Emotional Geographies of Teaching

ANDY HARGREAVES
University of Toronto

This paper introduces a new concept in educational research and social science: that
of emotional geographies. Emotional geographies describe the patterns of closeness
and distance in human interactions that shape the emotions we experience about
relationships to ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Drawing on an
interview-based study of 53 elementary and secondary teachers, the paper describes
five emotional geographies of teacher-parent interactions—sociocultural, moral, pro-
fessional, physical, and political—and their consequences.

INTRODUCTION

Around the world, important efforts are being made to improve standards
of learning and teaching. Guided by cognitive science and impelled by the
demands for new work skills in the informational society, these reform
efforts are stressing more constructivist approaches to learning, greater
emphasis on problem solving and knowledge application, and increased
attention to creativity. New learning standards are raising the profile of
new teaching strategies and standards that are more in tune with construc-
tivist principles and the best ideas in cognitive science. Yet somehow, standards-
based and largely cognitive-driven reforms do not capture all of what matters
most in developing really good teaching. They do not quite get to the heart
of it.
Teaching and learning are not only concerned with knowledge, cogni-
tion, and skill. They are also emotional practices ~Hargreaves, 1998!. This does
not mean they are solely emotional practices. Emotion and cognition, feel-
ing and thinking, combine together in all social practices in complex ways
~ James, 1917; Oatley, 1991!. But teaching and learning are irretrievably emo-
tional in nature ~Salzberger-Wittenberg, Henry, & Osborne, 1983!. Denzin
~1984! argues that an emotional practice is

an embedded practice that produces for the person, an expected or

unexpected emotional alteration in the inner and outer streams of
experience. . . . Emotional practices make people problematic objects
to themselves. The emotional practice radiates through the person’s
body and streams of experience, giving emotional culmination to
thoughts, feelings and actions. ~p. 89!

Teachers College Record Volume 103, Number 6, December 2001, pp. 1056–1080
Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University
0161-4681
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1057

As an emotional practice, teaching activates, colors, and expresses the

feelings and actions of teachers and those they influence. Teachers can
enthuse their students or bore them, be approachable to or stand-offish
with parents, trust their colleagues or be suspicious of them. All teaching is
therefore inextricably emotional—by design or default.
Recent years have seen efforts to remedy the neglect of emotion in the
fields of teaching and teacher development. This work highlights the vir-
tues of caring ~Acker, 1992; Noddings, 1992; Elbaz, 1992!, passionate ~Fried,
1995!, thoughtful ~Clark, 1995!, and tactful ~van Manen, 1995! teaching. It
also points to the importance of cultivating greater hope ~Fullan, 1997!,
attentiveness ~Elbaz, 1992!, and emotional intelligence ~Day, 1998; Fullan,
1999; Goleman, 1995, 1998! among teachers and to the significance of
emotionality in particular areas of the curriculum such as arts education
~e.g. Eisner, 1986!.
This literature provides a counterdiscourse to more technical and cog-
nitive science-driven conceptions of teaching that dominate the language
of educational policy and administration. At the same time, though, it
tends to represent teachers’ emotions and emotionality in personal, psy-
chological, and individual terms. Becoming a tactful, caring, or passionate
teacher is treated as largely a matter of personal disposition, moral com-
mitment, or private virtue, rather than of how particular ways of organizing
teaching shape teachers’ emotional experiences.
More contextual understandings of emotions are evident in studies of
the emotional expectations for and realities of other occupations ~Ashforth
& Humphrey, 1993; Fineman, 1993! such as nursing ~Chambliss, 1996!,
social work ~Satyamurti, 1981!, debt collection ~Rafaeli & Sutton, 1991!,
flight attendancy ~Hochschild, 1983!, and detective work ~Stenross & Klein-
man, 1989!. Just as people experience and express emotions differently
from one culture to another, they are also expected to display particular
emotions that are appropriate for different occupations. For example, debt
collectors are expected to cultivate and convey a sense of irritation ~Rafaeli
& Sutton, 1991!; whereas medical practitioners are expected to show dis-
tanced concern ~Chambliss, 1996!. The recurrent emotional experiences
that people have in their respective occupations affect their identities and
their relationships with clients in distinctive ways. Each occupation and its
culture has different emotional expectations, contours, and effects on work-
ers and their clients. Teaching is no exception.
Looking at teaching through a broader, more contextualized view of
emotion sensitizes us to the changing context of teachers’ emotions within
the special work life of teaching. It also takes discussion of emotions in
education beyond honorable and sacred ideals of love, care, trust, and
support towards a more profane realm of unsettling and darker emotions
in teaching such as guilt, shame, anger, jealousy, frustration, and fear ~Fine-
1058 Teachers College Record

man, 1993!. In this latter vein, a few studies do already explore the emo-
tional “underlife” of teaching in relation to the adverse emotional effects
on teachers of high-stakes inspection processes ~ Jeffrey & Woods, 1996!;
stress-inducing reform strategies ~Blackmore, 1996; Dinham & Scott, 1997;
Nias, 1991; Troman & Woods, 2000; Woods, Jeffrey, Troman, & Boyle, 1997;!;
the risks of collaborative teacher research ~Dadds, 1993!; authoritarian lead-
ership styles ~Blase & Anderson, 1995!; and the general speeding-up, inten-
sification, and extensification ~spreading out! of teachers’ work ~Hargreaves,
1994!. Beyond these specific studies, we have no systematic understanding
of how teachers’ emotions are shaped by the variable and changing condi-
tions of their work nor of how these emotions are manifested in teachers’
interactions with students, parents, administrators, and each other. This
paper sets out a preliminary conceptual framework of what I term emotional
geographies of teaching that addresses how teachers’ emotions are embedded
in the conditions and interactions of their work.

