Bringing Emotions Back to Research on stem Teachers and Teaching

Abstract

Abstract STEM education is widely recognized as a means to equip students with generic competences to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Thus, researchers have explored the challenges to STEM education implementation and recommended strategies to overcome these challenges to enhance the effectiveness and quality of STEM education. However, STEM teachers’ emotions are overlooked in the literature, although emotions have significant impacts on the quality of teaching and the implementation of STEM education. This article aims to provide a conceptual analysis of STEM teachers’ emotions by drawing on literature on teachers’ emotions. The analysis suggests that STEM teachers’ emotions can be constructed at interpersonal, interactional, and institutional levels, with different mechanisms operating at each level. Since these levels are interrelated, researchers should be theoretically sensitive to the multilevel facets, although they may focus on one of these levels in their studies.

Keywords

stem education teacher emotions intrapersonal interactional institutional

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