Social cultural and situative perspective of studying emotions in teaching and learning: characteristics, challenges and opportunities

Abstract

In this forum, I take a learning sciences perspective to examine the paper by Bellocchi, Ritchie, Tobin, Sandhu and Sandhu (Cultural Studies of Science Education, doi: 10.1007/s11422-013-9526-3 , 2013) titled “Examining emotional climate of preservice science teacher education.” I characterize their approach as a social cultural and situative perspective of studying emotions in teaching and learning. Such an approach overcomes the limitations of examining emotions as individual psychological constructs, but it also incurs other methodological challenges. I suggest an alternative approach of examining the individual’s emotions, as well as their aggregates as a group measure. This approach allows us to study variations in emotional outcomes at an individual level or at a group level. I also suggest examining interplay of emotions with other aspects of learning outcomes, for example, cognitive learning outcomes. Finally, I suggest studying development of meta-emotional knowledge among teachers as another fertile area of research that could benefit the teachers in their classroom practices.