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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 Toulmy, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the New University of Wollongong, NSW.
In Alberto Belaki, he's an Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology in Queensland, Australia. And of course, teachers aren't the only workers that are dealing with this type of stress or dealing with these different methods of trying to tackle their stress. You talk about health workers and customer workers. How do they compare to teachers?
And I guess first off, can you also just specify for us when you say health workers and customer workers? Who does that include, exactly? In our study, we compared teachers to healthcare workers, customer workers, and in a sort of a residual category of other weapons. By healthcare workers, we were referring to health professionals, doctors, nurses, and so on, health and welfare support officers, and also carers and aides that help people who have a disability or a city.
By custom workers, we were talking about all sorts of people engaged in face-to-face customer service, hospitality workers, sports and personal service workers, inquiry, collects receptionists, sales representatives, agents, assistants, sales people, sales support workers, etc. Just the people who have to do that day-to-day face-to-face selling job. And we chose these particular categories because they represent the kind of workers who do an enormous amount of emotional labor. They do this because of the nature of their job as a service agent, so face-to-face engaging.
And we wanted to try and do a bit of a contrast between these groups. And according to our data, we found that teachers are more likely to report a negative emotional experience as their most common motion of the last week than were any of the other professions that we looked at. So there's something specific about teachers and stresses with it, which creates a lot of negative emotions for teachers to have to deal with in the Australian context. We also found that compared to these other groups, teachers were more likely to report feelings of anger, and potentially indicative of intense frustration than were these other groups.
And this is when we do a particular measure where we ask them about a couple of different emotions that difficult emotions with people to deal with. Did they feel any of these emotions or did they feel none? Teachers were more likely to report feeling one of these and that was anger. And Alberto and I have discussed this before several times and when we're drafting this paper, about the intense frustration sometimes the teachers have to do it and what they have to do with that frustration.
I don't know if you want to comment on that one. Yeah, I can sort of connect back to the question Lee opened with about our connection to this research and having been a classroom teacher, which is what the focus of the kind of teaching we're discussing in this study, I can attest to some of the things that Roger was saying earlier about one up managing. So I'd like to just go back to that for a minute because I think it's important for some listeners who might be thinking, oh, this whole idea of being emotionally exhausted, like it sounds a little bit woolly. What does that really mean?
And so I thought that maybe connecting with a personal example might sort of make that a bit more concrete. And I'll use the positive example of having to show enthusiasm in the classroom and trying to get those kids on the last lesson on a Friday afternoon enthused about what you're doing with them. I used to find that whatever you would normally do, you kind of scaled it up 10 times. And in real terms, that means the enthusiasm has to come through your voice, through your movements.
All of this generates muscular and physical strain on your body. So to give a classic example, I frequently came out of lessons with a sore diaphragm above my abdominals from having projected my voice and done so enthusiastically. So it is physical and therefore physically exhausting, not just mentally exhausting and tiring just from the regular hours you work in the day, but there's an output of intensity that you generate at times. And going to the less pleasant things like anger, one of the things we discussed in the paper is this notion of stigmatized emotions.
And anger is a classic example. I mean, anyone who flies off in a fit of rage is probably not going to be looked upon well in any facet of society. Whenever we see these images in the media, the images that are often presented because they're representing something that is ugly, and society doesn't like this. And so a teacher like any person is bound to get angry at something that happens just as someone who's serving you dinner in a restaurant may not appreciate the way you speak to them and might boil up in anger.
But then they're suppressing that. As Roger mentioned with some of those strategies, they're either having to down regulate that, so they're having to turn that anger into something more acceptable. So they, you know, if they really feel like acting on that anger, they might make a little snide remark to the customer and then have to deal with the consequences. It's the same with teaching a teacher might feel very intense anger at something a student does, particularly if it's very aggressive and confronting or perhaps there's something a colleague does that really sort of undermines that teacher's beliefs or ideals or values.
