Post by Ben Gould
If any of this chimes with anyone, and you want to talk about any of it, I really do want to hear it & I am in A102 or email B.Gould2@brighton.ac.uk
That’s a question I’ve pondered during my latest research. I have wanted to explore the emotional impact that the relational component has on teacher wellbeing. By relational I follow Huberman (1994) who suggests it is the creating or building, maintaining and then ultimately the destruction of relationships. As teachers this is a natural part of our job as a ‘helping professional’ and I think one we often take for granted. But, how much do we consider it as a factor in our own wellbeing?
Recently my research has looked at the connections between the emotional burden that comes from teaching (aligned in many ways to the emotional labour that the job demands) and also through the emotional attachment involved in the multiple forming of relationship (between you and students, parents, carers, other teachers and staff, police, counsellors) how much of this leaves teachers in or with a state of compassion fatigue.
Price (2001) says that teaching is a profession that requires us to absorb and contain the anxiety, frustrations and anger of the students during the learning process and this places an emotional burden upon the teacher who contains these emotions and attempts to lessen the burden on the student. The role of a teacher extends far beyond the classroom though and increasingly teachers are part of meetings with social services and local authorities to discuss welfare plans for students in their care. This ‘access’ to often difficult to process home lives further adds to the emotional burden placed upon teachers.
The old adage in teaching is often ‘I came into the profession to make a difference’. It is in most teachers’ DNA to help. So, when they see a young person in need they often always go above and beyond what many would see as necessary to ensure the student feels their needs are being met. When this happens regularly (and in teaching this is an all too regular occurrence) then the likelihood is that the teacher is likely to feel their ability to contain more emotional content is getting full and the knock-on effect of that is a position of compassion fatigue.
So, what do we do when we care so much that it strips us of our ability to care anymore? Teachers leave the profession in ever increasing numbers. Research has suggested that somewhere between 50 – 71% of teachers leave the career within 5 years of starting (House of Commons Education and Skills Committee, 2004; Gorard et al., 2007 and Fenwick & Weir, 2010). This figure represents something fundamentally broken in our system. It suggests the problem itself is systemic. The Government’s latest answer to this is the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter (Gov.uk, 2021). This reads more as a pledge than anything tangible to halt the flood of attrition that teaching as a profession is currently experiencing. A bit part of the lack of tangible steps might lie in the complex manner in which relationships impacts teacher wellbeing. If the repeated creation, maintenance and destruction of relationships places such an emotional burden upon teachers, how can a government ever fix it? The problem comes from the relational nature of the profession, so if you attempt to remove that, you remove the ‘essence’ of why so many teachers came into the profession in the first place. Unfortunately, that sometimes is the situation for teachers. They reach a point of compassion fatigue which means they are unable to take any more emotional content from the students and those around them. If factors in their lives don’t allow them to leave the profession (as so many do) then they may choose to stay in the profession and develop coping strategies that protect them from further burden. This is typically defined as ‘burnout’ where the overwhelming exhaustion that comes from experiencing this emotional content and the overextension and depletion of one’s emotional and physical resources, leading to the person’s detachment from their own sense of meaning or purpose of their role and increase a position of disequilibrium of their own wellbeing (Maslach et al., 2001; Thoits, 1995). This position can result in young people now not being able to alleviate their own emotions as they may have done previously and in turn likely leaves them in varying degrees of anxiety.
Have these teachers committed any great crime of the teaching profession? No, they have cared too much, for too long and have nowhere or no way to safely remove it from themselves. Here, the second phase of my research aims to explore this acknowledgement and safe removal of emotional content or ‘stressors’ to allow teachers to ‘decontain’ or drain their containment in a safe and appropriate way. The slightly surprising thing about how this is done exists in the Janus-like role that relationships play in the process. Janus is the Roman god that is depicted by two opposite faces (see picture below). Relationships operate as a Janus-like term in teaching as they may both be the cause of increased emotional burden and compassion fatigue, but at the same time be the cure to sucessfully removing that burden. Through the use of non-outcome focused, peer to peer support networks it is hoped that the process of Active Listening will allow teachers to engage in a ‘supervision’ like session where they are able to offload the emotions to a colleague with whom they have selected and trust and that this deliberate act of Active Listening will allow the teacher’s inner world feelings and emotions to be projected in the outer world, which releases it safely from the ego. This follows the ideads of Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis with particular reference to Free Association that allows the sub-conscious to become conscious thought and expressed, but this is not without its challenges. Freud recognised the mechanisms by which the human mind protected itself from anixety and anxiety provoking thought through denial, projection and displacement to name three. These defensive mechanisms operate effectively if the required outcome is survival, but is surviving as a teacher really all we can hope for? If we learn to get beneath the defense mechanisms to the emotional burdens of our roles then we free our unconcious of the held emotional stressors as they become conscious in conversation with our chosen, trusted friend.
It is hoped that these valuable conversations between teachers, when formalised will allow teachers to remain emotionally available for their students whilst also having a safe space to ‘decontain’ those emotions themselves.
So, is it possible to care too much? In this system we can easily fall into a pattern where we need to be ‘everything to everyone’ and absorb those emotional stressors from all angles. We do this because it’s part of what drew us to the profession in the first place, and when it stops everyone loses. Students don’t feel supported and we, as teachers, are locked in survival mode. We want to care with everything we have, but we need mechanisms in place to allow us deal with those emotions effectively, and I hope this research might begin to explore this role.
If any of this chimes with anyone, and you want to talk about any of it, I really do want to hear it & I am in A102 or email B.Gould2@brighton.ac.uk
*To stay true to my principles I have written this as a free association and just let my mind focus on what it wants to try and say. Therefore, I apologise for spelling errors and structural issues that may present as a blur on the page. But, it’s all a work in progress!
DfES. (2004). Secondary Education: Teacher Retention and Recruitment. London: The Stationery Office
Fenwick, A., & Weir, D. (2010). The impact of disrupted and disjointed early professional development on beginning teachers. Teacher Development, 14(4), 501-517. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2010.533491
Gorard, S., Huat-See, B., Smith, E., & White, P. (2007). What can we do to strengthen the teacher workforce? International Journal of Lifelong Education, 26(4), 419–437.
Gov.uk. (2021). Education Staff Wellbeing Charter. HMSO Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/guidance/education-staff-wellbeing-charter
Huberman, A. M., Grounauer, M.-M., & Marti, J. (1993). The lives of teachers: Teachers College Press.
Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job burnout. Annual review of psychology, 52(1), 397-422.
Price, H. (2001). Emotional labour in the classroom: A psychoanalytic perspective. Journal of Social Work Practice, 15(2), 161-180. doi:10.1080/02650530120090610
Thoits, P. A. (1995). Stress, coping, and social support processes: Where are we? What next? Journal of health and social behavior, 53-79.