ABSTRACT
Based on the analysis of the teachers’ emotional experiences presented from Chapter 3 to Chapter 7, the final chapter of this book proposes teachers as disempowered moral agents. The concept suggests that teachers are the moral agents who are committed to facilitate students’ development, but their moral agency in the pursuit of the moral goal of education is socially disempowered by social structures, such as power and status, the school administrative system, and structural education reforms. Two types of disempowerment are also identified in the chapter: technical disempowerment, which is the deprivation of power over the labor in teaching, and cognitive disempowerment, which is the deprivation of power to identify the “instructional” values of teachers’ work. The implications of the concept of teachers as disempowered moral agents are also discussed in the chapter.
