring, more diffuse and less related to specific stimuli (Frijda, 1993).

For many years, emotional reactions at work were seen as disruptive, weak and a deviation from the sacred rationality in the organization (Zembylas, 2005). But, during the last two decades, a greater legitimacy has been given in many western countries to emotion management and displays in the workplace (Hargreaves and O’Connor, 2017), and the research on emotions in organizations began to deal with the question of why and how employees may display or manage particular emotions, including emotions that differ from how they feel (e.g. Ashkanasy and Daus, 2013). In this sense, life in schools is complex substantially because emotion is integral to the processes of teaching and learning and, therefore, school leaders and teachers need to manage their school/class emotionally as well as rationally (Hargreaves, 2000). Both cognition and emotion are equally important in guiding (Harris, 2004), facilitating or inhibiting leadership and teaching capabilities, professional capital and community (Hargreaves and O’Connor, 2017).

Past research has identified a wide variety of emotions and emotional engagements among school leaders and teachers including passion, empathy, excitement, satisfaction, intuition, relief, joy, trust, compassion, empathy, adrenaline rush and caring (Arar, 2017; Cliff, 2011; Oplatka and Gamerman, in press; Yamamoto et al., 2014; Zembylas, 2016). In addition, the literature centers on negative emotions of school leaders, such as fear of failure (Gronn, 2003), a sense of emotional “woundedness” (Johnson et al., 2005), anxiety, fear, pain, demoralization, anger, frustration, despair, dissatisfaction, distress (Blackmore, 2004; James and Vince, 2001), disempowerment, threatened self and disillusionment with the system (Beatty, 2000; Crawford, 2007; Zembylas, 2016).

The current special issue illuminates research on teacher emotion from multiple perspectives (e.g. professionalism and emotion, emotion management, emotion suppression, emotional intelligence, feelings, affects, emotional relationships, emotion and professional capital and community capacity) in different national educational systems. Its objective is to understand how teachers and educational leaders express and suppress emotions, what kind of emotional relationships they are involved in, the factors affecting emotion regulation in teaching, the varied effects of teacher emotion upon teacher professionalism and performance both as individual and as professional community and the like.

The first paper authored by Michalinos Zembylas from the Open University of Cyprus aims at contributing to recent work that canvass the affective conditions in standardizing processes taking place in schools by probing into the relations between affect and biopower in the standardizing processes that take place in schools and by asking how we can better understand the constitution of affective spaces and atmosphere that enable some transformative potentials while preventing others. His main argument is that professional standards for teachers and educational leaders create ambivalent affective spaces and atmospheres in schools that require one to look for the ways in which biopower works affectively through specific technologies.

Engaging with recent work surrounding the affective turn in the social sciences and humanities, the encounter between affect and biopower opens methodological, ethical and political possibilities to examine the affective impact of standards on the professional capital of teachers and school leaders. Thus, the analysis displaces emotions from their dominant positionality in discourses about professional standards, reinvigorating theoretical explorations of the affective spaces and atmospheres that co-constitute subjective, organizations, governance and social practices in standardizing process.

The second paper written by Amanda Datnow examines the intersection of teacher emotions, teacher collaboration and educational reform, particularly with respect to time, a key teacher resource that is often impacted in school change. Based on in-depth, two-year qualitative case study of teacher teams in two US elementary schools, the author found that the teachers benefitted from collaborative school structures that allowed the time and space to innovate and brought joy to their professional lives. Strong professional communities served as sources of support as teachers experienced stress and frustration with reforms that created shifts in time and in their teaching. Leadership played an important role in providing emotional support and autonomy to teachers, allowing teachers to flourish collectively.

In the third paper, Khalid Arar and Izhar Oplatka trace the ways assistant principals in Israel, both Arab and Jewish, manage their emotions at work. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 assistant principals, it was found that they are required to manage their emotions in accordance with entrenched emotion rules in the culture and society. Most of the Jewish female APs tend to display warmth and empathy toward teachers in order to better understand their personal needs and professional performances. In contrast, Arab APs suppressed or fabricated emotional expression in their discourse with teachers and parents, in order to maintain a professional façade and retain the internal cohesion of the school. Both groups of APs believed that their emotion regulation results in higher levels of harmony in the school. Empirical and practical suggestions are put forward.

The forth article, authored by Kennedy Kam Ho Chan, Jessica Shuk Ching Leung and Tracy Cuiling He from The University of Hong Kong, analyzes the emotions reported by a group of student teachers (STs) after viewing their own teaching videos and those of their peers, as well as the reasons for those emotions. It also investigated the perceived influence of the STs’ emotions on their learning from the videos. The findings suggested that most of the STs experienced negative emotions when viewing their own videos, whereas all of them reported positive emotions when viewing their peers’ videos. Distinct groups of STs displaying similar emotions while viewing the different video materials were distinguished. Their characteristics and the reasons for their emotions were identified. Analysis of the perceived influence of emotions suggested that they exert differential influences on learning from video materials, with the negative emotions associated with viewing one’s own videos reported to hinder such learning in most cases.

In the fifth paper, Megan Crawford identifies the educational workplace as a site of complex social and relational interactions, and asks how recent research on emotion in education, and the concept of personal engagement, can enhance practice. Drawing on the research in these two areas, her paper seeks to bring together these concepts so that teachers can utilize these linkages to develop their professional practice and looks at how knowledge of personal engagement and emotion can be applied to professional settings. It ends with a return to the importance of understanding teaching as an emotional practice, and the role of engagement in building up teachers’ professional capital.

Finally, Joanne Cliffe from the University of Birmingham explores the relevance of the use of the Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence test (MSCEIT) (Mayer et al., 2000) when assessing the emotional intelligence of headteachers as part of an investigation which aimed to reveal the ways in which female secondary school leaders were emotionally intelligent and whether it was possible to test for emotional intelligence. The accuracy of the MSCEIT is questioned, rather than taking the results at face value, attention is given to its content, language and cultural differences. The MSCEIT originates from the USA and is used globally. The findings of this investigation suggest that it is possible that the MSCEIT represents a deficit model due to the test takers’ interpretation of nuanced language. The findings show a disparity in relation to MSCEIT scores and self-reported emotional responses. Emotional responses are best understood through life experience as the headteachers attach retrospective meaning to their leadership actions.

The articles offer a critical examination of emotion in different contexts from different points of view, such as the psychologization of emotion management, workplace engagement, emotional labor, emotional intelligence, emotion and professional capital and teacher collaboration as community of professional. Authors who are coming from different national, cultural and social arenas deal with a wide variety of aspects from cross-sectional point of view. This includes the application and applicability of emotional intelligence to principals and teachers, the relationship in teaching between emotions and engagement, principals’ modes of emotion display and suppression, the intersection of educational reform, teacher collaboration and teacher emotions and the differences in emotions reported by a pre-service teacher and the reasons for the emotions. Together, the papers contribute to the production of new knowledge in the research on teacher emotion, emotions in educational leadership and professional capital in education, by illuminating new conceptual frameworks and methodologies used to explore emotion in education.