Karl Kitching

It's the Little Things: Exploring the Importance of Commonplace Events for Early-Career Teachers' Motivation.

This paper seeks to provide a rationale for further researching the everyday events that keep teachers motivated or that discourage them. We put forward the idea that routine Affect Triggering Incidents (ATIs) are an important area for researchers to investigate in terms of how they impact teacher motivation and resilience. Two groups of participants in separate consecutive studies kept weekly diaries of incidents that made them feel good or bad about themselves in their work as teachers (Study 1) and added weekly inventories of their commitment to teaching as well as measures of self‐efficacy and self‐esteem (Study 2). An analysis of the ATIs in these diaries revealed that student engagement and student achievement are major factors in incidents triggering regular positive feelings while students’ behaviour and perceived difficulties around home influences are major factors in regular dissatisfaction. These everyday ATIs are important in the sense that they correlate significantly with measures of commitment to teaching, especially in the case of positive ATIs.

What Makes Teachers Tick? Sustaining Events in New Teachers' Lives.

To investigate what keeps teachers motivated on a day‐to‐day basis, we traced the importance of routinely encountered affective episodes. Significant research on emotions already highlights the relative importance of positive versus negative episodes, the importance of perceived origins of events and the need to differentiate between the frequency and affective intensity of episodes. Survey reports from 749 recently qualified primary teachers in Ireland strongly suggest the absence of positive experiences undermines commitment and efficacy rather than the occurrence of negative events. Furthermore, while remote structural factors may heavily influence teaching, it is the perception of events at micro‐level that impinge most strongly on motivation. Finally, the importance of particular experiences was, crucially, more related to their frequency than intensity. A major implication for teachers’ job satisfaction is the suggestion that while adverse episodes may be inevitably experienced, positive events (tha...

An excavation of the racialised politics of viability underpinning education policy in Ireland

This paper unearths the improvisational nature of Irish state exigencies and their central contribution to racialisation in and through schooling. The analysis unravels white-Irishness through gender and Traveller membership, in terms of its links to the states early efforts at intelligibility and associated politics of desirable and viable subject regulation. It is suggested that mutating theocentric, mercantile and liberal equality paradigms attempt to privilege certain subjects as more viable than others in contemporary Ireland through race, but also class, gender and other vectors of power. Three technologies of potential exclusion through inclusionary state discourses are identified for minority ethnic school subjects. These are language support, pop-anti-racist terminology and the politics of school access and school provision. Ultimately it is argued that supporting ‘integration’ and ‘anti-racism’ in Irish education might require conceptual and political vigilance of the terms of the ‘inclusive state’ at all times.

Teachers’ negative experiences and expressions of emotion: being true to yourself or keeping you in your place?

This paper examines teachers’ experiences and displays of negative emotion as a means of partially exploring how identities at work might be formed and regulated. It uses the concepts of emotional labour and subjectivation to interrogate the negative emotions teachers may experience and/or express at work. It suggests that emotion display rules are developed and come to partially define the teacher self in tandem with overlapping, synthetically discussed discourses of the teacher as moral/caring agent, expert and purveyor of social control/social efficiency. The field of emotional labour is explored here using diary entries of teachers who were between their second and fifth year of teaching in Irish primary schools. Teachers’ experiences are read with less of a concern for the original ‘authenticity’ thesis of emotional labour in order to foreground an analysis of how certain truths about teachers’ emotions are legitimated and solidified in the labour cycle. It is argued that spaces for multiple teacher identities and interrogation of emotional display must be carved out in teacher education. This space might include an acknowledgement of ambivalence towards the profession.

Authoring oneself and being authored as a competent teacher

What kind of self is being made available and denied to student teachers as they participate in life in their teaching practice schools? In addressing this question empirically, the article seeks to show the forms of meaning being made and experienced by student teachers and the identities that are authored, authorised and constrained. A sociocultural perspective on professional learning, with its emphasis on participation agency and identity, illuminates aspects of the process of becoming a teacher and highlights the tension that is there for students within available meanings. Having to opt to be a teacher at the expense of a learner identity constrains what is available to be appropriated in professional settings with potential consequences for how beginner teachers frame themselves, their learners and their colleagues.

