The Construction Of Teacher Geogarphy In The Context Of Curriculum Change

The development of the nation relies on education, and the development of education relies on teachers. It is universally acknowledged that teachers are of great importance to education. Especially since the curriculum reform, with the proposal of ’teachers as curriculums’, issues of teachers’ changes and teachers’ professional development have become important content of education research. Among the existing research on teachers, most research focus on teachers’ professional rationality, professional knowledge and professional skills, regarding teachers as people of reason and profession, but seldom focus on non-rationality factors manifesting as teachers’ emotions and feelings. Teacher is a vocation of emotional practice. Teachers’ emotions directly influence teachers’ physical and psychological health, governs teachers’ understanding and commitment of students, curriculum and teaching, and what’s more determines orientation of teachers’ changes and professional development. However, through reviewing related research, it is found that western studies of teachers’ emotions have been quite mature and accumulated a great deal of empirical data and theoretical achievements. In comparison, domestic studies of teachers’ emotions have only been started, which have mentioned the importance of teachers’ emotions but lack sufficient empirical evidences and explanations.This research explored what kind emotions teacher experienced in their working daily life, what factors impacted teacher’s emotions and how different emotions in different context affected teacher’s teaching practice, professional development and curriculum changes, and what challenge teacher faced from three dimensions, teacher personality, social environment and their interaction respectively. Through teachers’ emotional self-report, summarized what are teachers’ emotional quandaries and emotional needs and construct teachers’ positive emotional geography environment to support teachers’ more efficient and happier teaching. This research names this series of research questions and context as ’teachers’ emotional geography’. To answer the above questions, this research reviews studies of teachers’ emotion in the context of education reform and in the interaction of teachers and students, and existing research of teachers’ emotional geography, further focuses on this research’s analytical framework, object and methods.This research consists of two parts. The first part is adopting questionnaire research on teachers in seven elementary and secondary schools in southwest China, collecting teachers’ frequent emotion types and levels in the recent month, by the means of difference analysis and means comparison, initially concludes teachers’ that overall positive emotional state is higher than negative emotional state, but negative emotions are still comparatively obvious; novice teachers have mixed positive and negative emotions, experienced teachers have significant negative emotions; expert teachers have comparatively positive and stable emotions; middle school teachers’ negative emotions are a little higher than elementary teachers’. The second part is adopting qualitative research orientation. Based on the initial conclusion of questionnaires, novice teachers, experienced teachers and expert teachers are selected as cases. Data of contexts, causes and influence effects of three types of teachers’ emotional states are collected by the means of in-depth interviews. Through discourse analysis and narrative inquiry of cases, the conclusions are as follows:(1) In terms of causes of emotional state, novice teachers’ emotion changes mainly result from interaction between teachers and students, relationship between colleagues, teachers’ professional efficacy, experienced teachers’ emotion changes mainly result from social factors, such as principals’ leadership, management and organization of schools, reward and punishment and accountability system, teachers’ association culture, repeated labor and feedback, expert teachers’ positive emotions not only result from individual teachers’ emotional capability and adjustment strategies, but also result from expert teachers’ favorable work environment and harmonious organizational culture. (2) In terms of effects of emotions, positive emotions increase teachers’ teaching motivation, promote teachers’ professional development and students’ academic achievement, create good cultural atmosphere of learning, negative emotions increase teachers’ job burnout, physical and psychological fatigue and demission tendency. (3) Teachers’ emotional adjustment stratigies is the intermediate variable influencing teachers’ emotional effects. In the perspective of emotional adjustment stratigies teachers usually take, research show that teachers are accustomed to negative emotional adjustment tactics such as ’tolerant acceptance’ and ’expressive suppression’ on a long-term basis, which inhibits individual teachers’ changes and innovations in the organizational culture.In the end, through emotional quandaries exposed by teachers, this paper constructs operating mechanism of positive emotional geography, and proposes stratigies of constructing positive emotional geography in the perspective of individual subjects and social organizations. In the perspective of individual subjects, firstly teachers should increase self emotional awareness and promote emotional intelligence, secondly improve self professional abilities, professional knowledge and professional sentiments, thirdly adjust individual mentality, approach others actively, trust others and cooperate with others, fourthly increase individual social capital, using multiple interpersonal relationship network to perfect individuals’ emotional geography. In terms of social organizations, they should enrich implementation strategies of education policies, perfect supervision process of policy implementation, reform evaluation methods and evaluation systems of teachers, strengthen principles’ leadership, adopt diverse organizational management modes, create teachers’ association culture of trust, support, encouragement, sharing and reflection, and propose incorporating teacher education curriculum system into cultivation of teachers’emotional intelligence.