Emotions and Science Teaching: Present Research and Future Agendas

Abstract

Many educators and researchers point out that affective issues are important in teaching; however, little has been done to incorporate affective concerns in a systematic way in research on teaching. As Norman (1981) pointed out two decades ago, most cognitive theorists preferred to ignore the affective domain and concentrate instead on developing information-processing models of purely cognitive systems. Such an approach has been most obvious in the investigation of teacher cognition and teacher beliefs (e.g., Clark & Peterson, 1986; Kagan, 1992a, 1992b; Nespor, 1987; Richardson, 1996). The emphasis on teacher beliefs has been on teachers’ views and perspectives often without any discussion of the relevance of those beliefs to teacher emotions. For the most part, this area of research still avoids addressing how teacher beliefs interact with teacher emotions and attitudes or what the role of teacher emotions is in understanding teaching and learning. Yet, conducting research on emotions in education or on the emotions of teachers, more specifically, presents several challenges. First, emotions are very fluid and much more complex and difficult to describe than cognition (Boler, 1999; Janack, 2000; McLeod, 1989; Simon, 1982; Zembylas, 2002a, 2002b). Second, one of the reasons for the neglect of investigating emotion in teaching may be due in part to the domination of cognitive psychology over educational research, and the difficulty in capturing the emotional components of teaching for research purposes. Finally, there is the legacy of dualism, which has opposed reason to emotion, and accorded reason the high status inscribed in Western thinking. Embedded in Western thought is the assumption that emotions threaten the disembodied, detached, and neutral knower; consequently, as it is suggested, emotions do not offer any valid knowledge. This view has placed emotions in an inferior role and made much more difficult the legitimation of research on teacher emotion. This uneasy relation between emotion and reason provides the social and historical context from which many current views on emotions continue to emerge (Schutz & DeCuir, 2002). These issues assert that we are convinced about the importance of emotions in education only at a general abstract level (Beck & Kosnik, 1995). One can imagine, then, what happens in science education when educators in general have a hard time accepting emotions as a legitimate subject of research. After all, in schools, science is portrayed as rational and non-emotional (Alsop, 2001; Zembylas, 2002a). What is the place of emotion in teaching and learning science? Why should one pay attention to the way teachers feel about science and science teaching?