Governing ‘Authentic’ Religiosity? The Responsibilisation of Parents beyond Religion and State in Matters of School Ethos in Ireland

The aim of this paper is to advance scholarship on the governance of religious difference and its relationship to social reproduction, inclusion and exclusion, with specific reference to parenting, schooling and childhood. Rather ask ‘how does the state and religion govern religious pursuits?’, the focus of this paper is ‘how might parents’ and childrens religious expressions be already implicated, or caught up in, the ordering and coordination of complex social systems?’ Drawing on Foucaults concept of governmentality, it analyses how the political rationalities of freedom of choice and diversity are deployed through media discourse. The paper traces an iterative process of producing a symbolically ‘new’ national space, which re-legitimises state (and more ‘discerning’ school patron) power in a marketised, global age. It argues that ‘Irish’ parents are evaluated in this imagined space in terms of their capacity to combine consumption and religious practices responsibly and authentically. In its implicit citation and elision of generational, classed and racialised hierarchies, the mediated, moral governance of responsible religious and ethical subjects, expressions and practices becomes clear. The paper concludes by noting the potential contribution of governmentality thinking to contemporary debates on religious and secular governance.

Taking Responsibility for Race Inequality and the Limitless Acts Required: Beyond ‘Good/Bad Whites' to the Immeasurably Whitened Self

Certain radical race scholars argue that white people can and must act in anti-racist ways as part of a project that aims to end racial identities built on inequality, terror and domination. Yet revisioning the white subject as non-oppressive should not be the primary goal of anti-racism, as this re-centralises concern for those benefiting from whiteness. In this article, the author considers the ongoing erasure of white responsibility for race inequalities, and analyses the merits and tensions of ‘critical race’ and ‘race critical’ principles for exposing, politicising and countering them. He agrees with assertions that responsibilisation for race inequality is a radical process that cannot imply a finite state for individuals (‘good/bad whites’); it is a process that must involve constant turns away from the Self and towards the Other. Acts of white anti-racist transgression must not be reduced to ever having taken ‘full personal’ responsibility for race inequality. However, for different reasons, caution needs to be exercised about assuming a universal, fixed, knowable white self at the centre of such acts, one which always successfully inhabits being white. Contributing to ‘race-critical/post-race’ scholarship, the author uses Butlers (2005) separation of agency from responsibility to think about responsibility as the task of the immeasurably whitened self.

How the Irish became CRT’d? ‘Greening’ Critical Race Theory, and the pitfalls of a normative Atlantic state view

This article considers the transatlantic use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) frameworks to critically interpret racism in education internationally, and the possibilities and pitfalls this has for understanding racism in Ireland. It argues for the importance of CRT’s framework on a number of grounds, but echoes cautions against the assumed, or sole use of a white/non-white framework to understand situated anti-racisms ‘elsewhere’. This caution focuses on less on CRT principles per se, and more on typically derivative ‘nationalist’ policy appropriations of anti-racism. Education policy (and research) misrepresentations of systemic racism as happening in another place, or at another time function by deracialising and ignoring complex Atlantic and wider (neo)colonial relations. By exploring the ‘troubling movements’ of education’s emergence within Irish-Atlantic-Empire politics, the article encourages postcolonial animations of CRT praxis. It shows ways in which CRT can work transnationally with and beyond white/non-white dualisms, to challenge derivative ‘normative state’ dilutions of educational anti-racisms.

Knowing how to feel about the Other? Student teachers, and the contingent role of embodiments in educational inequalities

This paper explores affective dimensions to the positioning of teachers within persistent educational inequalities. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’, we argue that inequalities are not maintained through how teachers and student teachers ‘feel about’ ‘different’ students per se. Rather, the very possibility of becoming a particular subject and object of feeling is itself already part of the production of learner differences and inequalities. We examine how affects circulate to shape particular objects (e.g. a teacher’s physical body) and collective attachments to particular signs (e.g. ‘the national teaching body’). We argue that contemporary changes to Irish and European teacher education policy reinforce rather than question educational inequalities. They produce and align ‘shock’ at student underachievement with teachers’ physical and collective bodies, while ‘sympathetically’ responsibilising teachers to professionalise in order to cope with or compensate for persistently ‘different’ and/or underachieving students. To explain how this process is lived and resisted, an analysis of interviews with our own student teachers explores how the affective economy which constitutes teacher education may become contingently directed in socially just or unjust ways.

The Mobility of Racism in Education

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss and analyse the interplay of potentially racist, common sense, and anti-racist understandings around and between ‘new migrant’ and ‘indigenous’ students and teachers in one Irish post-primary school. Taking inspiration from Rizvi (1993), this focus serves as a means of being vigilant to the mobility and multi-faceted nature of both overtly racist ideas and well-intentioned actions that may have racist effects. The first section of the chapter discusses national and international research on institutional racism, focusing on schools in particular. It notes how, despite decades of research evidence of institutional racism, official ‘intercultural’ and ‘anti-racist’ stances in institutions can constantly become diluted to racist effect, both as a result of wider state measures and shifting, exclusionary meaning making. School marginalisation is often rendered through ‘common sense’understandings about immigration, citizenship and educational participation in schools. It is repeatedly crystallized through the rendering of students in racialised achievement hierarchies internationally.