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In this essay, the author reflects on the importance of accepting and expressing emotion in teachers' lived experiences. By centering emotion work in preservice teacher praxis, teacher educators can make emotion work visible and assign value to it.
I remember a moment when I felt something break open in a class I was teaching with preservice English language arts (ELA) teachers. My students had been working in pairs to write and perform short skits addressing an issue of practice that had more than one appropriate teacher response. The last pair to perform had framed their skit with a question: What is the line between the personal and the professional? In their imagined scenario, a student joined a teacher on a bench outside school and shared that she was pregnant and did not know what to do.
I do not remember how the skit resolved. What I remember is that, while the class sat in a circle around the performers, one student announced in dismay that she was overwhelmed by "just how much" responsibility there was in teaching. Another student worried about the legal implications of advising a pregnant student; still another expressed concern about not attending fully to the student's vulnerability in that moment. Preservice teachers began talking with one another and over each other, and my first thought was that I should have let them have this space sooner.
As the preservice teachers talked, my thoughts drifted to my own early years teaching high school ELA, when I often struggled with how distinct the roles of human and professional seemed to be for me as a teacher. I sometimes hid my thoughts about school policies or events to protect administration or other teachers' reputations. The one time students made me cry, I left the room because I thought I should not cry at work. While my preservice teachers debated the role of a teacher in a student's personal life, I wondered about the role of a teacher's personal life in the lives of students. I shared these thoughts with the class when I eventually joined them in discussion.
I also told them about Ann, a sixth-grade ELA teacher who once shared a story with me about telling her students she was pregnant, only to...