Getting good at bad emotion: teachers resist and reproduce hegemonic positivity in a discourse community

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a growing phenomenon in countries around the globe. With this increase in formalized ways to recognize, define, and nurture social and emotional personhood comes a need for more critical attention toward the affective-discursive practices (i.e. culturally- and materially-habituated patterns of feeling, thinking, and relating) that shape and constrain what social and emotional personhood is and what it could be. This article analyzes a discourse community in which six elementary-school teachers and I, a teacher educator, conversed about the cultural and political underpinnings of SEL and other educational practices. This included discussion about ‘hegemonic positivity’, or the tendency to seek and value positive feelings and emotional regulation above other ways of experiencing relationships and emotion. My analysis focuses on how hegemonic positivity was resisted and reproduced in our shared discussions. I illuminate the stickiness of hegemonic positivity as an affective-discursive practice, offering ideas for how it may become a topic of critical, humble, and social justice-oriented awareness for educators to collaboratively explore.