THE STUDY
The data on which the paper is based are drawn from a study of the
emotions of teaching and educational change which comprised interviews
with 53 teachers in a range of elementary and secondary schools in Ontario,
Canada. The sample was distributed across 15 varied schools of different
levels and sizes and serving different kinds of communities ~i.e., urban,
rural, suburban!. In each school, we asked principals to identify a sample of
up to four teachers that included the oldest and youngest teachers in the
school, was gender mixed, contained teachers with different orientations to
change, represented a range of subject specializations ~within secondary
schools!, and ~where possible! included at least one teacher from an eth-
nocultural minority.
The interviews lasted for 1 to 1 102 hours and concentrated on eliciting
teachers’ reports of their emotional relationships to their work, their pro-
fessional development, and educational change. A substantial part of the
interview drew on methodological procedures used by Hochschild ~1983!
in her key text on the sociology of emotion, The Managed Heart: The
Commercialization of Human Feeling. It asked teachers to describe particular
episodes of positive and negative emotion with students, colleagues, admin-
istrators, and parents. Because of the range of the data, this paper is largely
based on one category of teachers’ reports about significant emotional
episodes involving interactions with parents.1 In the book-length analysis of
The Emotions of Teaching that we are producing from this study, we also
analyze teachers’ reports of emotional episodes with students, colleagues,
and administrators; we investigate the emotional labor of and ways teachers
managed their emotions with these different groups; we look at the rela-
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1059

tionship between emotions and teachers’ ethnocultural identity; and we

elucidate the nature of teachers’ emotional responses to different forms of
educational change ~Hargreaves, Beatty, Lasky, Schmidt, & James-Wilson,
in press!.
While one-time interviews have limitations as ways of getting others to
access and disclose their own emotions ~and we have therefore been com-
plementing our methodology with longer-term discussion groups!, they do
surface new topics and themes in previously unexplored areas; and they
enable initial patterns and variations in teachers’ emotions to be identified
across different school contexts and different kinds of teachers. And, although
reliance on critical episodes cannot verify overall frequencies of emotional
reactions and experiences, they do highlight what teachers find emotion-
ally significant and compelling in their work.
The interviews were analyzed inductively with the assistance of the com-
puter program Folio Views. Data were extracted electronically, then marked,
coded, and grouped into increasingly larger themes ensuring that all iden-
tified pieces of data were accounted for and included in the framework.

EMOTIONAL UNDERSTANDING
The theoretical framework for this social and organizational analysis of
teachers’ emotions is grounded in two basic concepts: emotional understand-
ing and emotional geographies. According to Denzin ~1984!, emotional
understanding
is an intersubjective process requiring that one person enter into the
field of experience of another and experience for herself the same or
similar experiences experienced by another. The subjective interpre-
tation of another’s emotional experience from one’s own standpoint
is central to emotional understanding. Shared and shareable emotion-
ality lie at the core of what it means to understand and meaningfully
enter into the emotional experiences of another. ~p. 137!
Teaching, learning, and leading all draw upon emotional understanding
as people reach into the past store of their own emotional experience to
interpret and unravel, instantaneously, at-a-glance, the emotional experi-
ences and responses of others. Denzin ~1984! describes how emotional
understanding can be established through a number of means including
emotional “infection” ~spreading optimistic or pessimistic moods to others!,
vicarious emotional understanding ~where we empathize with people’s lives
or predicaments through theatre or literature, for example!, sharing emo-
tional experience ~as when families experience a wedding or bereavement!,
and by developing long-standing, close relationships with others. Extensive
evidence of the importance of emotional understanding among Grade 7
1060 Teachers College Record

and 8 teachers trying to create programs, assessment practices, and school

structures that strengthen their emotional bonds with students is provided
in a previous study titled Learning to Change: Teaching Beyond Subjects and
Standards ~Hargreaves, Earl, Moore, & Manning, 2001!.
Without relationships of emotional understanding, teachers ~indeed any-
one! are prone to experience emotional misunderstanding where they “mis-
take their feelings for the feelings of the other.” ~Denzin, 1984, p. 134!.
Where such close relationships do not exist in schools and teachers do not
know students well ~Sizer, 1992!, teachers can easily misconstrue student
exuberance for hostility or parent respect for agreement, for example.
Here, teachers view students’ emotions as extensions of their own or they
treat students’ emotions stereotypically, attributing typical emotional states
to whole groups such as grade levels, high or low tracks, or entire cultural
minorities, for example.
Emotional misunderstanding strikes at the foundations of teaching and
learning—lowering standards and depressing quality. If we misunderstand
how students are responding, we misunderstand how they learn. Successful
teaching and learning therefore depend on establishing close bonds with
students ~and also with colleagues and parents! and on creating conditions
of teaching that make emotional understanding possible.
Emotional understanding is achieved not just by acts of personal will,
sensitivity, or virtue. It is not simply a result of emotional competence or
exercising emotional intelligence ~Goleman, 1995!. Similarly, emotional mis-
understanding arises not just because of personal flaws or deficiencies in
empathy or other emotional competences. Rather, as Denzin ~1984! argues,
emotional misunderstanding is a pervasive and chronic feature of everyday
interactions where human engagements are not based on the kind of shared
experience that fosters close and common understanding.

EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES
School teaching is full of spurious emotion. Schools are places where bore-
dom is often misinterpreted as studious commitment and frustration or
enthusiasm are viewed as hyperactivity, for example. Willard Waller ~1932!
more than touched on the sources of such misunderstandings, in his dis-
cussion of what he called “the teacher stereotype”:
The teacher stereotype is a thin but impenetrable veil that comes
between the teacher and all other human beings. The teacher can
never know what others are really like because they are not like that
when the teacher is watching them. ~p. 49!
The classroom, like the community, argued Waller, is a place where teach-
ers are necessarily distanced from those immediately around them:
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1061

Social distance is characteristic of the personal entanglements of teach-

ers and students. It is a necessity where the subordination of one
person to another is required, for distance makes possible that reces-
sion of feeling without which the authority of another is not tolera-
ble. . . . Between adult and child is an ineradicable social distance that
seems at times an impassable gulf ~which! . . . arises from the fact that
. . . the adult has found his place in the world and the child has
not. . . . To the natural distance between adult and child is added a
greater distance when the adult is a teacher and the child is a student,
and this distance arises mainly from the fact that the teacher must
give orders to the child. They cannot know each other, for we can
never know a person at whom we only peer through institutional bars.
~pp. 279, 280!

Waller’s ~1932! insights about the role of social distance in teacher-

student and adult-child authority relations are perhaps somewhat cynical by
today’s standards. Nonetheless, they point to how emotional understanding
and misunderstanding in teaching result from what I term emotional geog-
raphies. These consist of
the spatial and experiential patterns of closeness and0or distance in
human interactions and relationships that help create, configure and
color the feelings and emotions we experience about ourselves, our
world and each other.

