Understanding the diversity of demands and challenges in education

This issue of Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice opens with a paper titled The effect of teachers’ emotional labour on teaching satisfaction: moderation of emotional intelligence by Hongbiao Yin from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The paper sets out to research teachers’ sensitivity to emotional demands and the ways in which they are regulated through their work. Four instruments were used in the study, which included: (1) Emotional job demands scale; (2) Wong and Law’s emotional intelligence scale; (3) Teacher emotional labour strategy scale; and (4) Teaching satisfaction scale. The project involved a survey of Chinese teachers (N = 1281), results of which were analysed through hierarchical regression in order to quantify the relationships amongst ‘emotional job demands, emotional intelligence, emotional labour strategies and teaching satisfaction’. Yin highlights three major implications from the study. The first is that teachers need to adopt specific strategies in order to manage the emotional demands of their work, which, in so doing, influences the effectiveness of their practice. The second is that deep acting (see e.g. Gross, 1998) as a way of regulating emotions means teachers need to be able to employ ‘attention deployment in which one turns attention toward or away from something to influence his or her emotions, and cognitive change in which one re-evaluates the situation or one’s capability to manage the situation in order to influence one’s emotions’. Finally, emotional intelligence appears to be important in offering a protection effective through processes of emotional labour. Yin makes the point that although the study was conducted with Chinese teachers, the results support the work of others internationally and therefore speaks to the field in ways that should be informative for teaching and teacher education. As such, the study highlights what Yin believes is the importance of emotional intelligence as an aspect of the professional standards for teaching. Yin’s paper is followed by a study titled Teachers’ professional agency and learning: from adaption to active modification in the teacher community by Pyhältö, Pietarinen and Soini from Finland. Their paper explores issues of teacher learning, school development and professional agency in ways that bring to the surface important issues drawn from the complexity of practice. The study examines two major hypotheses. The first is that a ‘Teacher’s sense of professional agency in the professional community is embodied by interrelated ingredients, including motivation, efficacy beliefs and activities for facilitating and managing learning’; and, the second is that ‘Perceived professional agency in the professional community reduces experienced stress through proactive strategy use’. The authors developed two scales, one for measuring teachers’ professional agency and another for measuring proactive strategies. They also measured work-related stress using Elo, Leppänen, and Jahkola’s (2003) single-item stress scale. Through the use of probability sampling (N = 6000), they achieved a 39% response rate. The study found