Search results for: Emotions

This article examines emotionally challenging expectations in the relationships beginning teachers have with students’ parents. The data consist of narrative interviews with 17 Japanese beginning teachers. Due to strong cultural and social norms prescribing appropriate social interactions, Japanese teachers have little leeway in negotiating parents’ expectations. The authors found that beginning teachers described facing three emotionally challenging expectations in their relationships with students’ parents: 1) they do not fully understand what is expected of them; 2) they are expected to turn to colleagues for help with difficult issues involving parents; and 3) they are expected to endure and learn from criticism. To cope with these emotionally challenging expectations, beginning teachers perform emotional labour. The article presents a wider understanding of teachers’ work as a relational practice and offers insights that can be used to move beyond the discourse that frames beginning teachers from a ‘deficit’ perspective.

The authors investigated the influence of students' emotional and behavioral disorder (EBD) on pre-service teachers' judgments, while considering the frequency of calling on students as a mediator and stress as moderator. They conducted an experiment in a simulated classroom. 56 pre-service teachers went through a stress manipulation, while N = 46 were not stressed. Path analyses controlling for actual performance showed negative effects of EBD on participants’ judgments and an indirect effect via call frequency. Stressed participants called on students with EBD as often as students without EBD, while unstressed participants called on students with EBD more.

This year-long study by an undergraduate teacher candidate explores the identity and emotional work involved in learning decisions through her teacher preparation program. Using personal reflections, analytic memos, and notes, she was able to discover patterns of learning in the emotional geographies in teacher education. Further, the authors employed both a critical and meta-critical friend to rigorously develop and interrogate themes and interpretations. Findings revealed that decisions to ‘invest’ in any particular learning context did not merely constitute an intellectual commitment. Rather embodied emotional responses to persons, ideologies, and environments challenged her to make sense of her place in emotional geographies. Her decision-making process involved moving toward investing in learning or presenting a more superficial performance. These decisions depended, in part, on her deliberations of whether the emotional geographies provided opportunities that she perceived would ‘build her’ or ‘break her.’ The authors assert that learning actively requires students to make decisions about their position, identity and belonging within educational relationships. Attending to embodied emotional work in classroom learning is often understudied, and yet is relevant to issues of power and equity with teacher education. This self-study offers teacher educators and researchers a glimpse into the benefits of a teacher candidate initiating and conducting a self-study and suggests that this could be a fruitful area to pursue methodologically. This research contributes a deeper understanding of such emotional work and how self-study involving teacher candidates can be used as a source of knowledge in teacher preparation programs.

This study aimed at understanding teacher emotions through interviewing 25 and surveying 1,492 primary teachers in China using a mixed method. Content analysis was employed to analyse the data using the five nested ecological systems – microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macro-system, and chronosystem. Statistical techniques such as mean score, Multivariate analysis of variance, Univariate analysis, and effect size were used to deal with the quantitative data. Qualitative results show that 25 teachers described 65 emotions including 33 positive and 32 negative emotions. The number of emotions that teachers reported decreased as the distance from the teachers increased. The quantitative survey comprised 14 positive and 17 negative emotion items. Given the powerful role that emotions and relationships play in education, the discussion was made with regard to classroom management, emotional display rules, and teacher vulnerability. The implications for teacher development and well-being were provided accordingly.