Teachers’ emotions in a mandated curriculum reform: A Chinese perspective

Emotion has been one of the issues that had experienced dramatic increase in teaching and educational research since mid-1990s. In 1996 and 2005, two reputable academic journals in education field, i.e. Cambridge Journal of Education and Teaching and Teacher Education, published a special issue on teacher emotion in teaching and educational change, respectively. Recently, some authors conducted more thorough explorations on the roles of teacher emotion plays in teaching (Zembylas 2005), educational leadership (Leithwood and Beatty 2008), and education in general (Schutz and Pekrun 2007). In these studies, teacher emotion was usually viewed as a social-cultural construct rather than merely a psychological process as it is in popular conception (Hargreaves 2001; Jeffrey and Woods 1996; Zembylas 2002, 2005), which enriched our understanding about the nature and operation of teacher emotion in professional situations. Copyright © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.