Exploring Teacher Caring as a “Happy Object” in Language Teacher Accounts of Happiness

Abstract This article explores how the language teachers in our study associated particular teaching experiences with feeling happy in qualitative interview accounts. Adopting a critical poststructural orientation, it uses the concept of sticky objects (Ahmed 2010; Benesch 2017) to explore how contexts, social discourses, relationships and emotional norms are entangled in and shape emotions such as happiness. More particularly, it adopts Ahmed’s (2010) notion of “happy objects” in exploring language teachers’ associations of “teacher caring” with feeling happy. Rather than exploring what happiness is, this study investigates what happiness does to and for language teachers, focusing on their accounts of teacher caring. It argues that the happy object of teacher caring is enmeshed in normative discourses that cast individual teachers as responsible for caring enough in order to help their students to succeed as determined by institutional norms of student achievement. Ultimately, it contends that accounts of teacher happiness require careful scrutiny for what they can tell us about the complex intersections of emotions with normative discourses, structures and values.