Teacher's emotions in curriculum implementation: A case study of the senior secondary school curriculum reform in Guangzhou, China.

摘要

There has been an emotional revolution in the field of social science since the beginning of the 1980s; emotion has gradually become a remarkable research topic in many subjects encompassing philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, and anthropology, etc. Accompanying this emotional revolution is an unceasing increase of research on emotion in the field of education since the middle of 1990s. However, compared with the emotional studies in the domains of teaching and educational leadership, there is far less than sophisticated understanding of teacher emotion during the process of curriculum implementation in the literature.; Change is the central feature of our current age. The past two decades has not only witnessed the surge of emotion study in education, but also a return of large-scale change in the global educational filed. Given this context, the Senior Secondary School (SSS) curriculum reform in Mainland China, which has been put into practice since September 2004, can be regarded as a local response to this global trend.; This research is informed by symbolic interactionism in interpreting the relationship between curriculum implementation and teachers' emotions. To be more specific, all research findings are integrated into a 3-level "Self-Interaction-Society" framework. On the level of self, emotion is the product of teachers' efforts to reframe their identities in curriculum implementation, and teachers' emotional labor reflects their presentation of self by the use of emotions. On the level of human interaction, teachers' emotions are influenced by the emotional geographies and emotional dilemmas, which respectively result from "teacher-others" interactions and "reform-situation" tensions in curriculum implementation. On the level of social structure, teachers are not only constrained by the particular emotional rules in curriculum implementation, but also employ many strategies to cope with the constraints of the situations, which effectively bridges the interactions between the curriculum implementation and teachers' emotions.; Through the exploration of teachers' emotions and changes in curriculum implementation, this research adds the once-neglected dimension of teacher emotion into curriculum implementation research. This research finds the adaptive functions that teachers play in curriculum implementation, confirms teacher's position as change agent in reform, and recognizes the value of cultural-individual perspective in understanding curriculum implementation and teachers' emotions. These findings remind us that if curriculum implementation wants to achieve the ideal effects, reformers need to take into consideration subjective meanings that individual teachers attach to the reform. Teachers' emotions are one integral part of the meanings. Furthermore, they also need to concern the reciprocal influences between the subjective meanings and curriculum implementation. When the pace of large-scale reform and individual teachers' emotional and behavioral changes are well accommodated, curriculum implementation is more likely to achieve its goals. These findings bring some implications for the implementation of SSS curriculum reform in Mainland China. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)