The Role of Teacher Emotion in Education

Education is fundamentally driven by human interactions and emotions, particularly within the teaching profession. Teacher emotion significantly influences teaching dynamics and educational reforms but has been historically underexplored in scholarly research. As education systems worldwide embrace managerial reforming approaches, teachers are increasingly subjected to performance-based accountability, exacerbating negative emotions like stress and anxiety. These emotional responses are pivotal as they affect teachers' wellbeing, identity, and performance on a daily basis yet are seldom adequately addressed at both organizational and policy levels. This oversight in considering teacher emotion contributes to the ineffectiveness of reforms and policy implementations which fail to resonate on a human, emotional level with educators.

This Research Topic aims to foreground the emotional experiences of teachers, asserting that understanding and integrating these into educational practices can lead to more effective and humane reforms. Teacher emotion is conceptualized not just as a biological response but as a socially constructed phenomenon, where teachers actively engage with their environments and internalize and interpret educational changes. The dynamic interplay of recognizing and responding to reforms, sometimes with resistance or mixed feelings, highlights the complex emotional landscape that teachers navigate. This understanding opens avenues for a deeper exploration of how emotional processes shape educational practices and policies.

To gather further insights in the importance of teacher emotion in education, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• The impact of teacher emotion on individual teaching practices, wellbeing, identity, and professional development.
• The influence of teacher emotion in school management, reforms, and improvement.
• The role of teacher emotions in policy innovation, implementation, and evaluation.
• Examining how teacher emotions interact with educational changes and reforms.
• Strategies for integrating emotional considerations into educational policy-making.

Additionally, we invite original contributions that address theoretical, methodological, and empirical inquiries concerning these topics.

Keywords: Teacher Emotion, Well-Being, Education, School, Mental Health

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.