Emotion Management and Feelings in Teaching and Educational Leadership

A Cultural Perspective

Izhar Oplatka, Khalid Arar, Izhar Oplatka, Khalid Arar, Khalid H. Arar

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781787560116
• eBook ISBN: 9781787560123
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Counseling in Career Development

Past research has identified a wide variety of emotions and emotional engagements among school leaders and teachers including passion, excitement and satisfaction. However, the literature often centers on negative emotions of school leaders, such as fear of failure, anxiety and disillusionment with the system.

Thus far, most research on this issue has focused almost entirely on western educational systems. This book departs from that and highlights the connection between culture and emotion management in these settings, and allows researchers from different parts of the world to demonstrate how national and local culture influence the way educational leaders and teachers express their feelings, display their emotion, or suppress emotion in public. Emotion Management in Teaching and Education Leadership allows teachers and educational leaders from both traditional and marginalized societies to tell their own stories of feelings, emotion management, and emotion regulation at work. By expanding our knowledge beyond the cultural boundaries of Anglo-American nations and evoking new considerations in the research on emotion in organizations, this book will prove invaluable for researchers and school leaders.

Section II

Educational Management and Emotion in Different Cultural Arenas

Chapter 3

Exploring Emotion Management Strategies of Junior High School Teachers in Shanghai, China

Weisheng Li and Meng Tian

Abstract

This study scrutinised Shanghai junior high school teachers’ emotions and emotion management strategies in relation to teachers’ work settings and content. A mixed-methods approach was applied to collect data via field observations, interviews, and a quantitative survey. The aim of this study was two-fold. Firstly, it aimed to identify the typical work settings in which teachers experienced work-related emotions. Secondly, it aimed to reveal teachers’ priority work in school and how it affected teachers’ choices of emotion management strategies.

The data were analysed through the lens of emotional labour theories and professional agency theories. Findings showed that classroom teaching and the professional learning community activities were two typical settings in which the teachers experienced the most intensive emotions. Most Shanghai teachers managed their momentary emotions by either genuinely expressing their emotions that matched their roles and the scenario, or by purposely suppressing emotions to meet social and organisational expectations. Furthermore, most teachers adopted the long-term mood regulation strategy by aligning their emotions with long-term goal achievement in the future. As professional agents, the Shanghai teachers did not only manage their own emotions at work using these two strategies, but also managed students’ emotions as part of the moral education.

Keywords: Chinese teachers; emotional labour; emotion management; mood regulation; work setting; mixed-methods

Introduction

Teaching as a profession does not only require teachers’ professional knowledge but also demands teachers to tackle various emotions from themselves and from students, parents and other colleagues. Research on teachers’ emotion management and emotional labour has gained much popularity during the past years (Arar & Oplatka, 2018; Gong, Chai, Duan, Zhong, & Jiao, 2013; Lee & Yin, 2011; Oplatka, 2009; Schutz & Zembylas, 2009a; Yao et al., 2015). Yin (2012, 2016), for example, encapsulated Chinese teachers’ emotional labour with two metaphors, ‘heart-consuming’ and ‘knife-like mouth and tofu-like heart’. The former described the heavy burden imposed on teachers’ emotions and the latter on their complex and even paradoxical feelings of love and sternness towards the students. Meyer (2009) discovered that already at teachers’ professional induction stage, their emotional practice at the teacher training colleges had largely shaped teachers’ professional identities. Schutz and Zembylas (2009b) further pointed out that teachers’ emotional labour was associated with their job satisfaction and hence determined whether teachers would stay or leave their profession. In fact, in every stage of teachers’ career, emotions are experienced and expressed although their manifestations may differ from person to person on multilevels (Oplatka, 2017).

In this chapter, we aim to further explore the experienced emotions and the applied emotion management strategies by Chinese teachers in selected junior high schools in Shanghai. Our investigation went beyond the teacher–student interaction in a classroom setting as studied by Yin (2012, 2016). In this study, our research zoomed in teachers’ emotional experience with other teachers, school leaders, students and parents in two work settings, namely, professional learning community and classroom.

Three research questions are answered in this study: (1) In which work settings did the Chinese teachers experience the most emotions? (2) How did the Chinese teachers prioritise work and how did these priorities affect their choices of emotion management strategies? (3) How did the teachers’ emotion management strategies contribute to their professional agency? The value of this study is twofold. Firstly, it exposed the cultural values held by the Chinese teachers that affected their emotions. Secondly, it explained how teachers’ emotions shaped their professional identities and decision making from the professional agency’s perspective.

Literature Review

Teachers’ Emotion Management and Professional Agency

Our investigation drew upon emotion management theories and professional agency theories. Previous studies have shown that classroom teaching is not only an intellectual work but also filled with emotions (Emmer & Sabornie, 2014; Hagenauer & Volet, 2014; Lee et al., 2016; Saunders, 2013). Teachers’ emotion management capacity has been repeatedly confirmed as a key factor underpinning a psychologically secure learning environment for students (Harvey, Bimler, Evans, Kirkland, & Pechtel, 2012; Poulou, 2017). Understanding how teachers manage their emotions is essential for enhancing students’ emotional wellbeing and building teachers’ professional identity (Harvey, Evans, Hill, Henricksen, & Bimler, 2016; Jennings & Greenberg, 2009).