The concept of emotional geographies helps us identify the supports for

and threats to the basic emotional bonds and understandings of schooling
that arise from forms of distance or closeness in people’s interactions or
relationships. Analysis of data from the emotions project points to several
forms of emotional distance and closeness that can threaten emotional
understanding among teachers, students, colleagues, and parents. This paper
concentrates more on issues of distance rather than closeness and identifies
sociocultural, moral, professional, political, and physical distance as five key
emotional geographies of teaching.2 The paper draws largely on one area
of the data set—teachers’ reports of their interactions with parents—to
illustrate what these emotional geographies of teaching look like in practice.3
It is important to list three caveats to statements regarding emotional
geographies of teaching. First, there are no “natural” or “universal” rules of
emotional geography in teaching or elsewhere. There is no ideal or optimal
closeness or distance between teachers and others that transcends all cul-
tures and work contexts or that is precisely measurable in a universal way
~de Lima, 1997!. The emotional geographies of teacher-parent relations are
typically characterized by greater professional distance in Hong Kong ~Lee,
1996!, for example, than in many parts of South America ~Bernhard &
1062 Teachers College Record

Freire, 1999!. These differences reflect important cross-cultural variations

in how people experience and express different aspects of emotionality in
their lives ~Kitayama & Marcus, 1994!. Like senses of personal space, emo-
tional geographies are culture bound, not context free.
Second, the emotional geographies of human interaction are not only
physical phenomena. We can feel distant from people who are right next to
us, yet close to loved ones who are miles away. Emotions have imaginary
geographies ~Shields, 1991! of psychological closeness or distance as well as
physical ones. Emotional geographies are therefore subjective as well as
objective in nature.4
Third, distance and closeness are not just structural or cultural condi-
tions that shape the interactions between people.5 Teachers, like other
service workers or workers in the caring professions, often invest hard
emotional work or emotional labor in achieving greater emotional close-
ness to or distance from their clients ~Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993!. Emo-
tional geographies of teaching are therefore active accomplishments by
teachers that structure and enculture their work, as much as being struc-
tured and encultured by it. Teachers, in other words, make and remake the
emotional geographies of their interactions with others but not in circum-
stances of their own choosing. I will now examine each of these emotional
geographies more closely.

SOCIOCULTURAL DISTANCE

In today’s rapidly changing world, more and more children belong to

cultures that are different from and unfamiliar to those of their teachers.
Coming predominantly from lower, middle, and upper working-class back-
grounds ~Lindblad & Prieto, 1992! in a profession of limited ethnocultural
diversity ~Darling-Hammond, 1998; Gordon, 2000!, teachers are sociocultu-
rally distanced from many of their students’ families. They often find them-
selves teaching “other people’s children” ~Delpit, 1993!.
For teachers whose mean age is well into the 40s in most Western coun-
tries ~OECD, 1998!, their students often seem, in Bigum and Green’s ~1993!
words, like aliens in the classroom. Likewise, many students’ parents seem
like aliens in the community. All too often, teachers look at students and
parents with growing incomprehension. They are physically, socially, and
culturally removed from the communities in which they teach and do not
know where parents and students are coming from.
This sociocultural distance often leads teachers to stereotype and to be
stereotyped by the communities they serve. This stereotyping rests on more
than Waller’s ~1932! traditional teacher authority. Popkewitz ~1998!, for
example, shows how teachers in poor urban and rural schools use “popu-
lational reasoning” to ascribe characteristics in a blanket way to the stu-
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1063

dents and communities they serve. Teachers often have assumptions and
expectations about parental interest and support that are socioculturally
biased, misconstruing problems of poverty as problems of single mother-
hood or poor parenting generally ~Levin & Riffel, 1997!. The emotional
episode recalled by one teacher in our study described how
~A mother’s! child was just a joy. . . . lovely girl. She was the oldest of
five kids. She was in grade four. She was given so many responsibilities
at home that she seldom had a chance to do her homework. And I
keep on at Mom—“she’s got to get her homework done, she’s in
grade 4, she’s going to get more and more. . . . Don’t you understand
that?” “I’m a working mom ~the parent retorted!! When I was her age
I had to look after the kids.” ~So the teacher arranged for her to stay
in at recess.!. . . . Anyway at the very end of the year, the mom took me
to the office . . . and she said, “Jenny’s never had such a bad teacher. . . .
You say that she’s below level in language and that’s a lie. I know she
can do it—she’s just lazy.”. . . She’s verbally abusing her daughter
who’s a lovely kid. . . . Jenny was there and there were a couple of kids
cleaning up in the classroom, and I felt embarrassed for Jenny. . . . I
couldn’t understand where this mom was coming from. . . . ~I felt! just
so incredulous. . . . I understand that she must be busy—five kids,
she’s busy . . . and yet the child . . . has to have an education. And why
isn’t the mom understanding this? . . . I was hurt because the mom
didn’t realize all that I was doing; but angry and upset at the fact that
the mom didn’t realize what a gem she had in this child.
Teachers may also regard parents’ failure to attend meetings or other
officially organized events as failure to support their children or the school
~Burgess, Herphes, & Moxan, 1991!. In a secondary school that had rapidly
changed from being in a small village to a highly diverse expanding com-
munity, one teacher in our study said, “parents are busy people too, so
when we offer a parent’s night, we don’t get a big population of parents
coming.” Another remarked, “we’re trying to reach out and bring parents
in and involve them more in the life of the school but at the same time,
parents are really stressed and I think parents are sort of abdicating their
responsibility of educating the kids to an institution.”
Other teachers are inclined to measure parenting or “sensitive mother-
ing” of young children against a yardstick of practice that is culturally
skewed towards white middle-class norms ~Vincent & Warren, 1998!. Some
teachers in our study complained, for example, about parents who lied to
cover up their children’s absences, bought their children expensive presents
when they were still suspended from school, let their teenagers drive irrespon-
sibly, failed to prevent their young adolescents from smoking and drinking,
or did not view swearing in class as a problem. However, in a number of
1064 Teachers College Record

working class and ethnocultural groups, swearing is a routine part of ordi-

nary language. Similarly, lying to protect one’s child against an institution
that failed and marginalized oneself, might be viewed as a highly moral and
caring act rather than an immoral dereliction of responsibility.
In a number of cases in our study, teachers were upset that parents did
not seem to care for their children at all.

