Everyday teacher performances in school life: A dramaturgical account of continuity and disruption

Abstract

This study examines how teachers enact and adjust their professional roles in the everyday spaces of school life. The study was framed through Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective and related literature on teacher professionalism, school space, and emotional labour. An interpretive qualitative design informed by constructivist grounded theory coding procedures was adopted. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 20 teachers working in one public primary school and one public Anatolian high school in Ankara. The analysis showed that teacher performance extended beyond classroom instruction and was continually reshaped in classrooms, corridors, staff rooms, schoolyards, subject rooms, and digital communication spaces. Teachers moved between front-stage visibility and backstage role distance while maintaining credibility through dramaturgical loyalty, discipline, and circumspection. The findings also indicated that teachers in the primary-school case experienced a more continuous and affectively charged visibility, while teachers in the high-school case described clearer moments of role distance. Based on these findings, the study offers a dramaturgical account of teacher professionalism as an interactional, emotional, and spatial practice shaped between institutional continuity and subjective disruption.