Emotional Geographies

Hargreaves, A. (2001). 'Emotional geographies of teaching.' Teachers College Record, 103(6), 1056-1080. http://www.tcrecord.org

Drawing from an interview-based study with 53 teachers, Hargreaves (2001) uses the concept of emotional geographies to consider the nature of teachers' recollections of emotionally laden interactions with the people around them.

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 experiences and responses of others.
(p. 1059)

Emotions are not just personal, psychological phenomena. They are interpersonal, socially constructed phenomena as well. Hargreaves identifies forms of emotional closeness and distance - the geographies - that can enhance or threaten emotional understanding between teachers, students, colleagues and parents. Five key geographies are:

sociocultural - such as understanding the perspectives of people coming from different cultures
moral - such as where teachers and school communities are in agreement over school mission statements
professional - such as the distance between professional expertise and non-professional opinions and beliefs
political - such as differences in power between teachers and parents
physical - such as ongoing relationships or brief meetings in parent-teacher interviews.

Hargreaves argues that using the 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 standards of teaching and learning … (This) may help us to better understand how to create stronger emotional understanding in teachers' relationships with students, colleagues, parents and others, as well as how to avert or alleviate threats to that understanding. (p. 1075)