ABSTRACT

Emotional experiences and teaching and learning are recognised as connective dimensions. The special issues in journals by Nias (1996) and Van Veen and Lasky (2005), and the literature review by Sutton and Wheatley (2003), added to their growing significance. One sector of education that is under-researched in this area of teacher emotions is further education (FE), which in England covers a wide range of teaching settings. This chapter draws on two types of research in teacher emotions: teachers’ professional lives and their narratives. From the perspectives of their professional lives, the eight teachers alongside their professional (pedagogic) lives also include their lives outside of the pedagogic contexts as they enter teaching after having had other real-life and occupational experiences. This chapter uses Zembylas’s (2007, p. 356) definition of emotional knowledge to investigate the teachers’ wider professional lives. These lives cover “a teacher’s knowledge about/from his or her emotional experiences concerning one’s self, others (e.g. students and colleagues), and the wider social and political context in which teaching and learning take place”. This definition offers this investigation scope to include especially FE teachers’ wider range of biographical experiences. From the narrative perspectives, the articulations of the eight teachers serve to gain insights into their relationships between their lives, experiences and ‘emotional ecology’. The aim, therefore, is to study teachers’ emotions in the FE education sector, which offers significant provisions in occupation-related areas. This chapter uses Zembylas’s emotional ecology framework to examine the teachers’ pedagogic, life and occupational experiences. The findings indicate the complex interrelationships of the teachers’ experiences from two dimensions: emotional planes of an individual, relational and socio-cultural, and emotional knowledge of the teachers’ pedagogic, life and occupational know-how. In addition to the occupational experiences, the findings indicate new cases of teachers’ interrelationships to existing literature sources. The implications for teachers, their training and institutions are discussed. This chapter has two tables. The first provides details of the participants and the other provides a typology of the teachers’ emotional planes (individual, relational and socio-cultural) and emotional knowledge (pedagogic, life and occupational experiences).