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TITLE:
“No Room. No Pay. No Time.” Teachers’ Work in a Time of Expanding Roles: A Contribution to Overwork Theory

DOCUMENT TYPE: Article

*Lora Bartlett is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley.

Working Paper No. 47

Download the Document (PDF format - 90 K) - May 2002
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ABSTRACT:

This paper illuminates the tensions between the rhetoric and presumed rewards of an “expanded” conception of teachers’ work and the work demands and strains introduced by such a conception. Specifically, this paper draws on multi-day, 24-hour time and task diaries recorded by case study teachers, together with ethnographic interviews and observations, to illuminate the disjuncture between reform rhetoric and work place demands. I use these data to assess the usefulness of existing theories of overwork as they may apply to teachers and teaching. This paper suggests that teacher overwork is, in part, a result of the expansion of teacher work roles. The argument unfolds in three parts. First, teachers work roles have been expanded but structural supports for the expansion have been uneven. Second, the nature and extent of organizational support influences teacher experience of role expansion, and finally, teachers who embrace the expanded role conception strive to sustain it even in the absence of organizational supports. This results in overwork.¹ Current explanations of overwork do not adequately account for the case of teachers’ overwork.