I find the most frustrating experience is when you phone home and
you can tell by the tone of the parent that they don’t care. They too
have given up. If the parent has given up on their own child, it’s going
to be very difficult for a teacher to get across to a student as well. . . .
We deal with that on a daily basis.

One child in grade six . . . is a very nice kid but I really think mom is
nuts. . . . She had ended up locking him out. She had taken money
from him and then he had taken it back to pay for the camping trip.
She found out and accused him of stealing and so he wasn’t allowed
to go on the camping trip. I felt really bad for the kid. I worry about
him, I guess. I see him in four or five years down the road running
away or decking her. . . . ~I feel! disgust towards his mother.
Teachers’ perceptions that parents did not care for their children pro-
voked responses of incredulity, hopelessness, and even disgust among them.
There was a difference, an otherness about these parents that teachers
found hard to understand. How could they fail to love their children, care
for them properly, or support their education? Teachers were at a loss to
know where these parents were coming from. The sociocultural distance
between them seemed just too great.
Sometimes, the “otherness” of parents and their attitudes toward their
own children is not just mystifying to teachers—it is seen as a source of
danger and personal threat. All but one of these examples in our data were
reported by elementary teachers whose more frequent and intense inter-
actions with difficult or argumentative parents were experienced as more
imminently disturbing to them. Here, parents were not just socioculturally
distanced from the teacher, but also physically too close! Teachers’ com-
ments communicated a sense of dangerous intrusion into or pollution of
their world that the “otherness” of some parents threatened. In all these
cases, teachers made negative judgements and psychologized about “prob-
lem” parents and families, viewed the differences as deficiencies, and stig-
matized parents as “mad,” “crazy,” “nuts,” or “screamers”—thereby
undermining the rationality and legitimacy of their opposition and criti-
cism. Negative attributions to parents and families by teachers included an
African Canadian father from a “split family—father doesn’t talk to mother,
mother doesn’t talk to father”—who, when offered a separate interview,
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1065

“started to ask me ridiculous questions and grill me over the phone about
things that were completely unreasonable and wouldn’t take no for an
answer. . . . and it was just crazy. They’re just venting on you. And that
happens fairly frequently unfortunately.”
Another teacher described how “what we find with kids who have severe
behavioral problems is that very often you’ll see these kids come out of
single-parent households and sometimes you’ll find that the relationship
between the child and let’s say, the mother, is an extraordinarily close one,
to the point where the child has . . . almost a kind of a special role and . . .
the mother inadvertently makes a career of advocating for the child,” of her
child’s “dysfunction,” giving “her an opportunity to organize her life around
that. . . . This particular child is very bonded to his mother, and it’s a black
family.” In this instance, the mother had felt that this teacher’s refusal to
grant hall passes to her son was “a racist issue.” In these cases, parents were
not merely different; they were irrationally and intrusively dangerous. They
were “screamers” who “blurted” into the teacher’s face, “grilled” them about
their judgements or “vented” on them.
Strangeness or “otherness” arises out of complex interactions between
difference and distance. Stereotyping and stigmatization often occur where
actual interactions between culturally different groups are infrequent or
superficial ~Goffman, 1963!—a product of physical distance between them
that I will discuss later. They may also result from people’s willful assertions
or unwitting assumptions about the superiority or normality of their own
class or culture compared to others ~Popkewitz, 1998; Said, 1994!—a fea-
ture of the political distance I will also describe later. Teachers’ attributions
of “otherness” to seemingly difficult parents can therefore result from poor
knowledge or presumptuousness on their part.
Equally however, the tendencies of service workers’ and “caring” profes-
sionals to blame and complain about their clients can result from feelings
of powerlessness and helplessness—often referred to as low senses of self-
efficacy. Here, “othering” is a way of coming to terms with a felt inability to
make a difference in clients’ lives—blaming clients themselves for any fail-
ure to respond ~Ashton & Webb, 1985: Rosenholtz, 1989!. Blame, in other
words, frequently results from a suppressed sense of guilt or shame about
being unable to fulfill one’s job or calling and to care for one’s clients
sufficiently ~Hargreaves & Tucker, 1991; Scheff, 1994!, especially when down-
sizing accelerates change processes or other work reforms reduce one’s
capacity to be effective in the job ~Hochschild, 1983!.
Similarly, when the demands of caring feel overwhelming ~e.g., when
there are too many needy students and needy parents as well!, teachers may
try to insulate themselves against burnout by creating boundaries or buffer
zones between themselves and their clients ~Epstein, 1998!. Social and med-
ical workers, for example, sometimes routinize their relationships with cli-
1066 Teachers College Record

ents to minimize the need for expressing empathy and concern ~Chambliss,
1996; Satyamurti, 1981!. In short, the sociocultural distance that sometimes
separates teachers from parents is not always or only the product of poor
knowledge, presumptuousness, or prejudice. It can also result from teach-
ers’ efforts to protect themselves from burnout in intensified work condi-
tions that make it hard to care for people effectively.
None of this is meant to deny that, as a cross section of society, some
parents are indeed difficult and even dangerous. Many parents, like people
generally, are far from perfect. Yet too often teachers see obstacles rather
than opportunities in the changing lives and cultures of their students,
families, and communities. Stronger efforts and better working conditions
are needed to help teachers build better emotional understanding with
many parents and students and bridge the sociocultural gap that separates
them. Otherwise, parental deficiencies will remain exaggerated in many
teachers’ eyes. Deficiencies will sometimes be imputed unfairly, and teach-
ers will have less access to the cultural knowledge and emotional under-
standing that could help them deal more effectively with the most troublesome
parents.

MORAL DISTANCE
Emotions are moral phenomena. They are closely bound up with and
triggered by our purposes. At the same time, emotions help us choose
among a wide variety of options in a highly complex world by narrowing
down our choices ~Brody & Hall, 1995!. As Oatley and Jenkins ~1996!
argue, “in real life, a purely logical search through all the possibilities is
not possible. Emotions . . . are necessary to bridge across the unexpected
and the unknown to guide reason, and to give priorities among multiple
goals.” People experience happiness when they are achieving their pur-
poses or are suspended from them—as in holidays or listening to music,
for example ~Oatley, 1991!. Achievement and success bring satisfaction
and pleasure.
In the emotions project, teachers experienced positive emotions with
parents when they received gratitude, appreciation, agreement, and sup-
port from them. As one teacher said, “the more comments that I hear back
then I know I am still, after 25 years, on the right track and still somehow
getting to the students and still relating to the students in a positive way.”
Another remarked on how “this morning, I was totally spoiled with parents
who were saying that I taught their kids a lot.” Such appreciation for
teachers’ dedication and success was “energizing—it makes you want to go
out and try new things.” “It opens up creativity and makes you want to
risk”; “it picks you up—makes you feel good.” “It erodes some of the stress
that’s come along with all the other changes that have happened in edu-
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1067

cation”; “you’re encouraged to try harder and do more in your program.”

