Elementary Teachers’ Emotional Landscape: Insights Beyond Existing Literature

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Thursday 2:15pm
  In Poster Session: Emotion, Identity, and Social Contexts in Learning

Abstract

Teachers’ emotions are connected to their instruction and students’ achievement. We interviewed fifty-six teachers about their emotions at the end of a teaching day and coded the emotion types, as well as the emotion reasons. Findings showed that teachers expressed both positive and negative emotions equally, with about a quarter stating non-emotion words describing physical exhaustion, which may indicate burnout. Emotion reasons were multifaceted, including student-related factors while also foregrounding macro-level factors (e.g., intrusion of political ideology into schooling). Findings underscore the importance of qualitative approaches to teacher emotions research, which facilitate authentic expression of emotions. Also, there is a need for further exploration of indicators of teacher burnout and investigation into the systems-level reasons for teachers’ emotions beyond student-level factors.

Authors

• Dionne Cross Francis, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Boran Yu, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Yijia Chen, University of Arizona

• Lijie Liu, University of Arizona

• Ji Y. Hong, University of Arizona