In recent years, it seems that teachers in Hong Kong feel negatively about their work. To some extent, the negative emotional experiences may not only affect teachers’ well-being, but also the quality of schooling. Thus, it is necessary for us to pay attention to the phenomenon of teachers’ emotional experiences, especially the negative ones. In the literature, researchers have investigated teachers’ emotional experiences from the psychological perspective. Nevertheless, the psychological perspective may neglect the social impacts on teaches’ emotional experiences. The limitation may create an incomplete or inaccurate understanding about the phenomenon. In order to overcome the limitation, this article proposes a sociological research agenda for further investigation on the basis of symbolical interactionism. Copyright © 2014 Sjournals. All rights reserved.

In recent years, many teachers suffered different kinds of negative emotions in the context of education reforms. A typical explanation was that the education reforms disempowered teachers in teaching, so teachers were forced to do much non-instructional work. Teachers considered their work meaningless but were powerless to change it, and eventually indulged themselves in negative emotions. However, the present research suggested that this explanation had neglected teacher agency and might be incomplete. Arguing from the perspective of social constructionism, the research showed that teachers in Hong Kong experienced negative emotions in education reforms because, on top of the disempowerment, the reforms structurally displaced teachers’ educational goals with administrative goals. The goal displacement impeded teachers’ evaluation of the instructional values of their work. Thus, teachers perceived their work as inconsistent with their major purpose of teaching (i.e. making a difference) and they felt negative towards work. Copyright © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Although there are an increasing number of studies on assessing teacher emotions in mainstream education, there is a lack of appropriate measurement tools to evaluate the emotions of teaching assistants (TAs) who need to take care of students with a range of special educational needs (SEN). This study tested the generalizability of the 24-item teacher emotion inventory (TEI), among 204 TAs from 122 secondary schools with inclusive education in Hong Kong. We conducted both confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and Rasch analysis to test the within-network validity of the TEI. For the between-network validity, we examined the relationships between TAs’ emotions and their attitude toward inclusive education. The Rasch analysis supported the scale’s dimensionality and item fit statistics. The CFA supported the five-factor solution of the TEI. The results also showed statistically significant correlations between positive emotions (joy and love) and TAs’ attitudes toward inclusive education. TAs’ negative emotions (anxiety, anger, and stress) appeared to be negatively correlated with their attitude toward inclusive education. The results supported that TEI is a useful tool to assess the emotions of TAs that play a pivotal role in assisting both school teachers and SEN students, who are more likely to face increased emotional challenges than those not needing to educate SEN students. Implications of this study to enrich the current scope of research on understanding teacher emotions across educational levels and settings are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Yang, Hsu, Ye and Sin.

STEM education is an important approach for preparing students for a competitive workforce with essential skills in the 21st century. However, successfully implementing STEM education in primary and secondary schools presents a variety of challenges. The study suggests that a neglected challenge in the literature is how to sustain teachers’ positive emotions toward STEM educational work, which may cause teachers to be more engaged in, motived by, and committed to STEM education. Therefore, the study aims to contribute to the literature by investigating the mechanism of the construction and suitability of teachers’ emotions toward STEM educational work based on a single case study conducted in Hong Kong from the social constructionist perspective. The major findings of the study indicate that (1) positive emotions toward STEM educational work may be constructed by the teacher’s positive interpretation of the work, i.e., STEM educational work as the facilitator of students’ overall development and that (2) positive emotions toward STEM educational work may be sustained by enabling school institutions to have the elements of shared power, administrative support, and the value of a whole-person education. Copyright © 2021 MDPI AG

Teachers' negative emotions began to receive attention in the Hong Kong context in the mid-1990s. As negative emotions may affect both teachers' well-being and the quality of their teaching, Hong Kong education policy-makers and educators have used psychological approaches to determine the reasons why teachers experience negative feelings. However, these approaches fail to accommodate the social causes of negative emotions. Therefore, this study investigates the possible social causes of teachers' negative emotions from the perspective of alienation theory. In-depth interviews with 21 teachers in Hong Kong reveal that Hong Kong teachers may be suffering from alienation (characterised by a sense of powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, and self-estrangement) due to their experiences of teaching, their employment status, and their structural position in schools, which are related to the occupational and organisational structure of teaching. The findings also indicate that patterns of alienation may differ between more and less experienced teachers.
[Copyright of Discourse-Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education is the property of Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2016.1261084]

In recent years, many teachers suffered different kinds of negative emotions in the context of education reforms. A typical explanation was that the education reforms disempowered teachers in teaching, so teachers were forced to do much non-instructional work. Teachers considered their work meaningless but were powerless to change it, and eventually indulged themselves in negative emotions. However, the present research suggested that this explanation had neglected teacher agency and might be incomplete. Arguing from the perspective of social constructionism, the research showed that teachers in Hong Kong experienced negative emotions in education reforms because, on top of the disempowerment, the reforms structurally displaced teachers' educational goals with administrative goals. The goal displacement impeded teachers' evaluation of the instructional values of their work. Thus, teachers perceived their work as inconsistent with their major purpose of teaching (i.e. making a difference) and they felt negative towards work.
[Copyright of British Journal of Sociology of Education is the property of Routledge.]

This study aims to understand teacher emotions through interviewing 25 and surveying 1492 primary teachers in China using a mixed method. Deductive content analysis was employed to analyze the data allocating the five nested ecological system – microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macro-system, and chronosystem. Results show that the number of emotions that teachers reported decreased as the distance from the teachers increased. The highest intensity of teacher emotions, especially with regard to teacher-student interaction and classroom management, was reported at the microsystem level. Given the powerful role that emotions and relationships play in teaching and learning, it is critical for teacher education in both preservice and inservice settings to support the development of knowledge and skills for emotional self-regulation, the nurturing of relationships in classrooms, and the improvement of their will-being.

This study investigates the emotions experienced by primary teachers in Hong Kong and Mainland China schools and develops a Teacher Emotion Inventory (TEI). Through surveying 254 teachers in a pilot study and 1830 teachers in the main study, a 5-factor TEI (i.e., Joy, Love, Sadness, Anger, and Fear) is identified using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. This model portrays primary teachers enjoying positive interactions with students and colleagues, recognition from school, family and public, but experiencing negative emotions in relation to unfair treatment, competition among colleagues, imbalance of work lives, and pressure from society, policy, and educational change.
[Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd.]