As one teacher put it, “if people keep throwing you little pieces of food,
you will keep coming back.” Teachers welcome, indeed crave, this positive
feedback not only from present and former students ~Hargreaves, 1999;
Lortie, 1975!, but from parents too.
Clear indications of moral agreement and support as well as apprecia-
tion create a kind of closeness between teachers and parents. Now, as
Kitayama and Marcus ~1994! argue, this need for positive feedback about
personal success may be greater in Western and especially American culture
where individual achievement is prized highly; and the expectation to feel
something good all the time is culturally widespread. Indeed, these obser-
vations may explain why, despite a widespread equality ethic in teaching
where teachers are reluctant to acknowledge that any colleague is better
than any other ~Campbell, 1996!, teachers in our study welcomed being
singled out publicly by parents as special or better than their colleagues—in
school council meetings, letters to the principal, or donations to the school,
for example. Within the North American context of our study, therefore,
moral closeness with and support from students, parents, colleagues, and
administrators reinforces teachers’ sense of purpose and is a source of
positive and energizing emotion for them.
By contrast, negative emotion can occur when there is a great moral
distance between teachers and others, when teachers feel their purposes
are being threatened or have been lost. Nias ~1991!, for example, has
described how the English government’s National Curriculum created senses
of grief, loss, bereavement, and ~literally! demoralization among those who
first had to implement it. Similarly, when teachers’ purposes are at odds
with those around them, anxiety, frustration, anger, and guilt affect every-
one involved. Such emotions can be educationally damaging, leading teach-
ers and others to retreat inwards and lose energy and enthusiasm for their
work ~Goleman, 1995!.
The effects of moral distance and conflicting purposes were especially
apparent in teachers’ interactions with parents. One example was a parent
who did not understand current teaching approaches and why their child
may not have been achieving and who demanded to see curriculum docu-
ments, insisting that the teacher should be teaching differently. Another
parent who was a volunteer in elementary school and who was seen as being
overly ambitious for her child, went behind the teacher’s back to solicit
additional, more difficult work from the teacher of the next grade. The
teacher complained that “she went to the next grade up hoping that if he
knew all of this material then the next year he would just breeze through it.
She has sort of lost the purpose of having a program that is current.”
Another parent volunteer followed a teacher’s class to the computer labo-
ratory and argued that the program being pursued there was insufficiently
1068 Teachers College Record

rigorous ~whereas the teacher’s contrary purpose was to get students feeling
comfortable with computers!.
In these and other cases, teachers were questioned about their compe-
tence, expertise, program decisions, and assessment practices—at heart,
their very purposes. Teachers were angry and upset when parents criticized
their purposes, judgement, expertise, and basic professionalism. Indeed,
questioning of their academic purposes and expertise was the strongest
source of negative emotion among teachers in our study. If anything, as the
foregoing examples from elementary schools reveal, physical closeness in
terms of more frequent interactions between teachers and parents in par-
ent councils or elsewhere can exacerbate the anxieties and conflicts occa-
sioned by differences of purpose—unless the means exist to work through
these differences together.
Moral difference and distance need not, of themselves, be problems in
schooling or teaching. Indeed, as Maurer ~1996! argues, we often learn
more from people who are different from us than ones who are the same.
The point in organizations is not to hope that people already share the
same goals. In a complex world of shifting values and great cultural diver-
sity, this aspiration is increasingly impractical ~Hargreaves, 1994!. More
than this, taking refuge in small, self-affirming communities of tightly shared
values—as, for example, in many schools of choice—runs the risk of devel-
oping organizations and cultures that are balkanized, inward, and exclu-
sionary. In successful organizations, rather, people acknowledge and
understand each other’s purposes, and try and work together towards cre-
ating more common ones. Indeed, this very process of narrowing distance
and working through difference makes organizations emotionally vital ~Gole-
man, 1998!. Our data suggest that teachers’ interactions with parents are
often difficult because the means to work through these differences of
purpose are absent. This brings us to the problem of professional distance.

PROFESSIONAL DISTANCE

The social distance between teacher and child or teacher and parent, of
which Waller ~1932! spoke, is not only a result of adult-child authority
relations or even the institutionalized office of teaching. It is also a matter
of professional distance. As Grumet ~1988! points out, this is a historically
gendered issue.

Female teachers complied with the rationalization and bureaucratiza-

tion that pervaded the common schools as the industrial culture sat-
urated the urban areas. Rather than emulate the continuous and
extended relation of a mother and her maturing child, they acqui-
esced to the graded schools—to working with one age group for one
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1069

year at a time. Rather than demand the extended relation that would
bind them over time to individual children, they agreed to large
group instruction where the power of the peer collective was at least
as powerful as the mother0child bond. ~p. 55!

In many ways, schoolteaching has become an occupation with a feminine

caring ethic that is trapped within a rationalized and bureaucratized struc-
ture. In addition, the ambivalent and uncertain status of teaching has also
pushed teachers to clamor ~rightly! for greater reward and recognition, but
in the dubious direction of “classical professionalism” ~Hargreaves & Good-
son, 1996!.
While many core activities of teaching and learning require close emo-
tional understanding between teachers, parents, and students, “classical”
professionalism has been modeled on the traditionally male preserves of
medicine and law that require professionals to avoid emotional entangle-
ments with their clients’ problems and to maintain professional distance
from them ~Grumet, 1988!. The dilemma for teachers is that although they
are supposed to care for their students, they are expected to do so in a
somewhat clinical and detached way—to mask their emotions with parents
and control them when they are around students. The “classical” criteria of
professional autonomy and independence ~Friedson, 1994; Johnson, 1972;
Larson, 1977! help make the job of masking and maintaining emotional
distance easier. In these respects, bureaucratic regulation and classical pro-
fessional aspirations conspire together to distance teachers from those around
them. As Grumet ~1988! reflects about women educators especially, “when
we attempt to rectify our humiliating situation by emulating the protection-
ism and elitism of the other ‘professions,’ we subscribe to patriarchy’s
contempt for the familiar, for the personal . . . for us” ~p. 58!.
In our own study, teachers most experienced negative emotion in their
interactions with parents when their expertise, instructional knowledge,
and judgements for which they felt uniquely qualified were questioned.
Teacher after teacher was irate or incredulous about parents’ failure to
understand teachers’ practices. A secondary teacher who had previously
worked in industry portrayed the inviolable and almost sacrosanct nature of
his expertise in the following way:

