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Hello and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by braille. I'm Lee Chung-Greffo and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today we're talking about happy, stressed and angry, a national study of teachers, emotions and their management. We're talking with Roger Toni, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales.
Welcome, Roger. Hi, Lee. Thanks for having me here. And Alberto Belaki, he's an associate professor and principal research fellow at the Queensland University of Technology in Queensland, Australia.
Alberto, thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you, Lee and hi, Roger. Welcome, Tor. So you found that teachers exhibit great natural happiness, but also experience and hide high levels of stress.
So, Roger, I'm wondering what made you interested in exploring this. Did any of your personal experience dealing with stress sparked this research at all? So, I personally have not worked as a teacher, but I've known many teachers, including my colleague, Alberto, and heard a great length about some of the experiences I've had to go through. I have an academic, have taught students for over eight years now, and I'm well aware of the difficulties of trying to balance many things at once in undertaking teaching, particularly when you also have other things you have to do on the side of administrative duties and research and so on.
So, I'm drawn to trying to understand the difficult situations that teachers find themselves in and how they manage those situations, but perhaps from a personal look at teaching, which I hand out to Alberto, what he has to say. Yeah, thanks for that. Nice. And thanks for your question, Lee.
I think it's valuable to understand how researchers connect to their work. And as Roger's already noted, I was a former high school teacher here in Queensland before becoming an academic. So, there is a strong sense of personal experience with the stress of the job that certainly informs my understanding of the teachers I study in the research that I do. And there's also a strong sense of solidarity that I feel with classroom teachers because of that past experience.
So, that definitely informs why I'm interested in this topic and undertake that work. But also, I started researching emotions for other reasons and came around to the idea of how teachers manage emotions from there. And basically, I want to make sure that teachers' well-being is well-considered in their work, and that our teacher graduates are well-prepared for the work that's to come ahead for them. And also, that the profession is ready to support those graduates when they come into it.
So, it certainly has connections to my past, but there's also a strong connection with the research that I've been doing over the last decade. Yeah, and you talk in your work about this connection between emotional exhaustion and the growing problem of teacher attrition. Why is it important to examine the effect of stress on teachers? What does this mean?
Not just for individuals like yourself, but the profession at large. In terms of the sector-wide impact of the emotional exhaustion that teachers experience, the wastage that we get. So, when teachers leave the profession entirely, this exacerbates other problems, such as teacher shortages in areas of critical need. So, for example, it's a pretty much a worldwide phenomenon that there's a shortage of mathematics and science teachers.
So, when you have large numbers of teachers leaving the profession, that undermines these critical supplies shortages in some subjects. And the long-term effects of that impact all students. So, as many of you listeners probably are already aware, there are very high attrition rates associated with teaching across the board. And so, the teacher attrition, the teachers who leave the profession for good, or what we call wastage, happens at a rate of around 25 to 30%.
And that's a conservative estimates. There are some studies that report far higher rates. Now, the important thing about these high rates of wastage is that they tend to occur in the first five years after graduation from their university courses, or within the final 15 years of the profession. So, if we just stop and consider those two timelines, we've got our greatest hopes for the future of the profession leaving within five years.
So, some of these people are leaving after just one year. And then we've got our most experienced teachers, the ones where a great amount of practical knowledge from the classroom, but also a longer term of investment through professional development has happened. So, in terms of what are the broad impacts of this, I look at it as sort of, there's three parts to it. You've got the personal impacts for the teachers' well-being, and their personal finances that they've invested in, studying a course in education, becoming a teacher, often teachers resourcing their classrooms with their own finances.
This is something that happens in many countries. Secondly, you've got the sector-wide impacts for the profession. So, the fact that you're losing skilled staff and you're losing your youngest and brightest who are coming in to regenerate your profession. And lastly, and the one that we probably know the least about is what impacted teachers who are feeling burnt out have on students while they're still teaching.
So, really, that three-part structure there kind of explains the broad range of ways in which this issue has an impact. And, Roger, what are the typical ways that teachers are actually dealing with all of this stress? You talk about this method of down managing and up managing. What is that exactly?
Sure. So, when we refer now research to down managing and up managing, we're talking about distress, but emotions in general. So, my background interest in this topic comes from my study of the sociology of emotions, which is a particular field. And this field is quite interested in how society in general sets rules about how we're meant to feel in certain circumstances.
