Passing the Buck, or Thinking about Experience? Conditions for Professional Development among Teachers in a Norwegian Middle School

Abstract

This paper uses psychoanalytic ideas to explore obstacles and conditions for learning from experience among teachers. In specific, this is about consequences of failure in relationships. A particular situation that happened during an ethnographic study in a middle school in Norway is used to get as close as possible to a teacher's feelings and perceptions of a frustrating situation. The situation is followed up to understand how the individual teacher tried to deal with the problem and how her colleagues and the school management tried to support and help her. Interpreting the situation to involve violation of all dimensions of the teacher's subjectivity (personal, professional and cultural), the problem seems to be too complex to deal with in the school organization. It seems as if teachers and leadership unconsciously avoid unbearable feelings, with the consequence that violation of the teachers is not recognised, and thus not possible to learn from. Problems were repeated rather than understood.

Depth-hermeneutics: a psychosocial approach to facilitate teachers’ reflective practice?

“…As relational workers, teachers undertake considerable emotion workand management (Hochschild, 1979). To elaborate on this, we draw on fieldwork in a Norwegian middle school (Ramvi, 2010(Ramvi, , 2017, where teachers claimed that their relationships with students were 'alpha and omega' with regard to being a good teacher and achieving learninga finding recently confirmed by Klinge (2016). Teachers experienced their professional role as something deeply personal and had strong desires for affirmation in teacher-student relationships; self-esteem became attached to the quality of their relationships with students (Ramvi, 2010).…”

“…We employ a teacher's narrative as an example of what such a text could look like. This narrative emerged during fieldwork in a Norwegian middle school (Ramvi, 2010(Ramvi, , 2017. We take this text through four analytic phases (see Figure 1) in order to illustrate the process (different approaches exist, see Bereswill et al, 2010;Hollway & Volmerg, 2010;Salling Olesen & Weber, 2012).…”

Review of research on teacher emotion during 1985–2019: a descriptive quantitative analysis of knowledge production trends

“…These approaches were used to explore teachers’ subjective emotional experiences and lives such as “emotional incidents” (Erb 2002 ), “significant emotional episodes” (Hargreaves 2001 ), or “key events that left a particularly strong emotional impact” (Lasky 2000 ). Moreover, observation was used to study teachers’ expressive emotions although that method was not widespread (Prosen et al 2011 ; Ramvi 2017 ). Quantitative research designs involving questionnaires were also used.…”