Common threat-mitigation strategies preceded and failed to prevent deficit narratives, whose introduction followed the failure of mitigation to restore the emotional regime¶

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? Colleagues initially employed threat-mitigation strategies such as undermining the critique or distancing into abstraction, but when strong negative emotions persisted, deficit narratives were produced to restore the dominant emotional regime. → 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

From the Discussion, synthesizing the two discourse-analytic cases: mitigation moves observed in both cases (undermining the critique's validity, distancing into abstraction, offering reasons to justify the criticized practice) failed when negative emotions persisted despite them.

"colleagues initially employed common threat mitigation strategies (Vedder-Weiss et al., 2019), such as undermining the critique, but the failure of these mitigation strategies to restore the dominant emotional regime led to the production of deficit narratives to perform that function."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Deficit narratives are co-constructed in teacher collegial talk in response to teacher vulnerability under emotional regimes that disallow strong negative emotions
• Strict emotional regimes contribute to the production of vulnerability that can precipitate deficit narratives from asset-oriented teachers
• In Case 1, sustained self-critique by the focal teacher led colleagues to attribute students' mathematics failure to parenting and parental lack of authority — related
• 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
• Mitigating and normalizing the emotion recognizes it more than acknowledging-to-prevent but limits exploration to attributions that avoid critique of PD design — related