Teachers' emotions in a context of reforms

Abstract

This book explores how Dutch secondary school teachers perceive their work and current large-scale reforms. To understand them, a social-psychological theory on emotions is used as a theoretical framework. Educational reforms can be problematic, and few are implemented successfully. Often, teachers are blamed for this failure and accused of being too conservative and traditional. However, this research assumes most teachers to be strongly committed and capable teachers. Therefore, teachers' resistance to particular reforms may be based on something other than frequently suggested, such as a 'good sense'. Teachers' good sense refers to the way they think their work should be, which may be different from what reforms expect them to do. Being faced with those reforms, teachers often react with strong emotions, which can indicate that they have much at stake. This study investigates the emotions of teachers and what they have at stake by examining how they perceive their work in relation to current reforms. The thesis constists of five chapters, written in American English. The first chapter describes the purpose of the study, the policy context, its theoretical premises, and its relationship to existing theoretical and empirical work. The three following chapters each contains a sub-study, which has been published in or submitted to a research journal. The last chapter summarizes and discusses the findings. A summary in Dutch is included