The mechanism of teacher burnout ―An ethnography of the staff-room in a public secondary school―

Abstract

Teacher burnout has recently been a very real problem in the Japanese teaching profession. The quantitative studies of the problem up to this day have not been able to accurately portray the actual situations that are going on at the front lines. Using micro ethnographic approaches, this paper analyses the current teacher burnout situations and generates a hypothesis on the mechanism of it that contains the relationships with a wide variety of macro phenomena.

This study proposes a hypothesis that Japanese teacher burnout is caused and developed by the following six factors: (1) the organizational structure and teacher culture that can be the basis of their stress and burnout, (2) the instability of their identities and loss of self-confidence caused by bureaucratization, (3) the externality of behavioral code imposed by the organizational self-protection, (4) the burden-sharing and work overload caused by the insufficient family discipline, (5) the gap between the difficult student guidance and insufficient guidance skills and (6) the decline of the cooperative system and peer mutual support. Findings reveal the necessity of including social-historical factors as determinants of teacher burnout besides organizational and personality ones.