The Role of Emotion in Teacher Activism/Burnout

The purpose of this study is what role emotion plays in teachers’ behavior, specifically between choosing to try to reform the system (activism, such as walkout) or choosing to leave the profession (burnout). The research question is: What role did emotion play in the teacher walkout? This literature review will explore the connections between emotion and motivation in teachers who are burnout and how that leads to activism.

Political issues in today’s political climate can become a very arduous path to navigate. In the past, it was considered unbecoming to bring up politics in conversations beyond the home. However, there comes a time when politics are so involved in education that it has become impossible to separate the two. Freire (1970) states “that education is a political act and therefore, teaching is also a political act” (Dunn et. al., 2017, p. 281). Today’s classroom consists of scripted curriculum, micromanaged lesson plans and ideas, standardization, high stakes testing, and over all Taylorism in the 21st century (Au, 2011). Furthermore, the literature on “teacher activism is relatively slim body of literature, in part because teaching is sometimes viewed as apolitical and in part because teachers work in a challenging and tenuous political (currently neoliberal) climate” (Dunn et. al., 2017, p. 282).  It has come to the point that teachers are faced with “shuttling between the political and pedagogical” (Hung, 2018, p. 171). In conclusion, there has come a time in today’s society that the politics of education can no longer be ignored and with teachers emotions being ignored it has led to becoming active in the political arena as well as the classroom.

Due to these issues in the classroom, teachers are facing burnout due to emotional exhaustion. “Burnout is a symptom that appears mainly among individuals in human services and education institutions whose job require continuous interactions with people” (El Helou et. al., 2016, p. 552). Burnout does not just effect teachers in the United States as recent walkouts in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Colorado show but also across the globe. El Helou’s (2016) study focuses on why Lebanese teachers face issues of burnout in their classrooms. When looking at three major factors “emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment,” El Helou (2016) noticed that those teachers who stayed or left the classroom in Lebanon had the highest percentage in emotional exhaustion. Many of the teachers stated that “the relationship with the administration, power of parents/students, policies and rules of the school, and relationships with other teachers” led to their compounding issues with becoming burned out (El Helou, 2018, p. 559). This is further illustrated in Dunn’s et.al. (2017) study on why teachers use their resignation letters as public platform to evoke policy change.

In Dunn’s et. al. (2017) study teachers resigned for their own different reasons. However, when one teacher chose to speak publicly with her resignation letter she saw it as an opportunity to share her “deeply seated feelings about the troubling things she was seeing inside and outside her classroom” (Dunn et. al., 2017, p. 287). Another teacher wrote that her reason for resigning publicly was to have “a good opportunity to make a strong statement about education reform and education abuses” (Dunn et. al., 2017, p. 285). In contrast, Harfitt’s (2015) study on why new teachers leave the profession only to return again a few years later in different positions did not focus on doing so publicly. These teachers all attended the same university in Hong Kong, only to leave after the first year of teaching. Harfitt (2015) wanted to know why they left so soon and began a narrative inquiry. As the interviews show of these two young teachers it is not far off on how the teachers in Dunn’s et.al. (2017) study felt about their job. When Harfitt (2015) asked them why they left one of the teachers stated that “she regretted not being able to concentrate on her lesson planning and feeling underprepared in ‘almost every class I taught’” (p. 29). She went further on to say that “I just wanted to escape, really” (Harfitt, 2015, p.29). Even though Harfitt’s (2015) study lacks any connection to teacher activism it further illustrates the emotional exhaustion of two first year teachers specifically. Even in El Helou’s (2016) research she made a point to include teachers who had already left the profession as well.

In conclusion, the literature shows that emotion is connected to burnout and along with that burnout, teachers start to become more active in trying to change their circumstances. Teachers are becoming emotionally exhausted due to the neoliberal politics and their effects on the classroom (El. Helou, 2016; Harfitt, 2015; R. Richards, 2018). In Taiwan, teachers fought for better curriculum even though it was frowned upon to go against authority in their culture (Hung, 2018). Teachers are starting to speak out publicly with writing resignation letters (Dunn et. al., 2017) and walking out of classrooms. However, what the literature is lacking is how a teacher goes from being emotionally exhausted and burned out, to wanting to be more active in creating change for educational purposes. In what ways might emotion be connected to motivation to bring about change? Thus far, the literature on emotion and burnout has focused on the factors that cause teachers to leave the profession but not so much on how that emotion can motivate them to become activists for education. The goal of this study is to provide insight by interviewing leaders who played an active role in the walkout of Oklahoma teachers and to explore the story behind emotion and motivation connected to teacher activism.

References

Au, W. (2011). Teaching under the new Taylorism: High‐stakes testing and the standardization of the 21st century curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 43(1), 25-45.

El Helou, M., Nabhani, M., & Bahous, R. (2016). Teachers’ views on causes leading to their burnout. School leadership & management, 36(5), 551-567.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Harfitt, G. J. (2015). From attrition to retention: A narrative inquiry of why beginning teachers leave and then rejoin the profession. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 43(1), 22-35.

Hung, C. Y. (2018). Educators as transformative intellectuals: Taiwanese teacher activism during the national curriculum controversy. Curriculum Inquiry, 48(2), 167-183.

Richards, K. A., Hemphill, M. A., & Templin, T. J. (2018). Personal and contextual factors related to teachers’ experience with stress and burnout. Teachers and Teaching, 24(7), 768-787.

This resource is no cost at https://open.library.okstate.edu/goodthingstoread/