Parents think that they’re the experts in education and it amazes me.
I sent a note home saying that ~the father! wasn’t qualified ~to criticize
the teacher’s assessment practices! and this got him a little annoyed.
And we had conversations. And I said, “what would you think if I
presumed to walk into your office and tell you how to do your job
after you’ve been there for however long you’ve been at your job. And
yet you think you can comment on my job? You’re not even qualified.
1070 Teachers College Record

Good, you’re concerned about your kid. But don’t think you’re going
to intimidate me into giving him more marks, because you’re not. . . .”
An elementary teacher who complained about a parent criticizing her cur-
riculum programming in computer-based education
was disturbed in the fact that she was questioning what I was doing as
a teacher. I’m the one with the expertise! I’m the one with the edu-
cation! I’m the one with the degree! She is to be there to help.
In cases like these, teachers rarely seemed to doubt whether their own
judgements might be flawed or incorrect. They made remarks such as “I
was so sure that I was not wrong,” “they still felt that they were right and I
still felt I was right,” and “the only thing that has really changed has been
my attitude towards her ~the mother!.”
Teachers who preserve their “classical” professional autonomy by keep-
ing parents at a distance might protect themselves from parental criticism,
but they also insulate themselves from praise and support. While positive
feedback from parents was the most frequently cited source of positive
emotion for teachers, many teachers felt it was all too rare. Teachers did
not hear enough positive comments from parents. Parents did not see them
often enough. It was “too easy to shut your door” in teaching. Positive
parental feedback, in this sense, seems to be embedded in a scarce emo-
tional economy of teacher-parent interactions, especially at the secondary
level where the norm of professional distance severely constrains opportu-
nities for more regular and meaningful interaction. Here especially, the
problems of professional distance are further compounded by difficulties
of physical distance in teacher-parent interactions.

PHYSICAL DISTANCE

The most self-evident emotional geography of teaching is a physical one.

Emotional understanding and the establishment of emotional bonds with
teachers and parents require proximity and some measure of intensity,
frequency, and continuity in interaction. We cannot know or understand
people we rarely meet; nor can we be understood by them in return. Our
data suggest that secondary school teaching is a place where the difficulties
of physical distance are especially acute—where teachers and parents are
mainly engaged not in relationships but in strings of infrequent and dis-
connected interactions ~Lasky, 2000!.
In secondary schools, reported communications with parents were over-
whelmingly episodic and infrequent. They took place either in staged meet-
ings or through non-face-to-face mechanisms of written notes and telephone
calls. Over half the incidents of positive emotion reported by teachers took
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1071

place at parents’ nights when teachers were praised and thanked for their
efforts. Yet, a British study of parents’ nights shows that in the 8 minutes or
so they talk together, secondary teachers tend to set the agenda, dominate
the talk, and show little responsiveness to parents’ knowledge about their
own children ~Walker & MacLure, 1999!.
By contrast, only two citations of positive emotion among elementary
teachers in our study referred to parents’ nights—both of these involving
teachers of older, middle-school-age children. Of the remaining nine inci-
dents of positive emotion cited by secondary teachers, four took place
through the indirect means of the telephone or written communication
~compared to one at the elementary level!. Only one positive communica-
tion cited by secondary teachers took place in an informal setting. This
involved a teacher in our only rural secondary school site who described
positive encounters with a parent in the community. In elementary schools,
by contrast, half the instances of positive emotion ~the largest category!
involved informal discussions with parents and parent volunteers in and
around the school.
Similar patterns occurred in teachers’ reports of negative emotional inci-
dents with parents. Among secondary teachers, the vast majority of such
episodes took place on the telephone ~11 out of 16 cases!. These largely
concerned problems of attendance and behavior. Three more took place in
writing, and just one occurred on parent’s night ~where its stage-managed
nature helps insulate teachers against the possibility of negative emotional
outbursts!. Only one reported episode of negative emotion at the secondary
level occurred in a more informal setting. Conversely, elementary teachers
reported negative emotional episodes as being more spread out—with four
instances occurring informally with parent volunteers, two taking place
when parents came into the school, three happening on the telephone,
and one being in writing.
Just as secondary teachers seem to have less emotionally intense class-
room relationships with students compared to their elementary colleagues
~Hargreaves, 1999!, our data suggest they have less emotionally intense
relationships with students’ parents as well. These interactions seem to be
infrequent and intermittent and to take place primarily through indirect
communication or at formal events. To the sociocultural distance that cultural
diversity and changing families often place between teachers and parents,
secondary schools add a professional distance of relatively formal and stage-
managed interactions, as well as a physical distance of infrequent and non-
face-to-face communication that can make emotional understanding and
strong partnerships between teachers and parents even more difficult to
establish. Together, these emotional geographies of secondary teaching
pose significant threats to the possibilities for better emotional understand-
ing between teachers and the changing parents and students they serve.
1072 Teachers College Record

