Deficit narratives are co-constructed in teacher collegial talk in response to teacher vulnerability under emotional regimes that disallow strong negative emotions¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · qualitative r3 · q2
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Across two cases, teachers offered deficit narratives in response to teacher vulnerability under emotional regimes that disallowed strong negative emotions. → Samantha A. Marshall 2025 q2 i? Deficit narratives served to shift the threat onto students and families and return teachers' emotions to acceptable levels. → Samantha A. Marshall 2025

Evidence¶

Samantha A. Marshall 2025¶

Samantha A. Marshall, Grace A. Chen. (2025). Deficit narratives as teacher foils: how vulnerability and emotional regimes shape teacher discourse. Instructional Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-025-09740-9

q2 · i? · qualitative · r3

Critical discourse analysis of two selected extreme cases drawn from ethnographic fieldnotes, videos, and transcripts of video-based PD debriefs with 13 asset-oriented mid-career mathematics teachers. The authors traced backwards from deficit narratives to vulnerabilities and found that "the self-critique was reiterated, strongly, rather than mitigated," destabilizing the regime of positivity.

"The intensity and continuity of the self-critique threatened the emotional regimes that governed these collaborative conversations, which required positivity about teachers' work and themselves as teachers and affirmation of their colleagues."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• In Case 1, sustained self-critique by the focal teacher led colleagues to attribute students' mathematics failure to parenting and parental lack of authority
• Common threat-mitigation strategies preceded and failed to prevent deficit narratives, whose introduction followed the failure of mitigation to restore the emotional regime
• Consultation with trusted colleagues offered new interpretations of a student's behavior, lessening a teacher's emotional labor and shifting her from surface acting to deep acting (Linda case) — related
• Strict emotional regimes contribute to the production of vulnerability that can precipitate deficit narratives from asset-oriented teachers — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• In Case 2, persistent strong negative self-critique led teachers to assign deficit narratives to students as having missed opportunities, serving as foils for teachers — a narrower finding that bears on this claim