And encourages us to try and feel the right way and potentially change or hide how we feel if how we feel doesn't match the particular circumstances. So, let's take teaching, for example. Within a particular school and in classroom setting, there'll be an expectation that you feel a certain way as a teacher, and that you at least display it even if you don't feel it. So, we refer to down managing to start with as the experience where you might feel emotions which would be perhaps considered inappropriate for the classroom.
Take, for example, intense frustration or even anger at the unruly behavior of some of the students, or perhaps some of the conditions under which you have to teach it for the school of undergoing stress or some kind. Or just general stress, which has to identify as an issue for a lot of teachers. It's considered unprofessional to a lot of the time to display, use, exhibit those emotions so you need to sort of tap them down. And there's a number of ways in which we down-managed, tap down those particular emotions, some better than others.
We're talking about that in a second. But when we talk about up managing, what we're talking about there is a different kind of way of managing your emotions. Another expectation we have with our teachers is that they are bright, enthusiastic, cheerful, and they inspire the kids to learn. Now, I don't know how many people work jobs where they're capable of feeling those feelings all the time in their jobs and their teachers are in their everyday teaching.
So, it's work. They have to work to almost evoke those pleasant, good emotions that they can share with the students and inspire the students to engage more there. So, up managing, down managing all the emotions. And, as I said, I can talk a little bit about specific types, which are more effective than others.
So, I guess both methods are managing and damaging can be effective. But they can have debilitating side effects if they're down the wrong way. For example, one version of down managing might be to simply hide what we feel as a teacher and to try not to show the difficult emotions that we're feeling to the students. There's a particular term in the sociology of emotions from the work of Ali Oxchild called Surphers Acting, which captures this phenomenon.
And that is effectively where you just try to put on a cheerful face, try to keep your demeanor pleasant, but inside those emotions are still sort of there somehow spoiling away. And we've been starting showing that prolonged surface acting, where you don't do something that's feeling to just try to pretend they're not there or repress them. It's linked to incidents of high stress and burn out nutrition, which is not a great way to proceed in a long term. So, potentially better ways of dealing with those sort of difficult emotions that are managed as difficult emotions are along the lines of what Oxchild's called deep acting as opposed to surface acting.
Anyone who is listening who is involved in acting or drama might be aware of the style of acting where you try to really make yourself feel the feelings and motivations of the character you're trying to portray. And this is more akin to what Oxchild was talking about with Deep Acting. You try to actually change how you feel, not just pretend a different feeling on surface. So, like, not that acting?
Yes, yes, exactly. You can engage in mechanisms to try and genuinely change that negative feeling away. And also, you engage in mechanisms to summon up those good feelings to the up-mention part to get ready for your day. And techniques for this from literatures around emotional management and emotional regulation include modifying the situation somehow, often taking in props or trying to before you go in and rearrange the situation to reduce some of the stresses that come in.
Refocusing attention on certain things I try to think about positive thoughts is a very common way to deal with negative emotions. And cognitive techniques, like trying to change the meaning of the situation so that you don't get focused on a lot of negative aspects. And also, mindfulness techniques, allowing the situation to proceed without necessarily overtaking everything you think and feel. So, those are just a rate of particular techniques.
But as a good sociologist, I would be remiss if I didn't get a little bit critical on that stuff, which I'll just quickly now do. The techniques I just suggested, individualized techniques. There's a lot of techniques that, just say you're the manager of a school, you'll say to the teachers, here you go, we'll train you in how to do these various techniques of managing your emotions, and then you'll be fine. In other words, it becomes an individual responsibility.
Each teacher has taken up themselves. And we all know that teachers don't teach an isolation. They teach within the context of a particular school, which will have its own unique organizational issues and structural issues. School cultures, school structures shape what we feel and what we're allowed to feel.
And they sometimes can put undue pressure on teachers to have to manage emotions and situations where they really shouldn't be doing that. Consider situations where schools are understaffed. There's a great deal of organizational change of restructuring going on. Perhaps there's a situation of bullying going on between teachers or management or something.
And there might be unruly students, many of them, really struggling, putting a lot of pressure on teachers. My brother, for example, is a primary school teacher. They're a very difficult school in Tasmania. And he is super excited because next year he's going to change schools and he can't wait to go.
He'll be able to get away from his family all of his time simply doing discipline to actually starting to be able to do some teaching. So it's just an example that different schools have different requirements and they put different pressures on people to manage those emotions. So it shouldn't always be about, you know, let's be mindful, let's engage in cognitive therapy, let the individual teacher sort it out. And it's a port.
Thanks to both Roger Petoni and Alberto Belucky. They're the authors of Happy, Stressed and Angry, a National Study of Teachers, Motions and their Management. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google Podcast.