Teacher Emotionality in Higher Education: Using a Scholarly Personal Narrative Approach to Understand the Life of a Teacher

ABSTRACT
In this study I use the qualitative methodology of Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) as developed by Nash (2004) and Nash & Bradley (2011) to explore the push and pull of my emotional journey as a teacher in a higher education context in Saudi Arabia.
Despite the recent growth in research focusing on the role of emotions in education, teacher emotionality in a higher education context is still relatively under-researched. This negligence is partly related to epistemological and methodological traditions that have established dichotomies between emotion/reason, personal/public, and quantitative/ qualitative issues (Denzin, 2009); to the general assumption that in higher education emotions are the enemy of objectivity (Palmer 2007); and to the dominant discourse in higher education, which sometimes sees the affective as a threat to scholarly values.
By using my personal emotional experience as a teacher, embodied in the form of short paradoxical vignettes of ‘love and hate’, and by using current scholarly literature to explicate and challenge my narrative, I highlight the ubiquitous role of emotions in the life of a teacher in higher education, with the aim of deepening understanding and encouraging further research in this arena, especially in the Saudi Arabian university context. I stress the importance of using a multidimensional lens that keeps teacher identity, relationships, change, and social, cultural and political structures in focus. The study shows how the use of the ‘power of paradox’ (Palmer, 2007) to understand the conflicting emotions of teaching results in an appreciation of the role of both negative and positive emotions in a teacher’s daily life. My Scholarly Personal Narrative ultimately serves as an example of how teachers can be “empowered by recognizing emotion as a site of personal transformation” (Schutz & Zembylas, 2009).