A Case Study Of Junior High School Teachers’ Professional Emotion

Teacher’s professional emotion is the current cognition and feeling of teachers about their own profession,and it is also a long-term dynamic process for teachers to establish and maintain professional identity.Establishing positive professional emotion can help teachers standardize behavior,improve teaching efficiency,and gain happiness.In this study,a public junior high school in S city in northwestern China was selected as the field research site.Through a research of two and a half months,I use interview method and observation method,attempt to answer three questions: What kind of professional emotion do teachers have in their daily work,and how they show it? Why do teachers have such emotional experiences and changes? What factors affect teachers’ professional emotion and how to improve them?This research uses the logic of “what,why and how”,draws on Bourdieu’s field theory,cultural capital theory and symbolic interactionism,and uses social constructivism as the theoretical explanation and supplement to analyze teachers’ daily lives.Combining the two dimensions of social objective reality and individual subjective reality,the study focuses on the adjustment and expression of teachers’ emotion,and discusses the construction process and adjustment mechanism of teachers’ professional emotion.The findings include the following three points:Firstly,the teaching profession have a special nature of the service,and emotional labor runs through the entire career.Emotional labor does not only produce negative effects,teachers’ "deep acting" can build positive emotional experience and enhance teachers’ professional identity.as the teaching age increases,the state of teachers’ "deep acting" will gradually stabilize.Compared with younger teachers,expert teachers are easier to perform "deep acting",but their emotional adjustment strategies are relatively simple.Therefore,for novice and experienced teachers,we should establish their positive emotions,for expert teachers,we should maintain their teaching enthusiasm.Secondly,teachers’ professional emotion is constantly constructed by the social environment they live in.At the beginning of their career,teachers’ self-professional cognition will be constructed by family cultural capital,daily life reality,and organizational system norms.The school organization hopes that teachers should maintain a high sense of professional identity,and puts forward the requirements that teachers should love students,obey arrangements,and express positive emotions.Teachers continue to internalize these system norms in their career growth and complete the socialization process through continuous adjustments.Thirdly,teachers have resistance in the process of internalization and institutionalization of emotions and behaviors.Teachers’ subjective notions are not always consistent with objective facts(systems and norms).Teachers’ “resistance” and“abandonment” implied the attitudes of “obedience” and “internalization”,which provide a way for improving teachers’ professional identity.From the teachers themselves to the school and society,teachers can continuously improve and revise their self-definition and break prejudices in practical interaction.According to the findings,I give some suggestions: In terms of policies,the policies need additions and reductions,also need to improve the reward and selection mechanism,establish fair assessment,and reduce trivial tasks for teachers in school.Teachers need additional learning time for training courses to avoid squeezing their teaching time,we should pay attention to teachers’ emotional changes and acceptance,and guide them to participate in the practice actively.In terms of social support,all sectors of society should form a joint effort to understand and support the work of teachers,and work together to help achieve teachers’ educational goals,such as controlling dropouts,guarantee enrollment requirements and so on.Society should promote the atmosphere of respecting and loving teachers.The society can form a "helping teacher" atmosphere through public commendations and other methods.In terms of schools,they should help teachers complete their socialization process,such as building an excellent campus environment,organizing cultural and recreational activities,focusing on the construction of the internal working atmosphere of the faculty group,and paying attention to individual teachers,helping them to know themselves correctly,strengthening positive interactions,and relieve their negative emotion.At the individual level,teachers should form beneficial interactions,give full play to their advantages,and learn to actively adjust emotions when tired or angry.Teachers should learn to use "deep acting" strategy in professional growth to maintain positive teachers’ professional emotion.