Disaffected teachers: disrupting normalized feelings of race and gender in teacher education research

ABSTRACT

Making sense of normalized feelings in teacher education, scholarship on race and gender has spotlighted the affective and emotional landscapes of teaching and detailed how the profession has been shaped around its primary workers, cisgender straight white women. Disaffection, though, or unfeeling in ways that disrupt the sociality of affective norms, provides one conceptual and methodological tool for shifting well-worn patterns of normalized feelings in teacher education. Revisiting data from two previous studies of teachers’ affective practices, we used disaffection as a lens to analyze interview and group session transcripts, interpreting how unfeeling disrupts the racialized and gendered norms of grieving and liberationist politics of outness in classrooms. Inviting antisociality, disaffection offers researchers and educators a methodological expansion for studying affect, emotion, and feeling in teacher education, specifically by looking for the absent presence of unfeeling.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• emotions
• teacher education
• qualitative methods
• coding
• norms

Acknowledgments

Mandie’s project was supported with a research initiative grant from English Language Arts Teacher Educators.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While affect and emotion studies have evolved both separately and together (Leys 2017), we couple affect and emotion when explicitly referencing research genealogies relevant to teacher education. Moreover, we do not hold strict theoretical distinctions between affect and emotions.

2. Within this article, affect operates analytically as an umbrella term for various states, including affect, emotion, feeling, mood, and passion. Distinction between such terms do exist. We following Anderson (2014) embrace affect an array of analytical ‘devices designed to attend to and reveal specific types of relational configurations’ (12).

3. Both studies had IRB approval from the authors’ respective universities at the time the studies were conducted.

4. All participants’ names are pseudonyms unless otherwise indicated.

5. Pragmatic, affective practices avoid ‘non-human affect’ (Wetherell 2012, 4) to avoid perceived incommensurabilities between Spinozian affect studies and social science research.

6. For this study, I understand queer and trans identity as affective connections (e.g. a consciously appraised, felt sense of sameness, community, etc.) forged through imagined community (B. R. O. Anderson 2006; Coleman 2023b).

7. Drawn from queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s (1991) notion of the ‘proto-gay childhoods’ (22), proto-queer and trans kids refers to those children who largely due to gender nonconforming behavior are perceived as queer and/or trans and who might ultimately claim those identities.

8. To honor Claire’s multi-pronoun usage, I switch between she/her and they/them pronouns.

9. My storying of this school context speaks to one school and one administration and should not be extrapolated to pathologize the Black community as anti-LGBTQ+.

10. Ms. Smith is a Black trans woman, who identified and presented at that time as a gay man.

11. Taking place in the early 2010s, this binary conception of gender (queer women/men) holds true based on youth’s self-identification at that time but, likely would no longer, given the expansion of gender vocabulary.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the English Language Arts Teacher Educators, National Council of Teachers of English.