Two positive results of teachers’ emotion management are the creation of a calm and non-disruptive classroom climate and the improvement of students’ social, emotional and behavioural skills. Harvey and Evans (2003) discovered that emotion management took place on both personal and interpersonal level in the school. They illustrated the classroom emotional environment dimensions via a five-dimensional model which entailed emotional awareness and emotional intrapersonal beliefs on the personal level, emotional management and emotional interpersonal guidelines on the interpersonal level, and emotional relationships that bridged both personal and interpersonal levels. Harvey and Evans’ (2003) findings confirmed that teachers’ emotional competences can guide personal reflective practice in teaching, but not all the teachers were equally competent in all the emotion management areas.

Later, Harvey et al. (2012) further developed Harvey and Evans’ (2003) model by adding emotion contagion as the sixth dimension. Emotion contagion, measured by the items such as students mirroring teacher displays, students caring about teachers’ beliefs and student fulling teacher’ expectations, is positioned closely to emotion relationship. Emotion contagion is proven to have a strong correlation to both personal and interpersonal levels. Based on these two models, research further confirmed that teachers’ emotional skills can be associated with students’ emotional intelligence and emotional wellbeing (Harvey & Naus, 2015). Teachers possess distinct emotional profiles and tend to emphasize different emotion management strategies in practice. Moreover, such differences also seemed to be associated with teachers’ gender and cultural background (Harvey et al., 2012).

In addition to Harvey et al.’s (2003, 2012) model that examined teachers’ emotions on both personal and interpersonal levels, we considered that there was a social dimension to teachers’ emotions, too. Hence, teachers’ social emotional competence model was applied in this study. The definition of teachers’ social emotional competence contains five major emotional, cognitive and behavioural competencies, namely self-awareness, social awareness, responsible decision making, self-management and relationship management (Zins, 2004; Zins, Bloodworth, Weissberg, & Walberg, 2007). Existing literature reveals that socially and emotionally competent teachers demonstrate the following characteristics (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Zins et al., 2007). Having a high self-awareness means that teachers are able to recognize their own emotional strengths and weaknesses so that they can motivate themselves at work. Likewise, having a high social awareness refers to teachers can identify other students’ emotional patterns, and then devise different student management strategies. Furthermore, socially and emotionally competent teachers can translate their awareness into actions. For example, they can make responsible decisions that exhibit prosocial values after weighing the impact of their decisions on themselves and on students. Lastly, emotionally competent teachers are not only able to actively regulate their own impulses and stress, but also to manage the relationship with students even in a stressful environment. These relationship management skills manifest in cooperating and negotiating with others, providing and seeking for help, and engaging in and building relationships (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Zins et al., 2007).

Professional Agency Studies and Teacher Emotion

When reviewing the above emotion management theories and models, we found many connections to teachers’ professional agency studies (e.g. Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Meyer, 2009; Zins et al., 2007). However, so far very few studies have connected these two research fields. One reason for the research division is that research on teachers’ emotion management has a long tradition in psychology, while research on teachers’ professional agency originates mainly from sociology.

Despite of the different research origins, we found shared research foci in these two research fields. For example, both emotion management and professional agency research examine teachers’ intentional efforts to affect other people or to make a deliberate influence (Harvey & Naus, 2015; Hökkä, Vähäsantanen, & Mahlakaarto, 2017). Moreover, both emotion management and professional agency are associated with teachers’ professional identity, motivation and wellbeing (Harvey et al., 2012; Vähäsantanen, 2015). They both manifest in a wide range of classroom activities from regulating teachers’ own emotions, motivating students’ learning, to resolving conflicts and building relationships (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Ruohotie-Lyhty & Moate, 2016).

In this study, we define teachers’ professional agency as teachers, with their professional identities, deliberately make choices, take stances, exercise control and exert impact on their teaching and students (Eteläpelto, Vähäsantanen, Hökkä, & Paloniemi, 2013; Hökkä et al., 2017). According to Vähäsantanen and Eteläpelto (2015), emotion is one important dimension of professional agency that plays a key role in teachers’ decision making and affects teachers’ professional identity.

More importantly, previous studies on teachers’ professional agency appeared to shed light on emotion management strategies that can be used in classroom teaching. Sannino (2010) discovered that when teachers confronted conflicts and contradictions at work, it was possible to shift from resistance to self-initiative by expressing their emotions and engaging in externalized forms of experiencing. This implied that even negative emotions like resistance and low self-worthiness triggered by conflicts can be transformed into positive experience if teachers intentionally create a meaningful stimulus internally and seek for support externally from their immediate environment. Vähäsantanen (2015) highlights that the emotional aspects in teachers’ work should not be ignored because in daily practice teachers’ decisions and actions are not entirely rational. Especially, when teachers face maj...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Section I. Culture and Context in the Study of Emotion in Education
• Section II. Educational Management and Emotion in Different Cultural Arenas
• Section III. Cross-cultural Understandings of Educators’ Feelings and Emotions
• Index