Conference Program

Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in vocational upper secondary schools in Italy, this article examines teachers’ work as a form of moral and emotional practice in socially and symbolically marginal educational contexts. Situated within international debates on the transformation of educational work under New Public Management reforms, the study focuses on a largely underexplored dimension: how teachers morally sustain schools predominantly attended by students experiencing social vulnerability, low academic achievement, and limited prospects of upward mobility. Based on 29 in-depth interviews with teachers and school leaders, the analysis shows that teaching in vocational schools involves intensive moral and emotional labour, in which knowledge transmission is inseparable from practices of care, listening, and the management of suffering. Teachers face ethical dilemmas related to inclusion, discipline, and educational justice, balancing the need to adjust expectations against the refusal to “mislead” students already shaped by exclusionary trajectories. The findings further reveal that women and teachers from working-class backgrounds tend to assume a disproportionate share of emotional and relational work, often under conditions of institutional invisibility and moral overload. The article argues that, in marginal segments of the educational field, emotional labour is not a residual or vocational dimension of teaching, but a core moral infrastructure that makes educational relationships possible.