Looking Into the Prism: A Structural Approach to Teachers’ Perezhivanie / Mirando en el prisma: Una aproximación estructural a la perezhivanie de los docentes

Abstract

The concept of perezhivanie is attracting increasing attention as a key for teachers’ professional development. In most interpretations, perezhivanie involves a sort of psychological “prism” that refracts the influence of the environment on the subject. There is also broad agreement that perezhivanie involves an indivisible unity of personal and situational characteristics. In this regard, a central analytical challenge is to study perezhivanie while preserving this indivisible unity. This paper addresses this challenge by outlining an analytical approach based on structural semantics. This approach is used to study the perezhivanie of two teachers of English as a foreign language, who work in the same school but experience their jobs very differently. The findings suggest that the prism involved in a perezhivanie is narratively constructed upon a core narrative structure, which can be seen as the unit of analysis of perezhivanie, and that teachers’ professional development can be triggered by overcoming the narrative contradictions in the prism. These contributions are discussed in relation to the theoretical controversies concerning perezhivanie and the empirical results of other approaches.