Maria Teresa Estrela

The emotional dimension of teaching in a group of Portuguese teachers

The study of emotions within educational contexts congregates various perspectives, strategies and levels, and requires multidisciplinary approaches to clarify the impact of the emotional dimension of teachers in the classroom. This study aims at understanding through a multidisciplinary approach how teachers manage their emotions within the pedagogical objectives and in which classroom settings they experience emotions regarded as positive or negative. A detailed analysis of the answers of eight Portuguese teachers to an open-ended interview revealed that positive emotions were experienced in classroom contexts whereas negative emotions refer to meso and macro contexts. However, the description and understanding of emotions is centred in two basic categories: happiness and sadness. According to this data, the lack of discrimination of the teachers’ emotional states points to the need of training in this area, namely in what concerns the ability to discriminate and recognise emotions and situations that trigger them.

The Bologna process and the search for excellence: between rhetoric and reality, the emotional reactions of teachers

ABSTRACT There has been an overall change in higher education towards the achievement of outstanding patterns of quality and excellence that assure competitiveness at a global scale. Teachers feel the pressure of official regulations for achieving quality and excellence, based on questionable concepts of quality that do not take into account the experience and beliefs of teachers and lead to emotional states that may promote or hinder adjustment to changes. The present study used a categorical content analysis to capture the emotions that twelve university teachers associate with the changes experienced and with the pursuit of quality emphasized in Portugal by the Bologna Process. The results show that participants revealed mixed emotions regarding change. Students elicit mostly positive emotions, whereas bureaucracy, marketization and career changes generate negative emotions that impede the quest for quality, although in a minority of participants they prompt resilience that stimulates engagement in quality.

A Dimensão Emocional da Docência: Contributo para a Formação de Professores

Partindo de quadros teoricos que sao explicitados no texto, este artigo apresenta o conjunto do projeto de investigacao “A Dimensao Emocional da Docencia e Formacao de Professores”. Este projeto pretendeu captar as dimensoes pedagogicas dos sentimentos e emocoes de dois grupos de professores. Inferidas algumas necessidades e aspiracoes de formacao, concebeu-se um esquema de investigacao-formacao que visou o desenvolvimento da literacia emocional dos professores. Ao longo do processo verificaram-se mudancas na capacidade de discriminacao emocional, nas crencas e nos niveis de reflexividade dos professores participantes.