How Teachers Feel Pumping at Work

This chapter addresses the question: How do teachers describe milk production in school spaces in terms of their emotions? When teachers experience “outlaw emotions”, or those that cause them to question the norms in place because they are not conducive to their thriving and cause negative emotions, they are revealing specific practices in schools that value work production over the humanity of teachers. This chapter applies the concept of outlaw emotions to analyze three poems. Each poem was written by compiling research participants’ responses to questions about what emotions were provoked when they pumped at work. The analysis of the poems focuses on how the outlaw emotions of anger, loneliness, and stress teachers experience while expressing milk at work reveal where the capitalist design of the system is not working for the people in it. In contrast, what brings pleasure is a way to notice when the design may value human flourishing. The chapter concludes by giving an example of an administrator whose emotional experiences pumping at work and struggles as a parent led her to adapt what she calls a “big-hearted” approach to leadership, where she prioritizes the emotional and mental well-being of staff.