Every school day, across the country, education professionals labour emotionally—in the classroom, in the staffroom, online. Yet the language available for talking about these experiences in public conversation has a history of being fragmented, inadequate and polarized as either overwhelmingly negative or unrealistically positive. 

Only very recently have we begun to publicly acknowledge teachers are struggling. They struggle under the weight of unrealistic expectations and mounting responsibilities of modern teaching. Teachers in Australia fulfil many vital roles alongside their obvious teaching roles. They are de facto security guards, counsellors, data administrators, co-parents, citizen makers and child minders for the economy. Based largely on interviews with 42 Australian teachers (from the NARRES research project) the book presents engaging stories of teachers who shared resonant emotional events with us and our fellow investigators*. Each chapter is focused on a teacher’s emotional story followed by an academic response from education researchers across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and Spain. Our book reveals how social and political pressures, intensifying workloads and lowered professional status are impacting teacher wellbeing and reshaping the profession. 

Emotional experiences: guilt, demoralisation, helplessness, alienation, anger

The teachers whose stories are included in the book experienced challenging and confronting emotions: guilt, demoralisation, helplessness, alienation and anger. The contributing authors show many of these feelings are generated from the systems, processes and structures of schooling, over which which teachers have little agency or autonomy. The book demonstrates that teachers strive to be ethical, empathic, passionate, and committed professionals. But at present this work is threatened by a range of issues including unnecessary administrative burdens, workload and time pressure, poor work-life balance, vicarious trauma and emotional burnout.

These threats are making it increasingly difficult for educators to make a meaningful difference to the communities that they serve. These themes are common fare for Australian educational research. But our book offers a fresh take by focusing on teachers’ emotional lives and foregrounding teachers’ own experiences. Each chapter begins with a narrative extract from the interviews. The authors in our book shine a light on the complexity and nuance of teacher emotions. These professionals now have a voice that does not have enough presence in public conversations.  

Foregrounding emotional experiences

One story in the book (co-authored by Saul Karnovsky and Susan Beltman) focuses on emotional labour in teaching. Alanna (a pseudonym) explains her thinking when confronted by a student who disclosed intentional self-harming behaviours in the classroom setting:

I guess I tried to put on a façade too as, in stay professional; I couldn’t cuddle her or say are you ok? I couldn’t go too deep into it, because I’m not trained in that area. So I was worried if I did say something, you may not think you are saying anything wrong but to them you have said something that is going to trigger them and they will do it again. So I didn’t want to do that, so I was like what do I say? Do I be nice? [Or] Do I just blow it off? Do I give her advice?

Emotional self-training

Alanna’s story describes a type of emotional self-training that teachers often undergo. She explains that she “tried to put on a façade” and “stay professional” during her encounter with the student. Karnovsky and Beltman explore how Alanna exerts substantial effort to modify her initial emotional response, that of feeling upset and helpless in the situation. Alanna enacts a deliberate process of feeling management to ensure her negative emotions will not be shown.

This form of emotional labour constitutes a vital element of teacher professional practice in modern school settings. Alanna’s experiences help sketch out the opaque contours of emotional rules in the teaching profession. These invisible boundaries delineate the difference between ‘appropriate’ allowable emotional expression and ‘inappropriate’ emotional expression that teachers learn to police. Teachers must navigate these tacit emotional borderlines. They must take care not to misstep, lest they be seen as “not right for the job”.

Profound emotional events

Like Alanna, many teachers experience profound emotional events in their working lives. As academics, we are able to provide insight into these events by bringing scholarly language, concepts and theories to interpret those experiences. Many teachers work in environments that do not support sharing the emotionally intense experiences that take place in their schools. ‘Solutions based’ leadership is in vogue within school management practice. But this approach can be an impediment that fails to connect with the complexity of context. The authors in our book discuss ‘teacher wellbeing’ as an inadequate lens through which to address teachers’ emotional experiences.

Many teachers are cynical of wellbeing programs and it can be cruel to expect overworked teachers to adopt these practices. They become a further load on top of all that was already present. The primary issue is that the ‘wellbeing’ approach typically places responsibility for positive emotional practice back upon the shoulders of individual teachers. A thread that runs throughout the book is that workplace emotions ought to be a shared responsibility. We suggest a more productive approach. That would be to focus upon reshaping the ways emotions are discussed, interpreted and communicated in the school context. 

Collaboration and collegiality

Sustained collaborative and collegial work is required to improve teachers’ working conditions and school climates. Leaders have positions of influence over school policy, climate and structures. They can cultivate trust and introduce practices that allow teachers time and space to decompress, take time away from the business of their work, find solitude when needed and come together in a spirit of honesty and of collective, localised strategic thinking. Policy makers must create the conditions for this important change to occur in schools by trusting our education professionals to create local solutions to issues present in their communities. 

Both in Australia and globally there is a turn towards a more critical and nuanced appraisal of teacher wellbeing. We are now recognising the problematic nature of toxic positivity and cruel wellbeing in schools, in which interventions made in the name of individual wellbeing and workplace positivity conversely lead to negative wellbeing outcomes.

Conversations about safety

Conversations about teacher safety, teacher workload and policy conditions shaping the retention crisis are reaching traditional and social media outlets. Community attitude is often on the side of teachers, and the inherent challenges posed by the modern structures of schooling have been laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now more than ever education research can provide a roadmap for the profession to reconstitute what is of value and what we hope to achieve through schooling systems. There are certainly models around the world to look to, where policy makers trust and value teachers as professionals, allowing them space, time and resources to focus on what matters most. There is a need for a shared discourse about teachers’ emotional concerns and the book aims to articulate some clear concepts for use by teachers and teacher educators alike.

* We wish to acknowledge Karen Peel, Debbie Mulligan, Bobby Harreveld, Nick Kelly and Patrick A. Danaher as Chief Investigators of the NARRES Australian research team who contributed the 42 teacher interviews.