POLITICAL DISTANCE
Emotions are not just a personal matter. They are bound up with people’s
experiences of power and powerlessness. Teaching, in this sense, is rife with
emotional politics. Blase and Anderson ~1995!, for example, describe how
teachers experience anger, resignation, depression, anxiety, or ~among favored
insiders! satisfaction when they work for authoritarian principals. Similar
emotions occur in response to intrusive, unwanted, and inescapable imposed
reforms ~ Jeffrey & Woods, 1996!.
Although teachers sometimes endeavor to put parents professionally at a
distance, in some circumstances parents seem too powerful and get physi-
cally too close. The elementary teachers described earlier recalled parents
grilling them, venting on them or “blurting” things into their faces. Inter-
estingly, much of our vocabulary for emotion and for power is also a spatial,
geographical one. People are central or peripheral, “up” or “down,” on the
inside, or “out of things” ~Stallybrass & White, 1986!. As Kemper ~1995!
argues, “a very large number of human emotions can be understood as
responses to the power and0or status meanings and implications of situa-
tions” ~p. 125!. Kemper’s work shows that increases in our power make us
feel more secure because we are protected. Increased status leads to feel-
ings of happiness, satisfaction, and contentment along with pride when we
are responsible for the increased status or gratitude if someone else is.
Conversely, reductions in power lead to feelings of fear and anxiety that
result from compulsion; and losses of status create feelings of anger at
those who are responsible, shame if we hold ourselves responsible, and
depression if the situation seems irredeemable to us.
Power relationships with parents are often unclear, uncertain, and con-
tested. Although teachers are more able to fend off parental criticisms
about their instructional judgements and expertise, in the areas of behavior
and attendance they often have to rely on active parental support to achieve
their goals. In our own study, parents’ failure to support or “backup” teach-
ers in relation to their children’s attendance or behavior problems was the
second most common source of negative emotion in teachers and was
manifested in feelings of exasperation and powerlessness. Teachers felt they
could not coerce parents legally into cooperating—“the law ties our hands
on it. If the parent allows the kid to stay home, there’s nothing I can do
about that.” Or they might be afraid of parents—“I don’t have the nerve to
. . . confront the parents about lying.” Or they would feel powerless to
combat the extensive socialization effects of the home:
I thought I had their support in how to deal with this situation. When
he is getting these sorts of rewards at home for negative behavior
there is very little that I can do here. . . . I felt a sense of hopelessness
in working with this child to help him solve some of his problems.
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1073

In the emotional geography of schooling, many teachers prefer to be

politically superior to parents, securing their active support, rather than
experience parents having power over them.
When teachers were asked to describe an incident when they had had to
mask their emotions to fit the situation, by far the largest number of cases
concerned interactions with parents. Examples of how teachers had to
mask or manage their emotions in such encounters included the following:

I am not good at having people yell at me. . . . whenever something

happens like that, that gets really icky, I get tingles up the back of my
spine and get butterflies in my stomach. It is like when I go on stage.
I get nervous as soon as I end the situation, a feeling of calm comes
over me. I am really good at dissipating that kind of thing. . . . I try to
calm it down. I felt lots of fear. I wondered what he was going to do.
Is he going to go to the vice principal? Is he going to hit me?

There’s been the odd time where they come in and have been very
aggressive. And I’ve got to remain calm and stick to the issue of how
we can help this student without getting involved in the emotional
part of it. And I find it, personally, very difficult to try and defuse a
person who’s upset, so I have to pretend that I’m focussing when
inside I’m all upset. I find that difficult dealing with upset parents.

She was completely misinformed by her son that everybody is “neck-

ing” out in the yard. That is absolutely not true. I was angry. I could
feel the adrenaline starting to flow at all these accusations that were
completely unfounded—adrenaline and anger. . . . As a result we dis-
cussed it. I tried to stay calm which I managed to do. She went away,
she was happy and realized that . . . the situation as she saw it wasn’t
correct.

When power plays are at work, interactions with parents can provoke
fear, anger, anxiety, and other disturbing emotions. It is not surprising that
teachers sometimes want to avoid, minimize, or stage manage these inter-
actions. Goleman ~1995! describes this masking and management as emo-
tional competence or intelligence. He sees it as integral to achieving success
in the workplace. By contrast, Hochschild ~1983! describes the masking in
terms of emotional labor which is sacrificial, exploitative, and inauthentic.
“This labor,” she says, “requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order
to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind
in others” ~p. 7!.
For Hochschild ~1983!, emotional labor is largely negative. It involves
trading in part of the self to motivate clients or one’s subordinates within
the organization in exchange for job security, financial reward, and prof-
1074 Teachers College Record

itability. In education, for example, Blackmore ~1996! argues that women

principals who work in repressive policy environments have become the
emotional middle managers of educational reform, motivating their staffs
to implement the impractical and unpalatable policies of government—and
losing something of themselves and their health in the process. Indeed,
Boler ~1999! criticizes Goleman’s ~1995! concept of emotional intelligence
as being one that “packages marketable solutions for success and self-
improvement” ~p. 65! and adapts people emotionally to the imperatives of
organizational profitability.
Alternatively, others argue that Hochschild’s ~1983! concept of emo-
tional labor underplays the pleasures of acting and playfulness ~e.g.,
Fineman, 1993!. In her Marxian inspired analysis, Hochschild perhaps over-
estimates the exchange value of emotional labor ~as in the profit value or
emotional “selling out” of a salesperson’s smile!, at the expense of the use
value of such labor ~what that labor creates and recreates in oneself and in
others when it leads to motivation, engagement, fulfillment, or happiness!
as an act of sincere emotional giving.
Whether emotional masking is a mark of competence or exploitation is
best settled empirically by research on different occupations. Emotional
labor may be fulfilling or exploitative depending on the power relation-
ships and purposes at stake in the workplace. In their review of emotional
labor in a range of occupations, Ashforth & Humphrey ~1993! conclude
that masking or manufacturing emotions to fit the setting leads to compe-
tence and fulfillment when people can act in accordance with their own
values, can identify with the expectations of the role, and are in tune with
the emotions required of it. Emotion management and masking are more
laborious and damaging, however, when workers are obliged to sacrifice
their values or do not identify with the job and its purposes—when, in
other words, they are casualties of moral and political distance.
One crucial study for understanding the emotional politics and labor of
teacher-parent interactions concerns emotional labor among detectives.6
Stenross and Kleinmann ~1989! found that only the emotional labor that
detectives performed with victims was troublesome to them. When working
with criminals, however, emotional labor was enjoyable. Criminals were the
“real stuff ” of detective work that detectives looked forward to the most.
Emotional displays by criminals were judged inauthentic by detectives and
therefore discarded as not requiring any attention. Victims’ emotions, how-
ever, were judged to be authentic and in need of attention, yet they did not
help detectives solve their cases. Victims who had been burgled or mugged
tried to give detectives instructions and tell them what leads to follow, yet
were often unsupportive or unappreciative of their efforts. Detectives none-
theless had to treat victims respectfully since they might complain to super-
visors and accuse the detectives of being unsupportive. In the face of possible
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1075

