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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.

Sec. Teacher Education

Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1692383

This article is part of the Research TopicThe Role of Teacher Emotion in EducationView all 5 articles

Emotional Drivers of Pedagogy and their place in the motivational process: distinguishing percepts from outcomes

Provisionally accepted
  • 1University of Dundee, Dundee, United Kingdom
  • 2University of St Andrews School of Psychology and Neuroscience, St Andrews, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Research examining teachers' experiences during the Covid pandemic highlighted the importance of emotion as a driver of motivation, specifically the emotions of CARE, CURIOSITY, COOPERATION and CHALLENGE. Here we examine the generalisability of those findings in the post-pandemic period. Interviews were carried out with a new cohort of nine Scottish teachers, and deductive thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Results confirmed the presence of the four motivating emotions, as distinct from outcome emotions such as pride and frustration. However, their prevalence shifted, with CARE and CURIOSITY less dominant than during Covid, while CHALLENGE was more prevalent. Teachers' accounts also suggested that COMMUNITY is a more accurate label than COOPERATION for capturing the feelings associated with shared social motivation. Examination of co-occurrence of emotions showed they were frequently mentioned in close temporal proximity to each other. Narrative analysis highlighted individual stories that link emotional percepts, cognitions, volitional behaviour, and outcome emotions within each teacher's situational context. We consequently propose a motivational process model consisting of these four factors, in contrast to a recent integrative framework including six stages of action in which emotions are less foregrounded. We discuss how these findings support the development of a Theory of Emotionally Motivated Pedagogy that presents emotions as a central component of teacher motivation. Implications are discussed for pedagogical practitioners seeking to understand their own motivation, as well as for researchers examining motivation as a complex affectivist phenomenon.

Keywords: Teaching, emotion, Motivation, agency, Affectivism, Theory of EmotionallyMotivated Pedagogy, Thematic analysis, Narrative analysis

Received: 25 Aug 2025; Accepted: 03 Oct 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Porter and Donaldson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Karen Porter, kporter001@dundee.ac.uk

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