Files
Abstract
This research seeks to add to our understanding of high poverty elementary school teachers emotional work lives by investigating how the emotional experiences and coping strategies of teachers related to their beliefs about their work, themselves and their work relationships. I conducted a qualitative study in which I interviewed 36 high poverty elementary school teachers about their emotional work lives. Three emotional identities emerged from teachers accounts of their emotional experiences of work and ways of coping with their work emotions: thrivers, survivors and sufferers. These teachers shared similar beliefs about their work, professional identities and work aspirations. What most distinguished the emotional experiences and coping of thrivers, survivors and sufferers was their relationships with their administrators and their ability to realize their work beliefs. In particular, the amount of respect, trust, support and appreciation teachers perceived themselves to have from their administrators influenced their perceptions of their working conditions, their ability to enact their work beliefs, their work relationships with others and their commitment to their school. The findings of this research illuminate the centrality of administrator-teacher relations to teachers emotional work lives and support the growing body of empirical literature that asserts school working conditions, rather than characteristics of the students themselves, play a central role in teacher satisfaction and teacher turnover in high poverty schools. The findings of this study also underscore the importance of the amount of control teachers have in their work to their emotional experience of it. The more teachers felt deprived of the flexibility and autonomy to do their jobs well, the more negative their emotional work experiences, the less successful they felt in their work and the less committed they were to remaining in their school. The findings of this study suggest school leaders and policy makers can improve the success of high poverty schools by improving the relational conditions in these workplaces.