reprimand and pressure from above, detectives regarded victims as emo-

tional burdens to be endured as they carried out their work.
Whereas parents and students are not, of course, victims and criminals
respectively, the analogy does work in the sense that, like detectives, teach-
ers work with two different groups. Students are seen as core to the work
and in a position of lesser power; and parents are regarded as less core, but
still influential and unavoidable as well as being in a more ambivalent
relation of power. Teachers might therefore experience the emotional labor
of working with parents as more rewarding if schools and teachers could
move parents from the periphery to the core of teachers’ work, if the
changing power relations of teacher-parent interaction in a climate of increas-
ing accountability could be acknowledged and addressed more openly, and
if differences of purpose could be negotiated more explicitly.
In summary, the emotional politics of teacher-parent relations are com-
plex and difficult. This is because at the secondary level many teachers’
tend to place a physical and professional distance between themselves and
parents. More widely, threat and anxiety emerge when teachers’ and par-
ents’ purposes are dissonant, cultures are different, power relations are
ambivalent, and interactions seem physically too close.

CONCLUSIONS
Emotions are integral to teaching. Yet this means more than advocating less
rationalization and more passion in teaching and more than cultivating
more caring dispositions or greater emotional intelligence among teachers.
We also need to understand why teachers’ emotions are configured in
particular ways in the changing and varying organizational life of schools.
The conceptual framework of emotional geographies provides a way to
make sense of these forms and combinations of distance and closeness that
threaten the emotional understanding that is foundational to high stan-
dards of teaching and learning. Attending to the sociocultural, moral, pro-
fessional, physical, and political aspects of emotional geography in teaching
may help us better understand how to create stronger emotional under-
standing in teachers’ relationships with students, colleagues, parents, and
others, as well as how to avert or alleviate threats to that understanding.
Increased contact and greater physical as well as professional closeness
are not themselves sufficient to develop strong emotional understanding,
however. There must also be efforts to acknowledge, empathize with, dis-
cuss, and reconcile the different purposes that teachers and others have for
children’s education that otherwise put a damaging moral distance between
them. This means redefining teacher professionalism from a “classical”
stance of professional autonomy from clients to a stance of openness with
them where parents become partners at the core of teachers’ work ~Har-
1076 Teachers College Record

greaves & Goodson, 1996!. As our elementary teacher data show, where
great moral distances exist between teachers and parents, where their pur-
poses are at odds with each other, and where there are no means or desires
to resolve them, physically close and frequent interactions will only magnify
conflict and frustration between them. More accountability or “parent power”
in this situation will only exacerbate teachers’ anxieties and increase the
extent of masking in their interactions.
Political distance is also a threat to people whose interactions are physi-
cally close. Where teacher-parent relations are characterized by power plays
more than partnerships, negative emotion will always surface. Our data
suggest that physically closer, more frequent interactions between teachers
and parents will actually exacerbate negative emotions between them unless
educators also make serious efforts to be less professionally distant in these
interactions, unless teachers and parents are more politically open towards
and respectful of each other, and unless both parties show more readiness
to listen to and engage with each other’s purposes for their children’s
education.
In a culturally diverse, increasingly unequal, and rapidly changing world,
building strong, reciprocal partnerships with others to develop the depth of
emotional understanding on which successful learning among and caring
for all students depends has never been more necessary. Yet in a world
where parents are more demanding, teaching is changing, the cultural
differences are widening, and most teachers are overloaded by and unsup-
ported in meeting rampant reform obligations, teachers’ understandable
inclination is to close their classroom doors, contain the demand, and
manage any remaining interactions with parents as best as they can. Iron-
ically, however, building better emotional understanding with students and
their parents really requires teachers to “move towards the danger” ~Mau-
rer, 1996! in working with those of whom they have been most anxious and
afraid, to form better, more productive alliances ~Hargreaves & Fullan,
1998!. In short, it requires teachers to redefine the emotional geographies
of teacher-parent relationships and to make these relationships a core
rather than peripheral part of their work.7
Better emotional understanding and the quality of education that comes
from it also requires a reversal in many educational policies and policy
processes ~Darling-Hammond, 1998!. Policy must refrain from putting teach-
ers back in their classroom boxes by overloading the curriculum, increasing
the content focus, creating a profusion of learning standards, limiting teach-
ers’ time out of class to interact with others, and standardizing their inter-
actions with those around them. It must also beware of seeking to increase
the power of stakeholders other than teachers in education through parent
councils, school choice, or greater accountability, unless this empowerment
is embedded in parallel commitments to improving relationships between
 Emotional Geographies of Teaching 1077

these stakeholders and teachers. Instead, policy must provide a framework

that gives teachers the discretion, the conditions, the expectations, and the
opportunities to develop and exercise their emotional competence of car-
ing for, of learning from, and of developing emotional understanding among
all those whose lives and actions affect the children that they teach.

This paper is drawn from a project on The Emotions of Teaching and Educational Change
funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes
1 Analyses of other parts of our database and of the interview schedule that prompted it
can be found in Hargreaves ~2000!, Lasky ~2000!, and Schmidt ~2000!.
2 Although these five emotional geographies are the most prominent in the data, others
are also plausible and there remains considerable room for further development of the theory
of emotional geographies.
3 More detailed presentations of the project’s findings are available elsewhere concern-
ing teachers’ interviews with parents ~Hargreaves, 2000; Lasky, 2000!, with students ~Har-
greaves, 2000!, among secondary school department heads ~Schmidt, 2000!, and with other
colleagues and senior administrators ~Hargreaves et al., in press!.
4 In this sense, space is like time in being a relative and subjective as well as an absolute
and objective construction ~Hargreaves, 1994; Hawking, 1991!.
5 The concept of emotional labor is described later in the paper.
6 I am especially grateful to my graduate assistant, Sue Winton, for drawing this work and
her own insightful interpretation of it to my attention.
7 These same points apply to and are confirmed by our data on teacher’ interactions and
relationships with students and colleagues.

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ANDY HARGREAVES is Co-director of and Professor in the International

Centre for Educational Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education of the University of Toronto and is Professor in Residence,
National College for School Leadership, University of Nottingham in England.
Hargreaves is the author and editor of more than 20 books in the fields of
teacher development, the culture of school, and educational reform.