Feeling Obligated

Feeling Obligated illustrates and interrogates the experience of teaching in today’s Canadian schools.

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Feeling Obligated combines theoretical insights with the first-hand experiences of Canadian teachers to illustrate the impact of neoliberalism – the installation of market norms into educational and social policies – on teachers’ professional integrity.

Anne M. Phelan and Melanie D. Janzen illustrate the miserable conditions in which teachers teach, their efforts to navigate and withstand those circumstances, and their struggle to respond ethically to students, especially those already marginalized economically and socially. Exploring how educational policies attempt to recast teachers as skilled clinicians, the book revitalizes a conversation about teaching as a vocation wherein the challenge of obligation is of central concern. Haunted by what has already happened and threatened by what may yet occur, Feeling Obligated foregrounds the challenge of ethical obligation in teaching and makes a strong case for the revitalization of teaching as a vocation, involving commitment, resolve, and trust in a future yet to come.