The emotions of educational change: teachers'voices

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the effect of emotions on teachers’ ability to cope with educational change and what factors help or hinder their ability to change their practice. Using an ethnomethodological approach, how one group of Hong Kong Secondary English teachers were able to make sense of the first School Based Assessment (SBA) initiative, part of the greater Hong Kong educational reform project, and apply it to their daily teaching practice is explored. The group of teachers is comprised of five Form Four teachers including the researcher. Being a participant-member, the researcher was able to have total access to the study environment and close daily contact with the other participants in the study. Interview data was taken at three intervals, one at the end of the first year of the initial implementation, another upon the completion of the first SBA cohort and then again at the end of the first Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) at which point the original form of the SBA had been conducted six times. Findings show that teachers’ emotions play a very important role in their working lives and are often sublimated to be able to cope with the competing and sometimes conflicting demands of school and society. This emotional management is very difficult to maintain and teachers must find creative ways of coping to lessen its effects, in particular, by a form of emotional banking in which teachers tap into good teaching memories to alleviate feelings of being overwhelmed or inadequate in the face of change. Other findings demonstrate that teachers’ ability to change their practice was greatly restricted by systemic factors beyond their control. While the largescale reform effort seeks to transform Hong Kong’s education system to be more ‘flexible, diversified and integrated’ and increase teachers’ professionalism, the reality is that society clings to the belief that only the high-stakes examinations have value. This factor, coupled with an overloaded administrative workload has made real teacher development and growth in professional practice virtually nonexistent.