Sociological Understandings of Teachers' Emotions: A Short Introdution, Critical Review, and the Way Forward

Teachers' emotions have been issues drawing the attentions of educational scientists. Since teachers' emotions has been regarded as a psychologial phenomonon, the educational scientists explain how teachers feel and how their feelings affect educational process with psychological theories. However, more and more educational scientists note that teachers' emotions are socially constructed and the social construction of teachers' emotions is not explained by the psychological theories. As a result, they swith their theoretical perspectives from psychology to sociology. In the literature, the sociological theories they have employed include the labor process theory, theory of bureaucracy, emotional labor theory, post-structuralism, theory of emotinoal geographies, and identity theory. Nevertheless, each of the theories has some limitations. Therefore, the goals of this book is to (1) introduce and review the sociological theories which are applied to explain teachers' emotions critically and (2) propose a sociological framework and research agenda for further studies based on the critically review.

Dr. Kwok Kuen Tsang is an assistant lecturer of the Hong Kong Institute of Technology. He receives his Ph.D. in the sociology of education from the University of Hong Kong.