Grappling With the “Good Girl”: Reclaiming the Early Childhood Teacher as Emotional Subject

Abstract

This chapter explores the dominating discursive construction of teacher as “woman” from a toddler teachers’ perspective, particularly in terms of emotional control. Drawing on Janet Miller’s (2005) essay, “Mr Brucker’s Good Girl,” this work explores the “good-girl-ness” of being teacher and behaving appropriately as one in control of one’s emotions. Through reconstructions of autobiographical narrative data, the author grapples with the feminization of teaching (Grumet, 1988) and the exploitation of emotional labor imbued in early childhood education. This self-reflexive narrative project seeks to resignify teachers’ emotions, exploring notions of guilt and the expectations to suppress emotional responses in efforts to reframe and reclaim the teacher as an emotional subject in the context of immensely affective classroom spaces.