A Phenomenological Study of Teacher Emotions as an Essential Construct of a Liberal Arts College’s Signature Pedagogy using Sense-Making Methodology

This research aims to explore the emotional geographies of teachers’ relations with colleagues in a liberal arts college, with the premise provided by Hargreaves of the International Center for Educational Change, that teaching together is better than teaching apart. It seeks to establish the status of the emotional aspect of teaching, in particular, what Hargreaves pinpointed as “the teachers’ relations with other adults that seem to generate the most heightened expressions of emotionality among them,†It will take issue with what he identified as the “absence of systematic efforts to understand and explain what patterns and components of teachers’ relationships with colleagues create positive or negative emotions among them.†The study made use of Focus Group Discussion (FGD) with Doodling exercise and Sense-Making Methodology (SMM), an approach developed by Brenda Dervin as a platform to conduct audience research by interviewing methodologically, to replace the noun-based frameworks that dominate research, practice and design with verb-based frameworks) with the hope that reflections yielded will gauge the emotional dimention of faculty life and shed light on the issue of collegiality in the institution under study.