School teachers’ lives and emotions in a context of educational changes from the perspective of life history

Educational change is a reality that affects teachers’ personal lives and emotions. Yet most research in educational change focused on teachers’ emotions from organizational perspective devoid of personal lived experiences. Therefore, this study aimed to understand teachers’ lives and emotions in a context of educational change in Malaysia. Specifically, it examined the teachers’ lived experiences, their emotions, and the emergence of their emotions in their lived experiences in a context of educational change. Symbolic interactionism was the underpinning theory used in this study, focusing on interaction of self and objects. Based on purposive sampling methods, fifteen secondary school teachers were involved as participants who provided the narratives of their teaching lived experiences. Data were collected through life history interviews using face to-face and email interviews and were analysed using thematic analysis. Findings revealed that interaction of teachers’ self with different objects, such as social objects and abstract objects, allowed for different types of emotions to emerge in teachers’ lived experience and within educational change context. Students, as social object, were important in the teachers’ lived experience that they either changed or not changed their teaching purpose (abstract object) in order to accommodate students’ diverse needs. In addition, it was discovered that the teachers were adept emotion managers who managed their emotions which emerged using both intrinsic and extrinsic strategies. This study contributes to the understanding of the functions of teacher emotions from the sociological perspective, which assumes emotion as a process of meaning making, through the interaction of self and object, of the teachers’ lived experience in the context of educational change. Implications from this study highlights the needs for teacher emotions to be considered as source of information for better change planning in the future. Limitations are discussed and recommendations for future research are given.