Feeling Their Way Through It: Educators’ Emotions and Ethical Sensemaking of Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act

Abstract

Context:

The study is situated in Tennessee, following the 2022 passage of the Age-Appropriate Materials Act (AAMA). This legislation required schools to maintain and publicly disclose a complete list of educational materials while implementing review processes to ensure content appropriateness relative to student age and maturity levels. The AAMA’s scope extended beyond school library collections to encompass all materials accessible to students, including those in teachers’ classrooms.

Purpose:

This study investigates how educators make sense of ethical tensions created by Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022, with attention to how emotions shape their reasoning, decisions, and actions. By centering educators’ lived experiences, the study contributes to understandings of ethics, affect, and professional agency in policy-constrained contexts.

Research Design:

The data set for this study comprises 30 semi-structured interviews conducted in summer 2023 with educators across Tennessee. Guided by the theoretical frame of ethical sensemaking and using reflexive thematic analysis, the study examines how participants interpret, negotiate, and respond to ethical tensions between professional values and policy mandates.

Conclusions:

Educators’ engagement with education policy is shaped through emotionally laden processes of ethical sensemaking, in which teachers actively negotiate tensions between professional values, institutional constraint, and care for students. These negotiations often take the form of “ethical truces” that sustain moral agency, enabling educators to enact ethical responsibility through subtle, relational, and often invisible forms of advocacy. Supporting educators in these contexts requires greater attention to the emotional labor of ethical decision-making and to how professional agency is cultivated in contemporary policy environments.