And so that's strong response in an environment like a school which has very strong rules, especially it's trying to, you know, teachers are trying to be role models. So a teacher flying off the handle in a fit of rage is not exactly an acceptable mode of behavior in a school and context. And so teachers have to work if they feel that way to suppress the intensity of that feeling. And that's where the exhaustion comes from.
It's holding that back and representing it in a different way that is necessary there. So what if you're there to characterize teaching as a sort of high risk, high reward profession? I know it sounds like a contradiction to have such a positive sounding or pleasant emotion as happiness alongside and in high frequency with something as, you know, as unpleasant as stress. But I really think when I look back and reflect it and I have researched my own teaching experiences in the past, you get a lot of satisfaction of working with young people.
And I'll come to this perhaps later on. So I think, you know, I can understand why someone would report happiness. They are probably happy about the nature of the work that they do. They see value in teaching work.
But then the enactment of that work is where the stress comes in. And Roger mentioned earlier in response to a question Lee about some of the structural factors to give one example. And again, to put some sort of concrete examples around that, teachers in Australia have faced very regular changes to what is expected of them in terms of the contents of teaching. So there are frequent curriculum reforms.
And in recent times, we have seen an increasing amount of testing and accountability measures. And all of this has changed the nature of the job quite considerably from previous periods. So those are the kinds of things that are bringing extra stress. So sometimes it may be that a student in a classroom may be the trigger for some unpleasant experience.
But the thing that is perhaps more frequent is the administrative and frequent changes to curriculum that are going on at those kinds of stresses that are structural as Roger referred to them earlier that have a prolonged impact as well. One last question. And to borrow one of your questions after completing this research, does teaching make teachers happy or do teaching professions attract people with a positive outlook or with a happy disposition? Albert, wondering if you can take that.
Yeah, sure. Thanks for that, Lee. So it's a really interesting sort of conundrum. If you want to think of it that way that we finished our paper on in some respects, I guess what I would say to that.
And again, we're not speaking about the evidence that we've generated through this study, but if we speculate on the possibility of this idea, are they just positive people or do they become positive because of the job? I think this ties in with my previous sensor. So people become teachers often because of a strong sense of vocation. And the other reason is for that pleasure of working with children and young people.
Those are two very big reasons why people choose to become teachers. So I think, like any profession, it's going to generate a sense of fulfillment and enjoyment that leads to happiness for teachers when they see the students succeeding when they have a breakthrough in the classroom. A student that wasn't doing so well, all of a sudden really understands something. All those things give you great joy because they're the moments where as a teacher, you see the value in what you've been doing sometimes for a sustained period of time without necessarily receiving any positive reinforcement for the work that you've put in.
So certainly the job can generate lots of enjoyment and happiness in that way. Working with young people is fantastic. They have interesting lives. They're very engaging.
You know, humorous people. So there's a lot of fun to be had with young children and young people in schools. In terms of our teachers, people with a happy disposition, that one I think is a bit more, I would, again anecdotally, I would say it's the same with any job. I think we wouldn't necessarily see a higher proportion of people who are predisposed to be happy, go lucky necessarily going into teaching.
That's not my observation. But as I said, I'm not speaking from the data in our study. This is a question that we posed at the end of it. And it would definitely be interesting to do further work on it.
And Roger, I'm sure has his own views on this as well. Sure. Look, I would just say that I agree with our below that it's kind of both happy people seeking meaningful work would self select into being teachers because they like to engage with others support, build, help young people develop those sorts of things. And they would gain great meaning and joy out of doing that task well.
So it can become a really virtuous circle where the person goes in does work which makes it happy. So, sorry, I sort of disentangle these checks. But I will say that whilst some happy people and people seeking meaning would self select into being teachers, they won't all get the same rewards because the teaching environments as I've noted change and very, and some of them are much more difficult than others. And if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't have such high tuition rates.
So we need to be aware that the teaching environments that the teachers are teaching into challenging, to have a written style that desire for that wonderful meaningful work with the teacher with difficulties and stresses that sometimes have to do that. And then some of them leave for something. 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.
Thank you, Lee. Thank you, Lee. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on Apple podcast, Spotify and Google podcast.