Teaching and Teacher Emotions: A Post-structural Perspective

Abstract

Emotions in education are increasingly the focus of a variety of investigations from different methodological and epistemological perspectives (Schutz and Pekrun 2007; Schutz and Zembylas 2009). These investigations highlight the impact of emotions on teachers’ and students’ lives, showing that emotions have significant implications for teaching and learning. The findings of research in this field suggest that emotions are important to pedagogical practices, to student–teacher relationships, to issues of reform efforts and processes of change, and to an understanding of power relations and social structures in schools and the society. Despite these recent developments, as both Pekrun and Schutz (2007) and Zembylas and Schutz (2009) point out, there is need for further enrichment of this work, especially in terms of employing new epistemological and methodological perspectives.