Desarrollo evolutivo e implicaciones de la educación ambiental

As discussed in 2.2.1, teachers experience a high variety of emotions during their

teaching. Simply, according to two dimensions of emotion valence, these emotions can be divided into positive and negative emotions (Watson & Clark, 1992).

Positive emotions

According a review made by Sutton and Wheatley (2003), the most common positive emotion that teachers experience was caring. Teachers, especially female teachers from elementary schools, reported higher frequencies of the feeling of love and caring (Woods & Jeffrey, 1996), although high school teachers or male teachers also indicated that they had the emotion of caring for their students (Hargreaves, 1998; Sutton, 2000a).

Other positive emotions commonly experienced by teachers were joy and

satisfaction (Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). These feelings came out when teachers saw their students’ performance met their expectation (Sutton, 2000a; Frenzel et al., 2009b). Moreover, teachers might feel excited if students made some unexpected progress (Nias, 1989).

In all, the sources of teachers’ positive emotions could be students’ cooperation, colleagues’ support and parents’ respect (Sutton & Wheatley, 2003) and these factors are discussed in the later section of part one.

Negative emotions

In terms of negative emotions in teachers’ emotional experience, anger and frustration were the most popularly discussed in many studies (Chang, 2009; Frenzel et al., 2009b; Sutton, 2000a; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). Anger normally came out when teachers saw students’ misbehaviours in the classroom (Spilt, Koomen & Thijs, 2011; Tsouloupas et al., 2010) and it can be intensified by the teachers’ tiredness and stress (Nias, 1989;

Sutton, 2000a; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). Beginning teachers were easier to feel anxious due to the lack of experience (Coates & Thoresen, 1976; Varah, Theune & Parker,1986).

Other negative emotions including helplessness, sadness and guilt might occur when teachers who had low self-efficacy faced un-controllable situations (Kelchtermans,

1996). As many educational psychologists (Carson, 2006; Chang, 2009; Van Horn,

Schaufeli, & Enzmann,1999) argue, unpleasant emotions are key factors that result in teachers’ emotional exhaustions, and among these negative emotions, anger, anxiety, frustration, guilt/shame and sadness are main emotions leading to emotional exhaustion of teachers.

In the classroom setting, teachers’ emotional experiences closely relate to students’ performance (Frenzel, et al., 2009a; Chang, 2009). That is to say, teachers’ expectations of the achievement of their teaching goals and outcomes of students’ learning are resources of their emotions in the classroom. In addition, in an achievement related context, for example, a teacher teaching and engaging with his/her students in a classroom, people usually have expectations to achieve certain results of the activities; and no matter if they achieve their expectations or fail to attain them, some emotions relating to expectations would come out as consequences of cognitive activities and these emotions can be named as achievement emotions (Weiner, Russell& Lerman, 1979, Pekrun 2000). Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, and Perry (2002) have summarised several

achievement related emotions in the academic setting by conducting 5 qualitative studies. Nine emotions emerged from their study and four of these emotions (pride, hope,

enjoyment and relief) were positive and five of them (hopelessness, anger, anxiety, shame, and boredom) were negative.

Later, they categorised these emotions based on three main settings in education. These settings were, students “being in class, studying, and writing tests and exams” (p.3,

Pekrun,Goetz,& Perry,2005). In details, the emotions frequently experienced by students in the classroom were “enjoyment, hope, pride, anger, anxiety, shame,

hopelessness, and boredom” (p. 3, Pekrun et al., 2005). The emotions related to students’ learning were the same as those experienced in the classroom and the emotions

experienced during tests were “enjoyment, hope, pride, relief, anger, anxiety, shame, and hopelessness” (p. 3, Pekrun et al., 2005).

However, in the current educational psychology domain, when it comes to achievement-related emotions, most of the research talks about emotions related to students’ learning and achievement and so little research can be found on the respect of teachers’ feelings about achievements during the instructions (Sutton & Wheatley, 2003; Pekrun et al., 2002). As Frenzel, et al., (2009a) have argued, teachers’ emotions in the classroom can transfer with students’ emotions because students’ academic emotions can be used as guidelines for teachers in planning their instructional environments (Pekrun, et al., 2002). As they are closely related to teachers’ teaching, they guide teachers’ teaching goals and method; and in a way, shape teachers’ expectations in teaching. Specifically, if a teacher wants his/her students to experience more positive emotions in academic activities, he/she may expect him/herself to deliver positive emotional influences first. Several research studies (Hargreaves, 2000; Isenbarger & Zembylas, 2006; Skinner,& Belmont, 1993) reported that the teacher in the classroom would try to stay positive and let students sense the hope or enjoyment from him/her. In this sense, the academic emotions can transfer between the teacher and students.

Based on this transmission discovered by previous research, the current research decided to adopt achievement emotions discovered from academic setting (Pekrun et al., 2002) as investigation items and since the current study focused on teachers’ emotional experiences in the classroom setting, the class-related achievement emotions (anger,

anxiety, shame, hopelessness) were mainly adopted. The reasons for excluding the positive emotions are as follows. Firstly, as it was argued previously, it is the negative emotion which takes most of the responsibility for teachers’ emotional exhaustion and

mental burn-out. It would be more important and meaningful to examine how and why the

teachers’ feeling are drained out. Secondly, the situational antecedents which were selected in the present research for triggering teachers’ emotions were students’

misbehaviours, as such it may be inappropriate to assume teachers would have positive feelings when they confront students’ incivilities in the classroom. Moreover, as the current research studied teachers’ emotional reactions to students’ misbehaviour or incivilities in the classroom, some other emotions were included into the present research in addition to the academic emotions in the classroom setting. Sadness was one of them, although it was allocated to test-related emotions by Pekrun et al., (2006), it was

mentioned by several previous studies (Day & Leitch, 2001; Isenbarger, & Zembylas, 2006). For instance, according to a qualitative study done by Mishna,Scarcello,Pepler, and Wiener (2005) teachers would feel sad when they saw bullying behaviours in their class. Another emotion which was also examined in this research was annoyance, as it was proposed by many participants in the pilot study; and according to the hierarchical cluster of emotions proposed by Shaver,Schwartz, Kirson,& O'connor, (1987), it is close to the emotion of frustration which is one of the key factor leads to teachers’ emotional worn-out.