The construction of teachers' emotion in 'special' education

The project described in this thesis explores teachers' emotional involvement with their day-to-day work in "special" schools. To understand their emotional involvement, the research examines the discursive practices that define and regulate emotionalality across three groups of teachers in "special" education. The analysis of their emotional involvement moreover, gives cause to consider the contribution emotional discourses make to the construction of a teachers' identity in "special" schools. This thesis considers the researcher's subjective experience as a starting point and is inspired by the postmodem turn that redirects the use of qualitative methods into finding new forms of representation, partial and always incomplete understandings of those complex experiences. Through the review of literature, a detailed account of the constitution of emotional discourses in education is presented and different views of, and approaches to emotion are explained genealogically, recognising the different shifts taken in the move to establish contemporary discourses around emotion. A combination of different research methods are put to work in three special schools: emotional diaries, participant observations, individual interviews, focus group interviews, micro ethnography and fiction narrative/writing. The decision to draw on such a range of methods was intended to provoke a variety of stories that illustrate the different twists and turns of teachers' emotional discourses as they emerge in different contexts within the field of "special" education. This research concludes with the idea that teachers' emotional involvement with their work in "special" education has a considerable influence on the construction and performance of their emerging identities, whereby emotions are perceived as a constitutive force of identity and subjectivity. For that reason, this study reaches the conclusion that the emotional subjectification of these educators can be understood through the emotional discourses that circulate in "special" educational spaces, taking into account how these spaces support the articulation of educators' emotional performances. Therefore the main contribution of this research is to provoke discussions about teachers' emotional involvement with their work within the field of "special" education, presenting an innovative theoretical and methodological framework.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo