ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the largely overlooked context of the teachers’ lounge as a potential site for the enactment of professional community and the stimulation of collective learning. Collective catharsis provides opportunities for solving dilemmas and for reducing tensions in the workplace. In this way, catharsis promotes social cohesiveness, the basis for sustaining a learning community of teachers. Our orientation to the study of teachers’ lounges was framed by an interest in the concepts of professional community, organizational learning, and teacher collegiality and culture. Teachers’ lounges hold the potential for fostering teacher development to the extent that they function as “communities of discourse”. The process of collective remembering becomes a channel for the induction of novice teachers to the culture of schools. Evidence from our study concerning the collective learning that occurred in teachers’ lounges is described in terms of the interactions that occurred among peers and between novices and senior teachers.
