Teachers’ emotions in super-diverse school settings

ABSTRACT

Emotions have a great impact upon teachers’ daily practices and especially on the ways in which they understand and interpret educational policies. Teachers are the agents of social change; hence, their voices, views and emotions should not be ignored. This article investigates the ways in which teachers experience, negotiate and enact on the intercultural education policy, in super-diverse school settings. For the purposes of this research, we used the Cyprus educational system as our case study to perform interviews with 20 teachers of ten primary schools with high diverse profile. Research data revealed that teachers’ emotions were constantly challenged and negotiated within culturally diverse school settings and had implications on their practices. Both contextual and professional factors were found to influence their emotional responses and consequently affected the way and degree to which teachers comprehend, amend, perceive and enact on intercultural education.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher emotion
• policy enactment
• interculturalism
• primary education
• super-diversity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.