“It Is Even More Painful When You Can’t Do Anything”: Excavating the Details of How Schoolteachers Negotiate Challenging Situations Related to Ethnic Minority Students

How do schoolteachers negotiate challenging situations related to ethnic minority students? That is the question this chapter aims to answer. I use empirical data from memory work-inspired group interviews, where 24 lower secondary schoolteachers were asked to recall challenging situations related to ethnic minority students. Drawing on some of the most intense moments during the group interviews, I show how patterns of affective-discursive sense-making (Wetherell, Affect and emotion: a new social science understanding. In: Affect and emotion: a new social science understanding. SAGE, 2012) occur in the negotiations of the challenging situations related to ethnic minority students. The teachers’ negotiations of the challenging situations mainly take on familiar routes of culturally accepted discursive sense-making, however, there are also exceptions, creating further affective tensions within the room of teachers. I further notice how some of the teachers seem to be left with (unwanted) feelings of distance to the ethnic minority students, feelings of powerlessness, and even feelings of pain entangled in not being able to live up to what the teachers feel are their obligations. The teachers’ feelings are difficult to ignore, and the feelings can come to blur possible solutions to the challenging situations related to ethnic minority students.