“I felt the whole world was against me!”: a qualitative study of novice teachers’ anger expression and regulation

ABSTRACT

This study examines how novice teachers engage with the emotion of anger in their professional work. We generated 155 Chinese teachers’ written reflections on how they felt, expressed, and regulated anger. The study revealed three findings: 1) the primary sources of the teachers’ anger were related to students; 2) the majority of teachers tended to express anger destructively; 3) some teachers lacked emotional competence to regulate anger. The intensifying emotional labour in the teaching profession, the professional prematurity of novice teachers, and the stringent emotional rules in Chinese schools jointly contributed to the identified patterns. This study generates new insights into novice teachers’ anger-related experiences, highlights the socio-cultural dimension of teacher anger, and suggests practical implications for supporting teachers in making sense of and acting on anger more consciously and effectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional labour
• emotional rule
• novice teacher
• qualitative research
• teacher anger

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the International Joint Research Project of Huiyan International College, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University (Grant Number: ICER201901)

Notes on contributors

Wei Liu

Wei Liu is a lecturer at the School of Psychology, Guizhou Normal University. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Teacher Education Research, Beijing Normal University. His research interests include teacher emotion and motivation, teacher education, and school mental health education.

Rui Yuan

Dr. Rui (Eric) Yuan is an associate professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of Macau. His research focuses on teacher education, particularly teacher cognitions, identities, and emotions, as well as English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education.

Wei Liao

Dr. Wei Liao is a lecturer at the Center for Teacher Education Research, Beijing Normal University. His research centers around equity-oriented teacher education, teacher educators' professional learning, and qualitative research methodologies.

Hong Zhang

Dr. Hong Zhang is Professor at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China. Her main research interests include language teacher education, materials analysis, and foreign language education.