Beyond teacher cognition and teacher beliefs: the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching

Abstract

This article is an attempt to show the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching, and the importance of exploring teacher emotion in understanding teaching. A coherent account of teacher emotion must find a dynamic outside the cognitive, discursive or normative practices that have monopolized attention in research on teacher cognition and teacher belief. Thus it is argued that this dynamic can be found in the very character of emotional expression—what the anthropologist William Reddy (1997, 2001) calls emotives. This article makes the above case through the description of findings from a case study of an elementary school teacher (Catherine) who participated in a three‐year ethnographic project investigating the role of emotions in her teaching. Emotional suffering and emotional freedom are examined; such a theorization gives political meaning back to research on teacher emotions and allows us to discern the successes and failures of particular emotional regimes within a school culture.