<p>The complexity of early childhood teacher’s emotions within their professionalism</p><p>(Elicit the complexity of early childhood teacher’s emotions into their professionalism)</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>I am interested in understand the complexity of teacher’s emotions within early childhood education dynamics, specifically, how those emotions are related with their professionalism in ECE setting. I define professionalism as professional standards or reflective professional identity. Also, it includes professional knowledge, skills, value, and ethics with varied conditions and relations. Teachers work with multiple students, parents, colleagues, and administrators within broad, social, culture, political contexts. In this complex dynamic, teachers experience range of emotions from honorable and sacred to negative and darker emotions and even complex and changeable emotions through combining emotions in daily their lives in school. Teacher works are variety emotional practices. In this study, we will examine why early childhood teachers experience certain complex emotions in school where they work.</p><p> </p><p>This study is to focus on the complex and complementary nature of teacher’s emotions within early childhood education context. More specifically, the purpose for this research is to analyze how early childhood teachers experience a range of emotions in school dynamic such as conditions and interactions with students, parents, colleagues, and administrators in daily experience of emotions, and how those complex emotions related to professionalism such as teacher’s own perspective, value, ethics, belief, and rewards and complement or conflict each others. For example, feeling of uncomfortable was a chance for a teacher to reflect her own play theory so that she could reframe classroom rules for social justice (Madrid, 2013).</p><p> </p><p><strong>Early Childhood </strong><strong>T</strong><strong>eacher Emotions and Professionalism</strong></p><p> </p><p>In early childhood education setting, a range of teacher emotions are considered into simple dichotomy- “appropriate” or “inappropriate”; Love, caring, trust, support, and sympathy as an appropriate to express and guilt, shame, anger, jealousy, frustration, and fear into inappropriate to express as a professional teacher so that teachers should express the difficult emotions in neutral way or pretend nothing happen. Such teachers’ experiences and emotional expressions differently is culture in early childhood setting (Hargreaves, 2001). This culture finds research, too. Recent years, research focuses on several positive emotional aspects of the work teachers do with their students (Hargreaves, 2001) such as caring (Noddings, 1992; Acker, 1992), passion (Fried, 1995), thoughtfulness (Clark, 1995), tact (van Manen, 1995), hope (Fulluan, 1997).  However, we need to talk teacher’s emotions beyond the honorable and sacred emotions towards unsetting darker emotions in teaching (Fineman, 1993). Such simplistic and closed culture shows traditional society perspective and concerns surround early childhood teacher and education (Campbell, 2003).  Majority of early childhood teachers are young and females; Certain power push teachers follows fixed rules without inquiry and hind real emotions to be a professional. Yet, the emotions of teacher affect teacher’s identities and their relationship with students, parents and colleagues. More recently researchers focus on teacher’s difficult emotions like guilt, surveillance, and resistance (Mardrid & Dunn-kenney, 2010) or emotional discomfort in early childhood education. However,</p><p> </p><p> </p><p><strong>Conceptual framework</strong></p><p>When early childhood teacher’s work highlights a cognitive and behavioral practice in professionalism like what teachers should know and be able to do, we miss integral part of daily teacher’s experiences. Teaching is an emotional practice (Denzin, 1984).  The teacher’s a range of emotions always present in teacher’s feeling about their work, students (Salzberger-Wittenberg, Herny, & Osborne, 1983) and the emotions influences teachers and around students, colleagues (Hargreaves, 2001), and even parents. Through diverse relation with other adults and sure students, the consequences of teacher’s emotions are changed and reform (Hargreaves 2001).</p><p>I would like to more systemically understand these changeable and complicated emotional aspects of teachers’ work. The complexity of teacher emotions come to understand of process how they are feel and why teacher act in their school contexts.</p><p>Positive emotions are changed to negative emotion. For instance, teacher’s emotional satisfaction from the student-teacher relationship is changed into disappointments of educational reform (Little, 1996). Negative emotions can be a source for positive emotions. For example, feeling of uncomfortable was a chance for a teacher to reflect her own play theory so that she could reframe classroom rules for social justice (Madrid, 2013).</p><p>To capture the complexity of emotions, I will use emotional geographies by Hargreaves (2000a, 2000b) as my conceptual framework. This conceptual framework provides teacher’s emotional dynamic as well as dynamic relation in early childhood setting. Hargreaves conceptualized five emotional geographies – sociocultural, moral, professional, political, physical geographies- that “ consist of the spatial and experiential patterns of closeness and/or distance in human interactions and relationships that help create, configure and color the feelings and emotions we experience about ourselves, our world, and each other” (Hargreaves, 2000b, p.815)</p><p>1. Sociological geographies – culture, race, class, gender and abilities</p><p>2. Moral geographies – fundamental values and beliefs about education</p><p>3. Professional geographies – professionalism, colleagues, organization</p><p>4. Political geographies- district, state, and national bureaucratic forces</p><p>5. Physical geographies- equipment and facilities around teachers</p><p>Emotional geographies are mutually inclusive and should be considered collectively and combinatorially. They are a heuristic for understanding how teachers’ emotional feelings about teaching and changes are influenced by their physical environment, schools, social practice and social forces.  </p><p> </p><p>Interview Protocol</p><p>Do you think early childhood teacher is professional?</p><p>How do you define professionalism for early childhood teacher?</p><p>Where do those ideas come from?</p><p>How do you learn about teacher’s emotions?</p><p>How do you think of you as professional early childhood teacher?</p><p>How teacher’s emotions are important in your job?</p><p>Why do you think it is important in your work?</p><p>What kinds of emotional experience do you have?</p><p>How those emotional experience? Good or bad for teaching?</p><p>Is that easy to divide to good or bad? </p><p>How would you define the emotion?</p><p>How is this reflected in your teaching and relations?</p><p>How do you include these emotions in your teaching and work in school?</p>