Graduation Year
2019
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Anthropology
Reader 1
Seo Young Park
Reader 2
Daniel Segal
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2018 Delaney M. Dawson
Abstract
This thesis explores how public high school teachers in Tacoma, WA, USA conceptualize the values and rewards of their career through their professional interactions at various levels of the educational institution. By analyzing teachers’ career motivations, goals, and definitions of success, it becomes clear that these teachers most highly prioritize their affective labor and the relationships they build with their students. Teachers consistently emphasize the non-financial, student-centered elements of the compensation they receive for their work, and their grievances about the structure of the school system primarily center around the constraints placed upon their performance of student-centered affective labor by the neoliberal foci of the institution of the public school. Ultimately, it is argued that teachers’ choice to emphasize this affective labor can be seen as a public reclamation of a historically feminized form of labor in an effort to cultivate a vocational sense of meaning within their career.
Recommended Citation
Dawson, Delaney, "'If I Don't Have That, No Learning": Significance of Student-Centered Affective Labor Among Public High School Teachers in Tacoma, WA" (2019). Scripps Senior Theses. 1312.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1312
