Emotional Work in Preschool Teachers’ Everyday Lives: A Theoretical Outline and Dialogue with Critical Pedagogy.

Abstract

This paper points out educational study is not only a pure macro-oriented focus such as analysis for policy and ideological formation; rather, it also must be in synchronicity with the actual socio-historical process and the baseline of everyday life in the micro level. Thus, this paper considers that emotional issues may be the good windows to inquire schoolteachers` everyday lives. First, this paper reviews relevant theories in multiple disciplines to systematically politicize emotions as an important site of educational research. Second, this paper emphasizes that to understand emotions are inscribed in culture and ideology, as "embodied and situated." Finally, this paper`s focus is not only on how social factors affect what schoolteacher feel, but also on how schoolteachers mobilize their feeling to creation a condition for social transformation. That is, the ultimate purpose is to answer "can one explain the possibility of resistance from an oppressed position through emotion mobilization?" and to build up this model—the emotional requirement for subversive action: "structure of feeling" is an important social condition for intervention from anger to joyful/hopeful commitment to social transformation.