Emotions are of great importance in the teaching-learning processes. This study aims to deepen the understanding of the emotions perceived by future male and female teachers of Primary Education when using an active methodology in the classroom during their teaching practice. A qualitative methodology has been adopted by means of narratives collected with an open-ended questionnaire developed ad hoc. The virtual tool Google Forms was used for this purpose, as well as the AQUAD program for data processing. The results reveal that the most significant emotions for future teachers are those perceived as positive, such as fun, confidence, or illusion; during the whole process, although in the phase prior to their teaching performance, nervousness, fear, or concern are perceived more. This research highlights the importance of strengthening the emotional dimension in initial teacher training.
TopIntroduction
The concern with emotions is linked to human behavior itself (Belmonte, 2007; Hernández-Barco et al., 2021; Hualde, 2016). These emotions are defined, as Schutz et al. (2006) indicate, as the “socially constructed, personally enacted ways of being that emerge from conscious and/or unconscious judgments regarding perceived successes at attaining goals or maintaining standards or beliefs during transactions as part of social-historical contexts” (p. 344). From this perspective, emotions are social and relational constructs, i.e., they involve relationships between a subject and a particular object, such as being disappointed or excited about someone or something (Denzin, 1984; Lazarus, 1991). In the case of teachers, these human-object interactions tend to occur in the classroom. For Bisquerra (2003), “emotion is a complex state of an organism characterized by an excitation or disturbance that predisposes to an organized response. Emotions are generated in response to an external or internal event” (p. 12).
Regarding the proposed classification of emotions, Ekman (1992), Damasio (1994), Díaz and Flores (2001), (Mellado et al., 2014) and Goleman (1996) could be cited/are worth mentioning, but the authors of the present research consider the one proposed by Dávila-Acedo et al. (2015), based, in turn, on the proposal of Fernández-Abascal et al. (2001), to be adequate. Thus, there are positive emotions: confidence, enthusiasm, joy, amusement, happiness, satisfaction, and surprise; and negative emotions: anxiety, boredom, fear, nervousness, rejection, and worry. According to this proposal, positive emotions are those that guarantee happiness. However, the classification of emotions into positive and negative does not mean that some are “good” and others “bad”, but rather that it would be necessary to project a broader meaning, since emotions, of one type or another, can increase the evolutionary capacity of people (Plutchik, 2001). From this evolutionary point of view, this author claims that feeling states tend to be followed by motives that lead to action: emotions thus trigger a series of events and arise from social interaction. The relationship between emotional and cognitive dimensions has been found in numerous studies (Hernández-Barco et al., 2021; Pessoa, 2008). Emotions influence student learning and performance (Frenzel et al., 2007; Phelps, 2006), or memory (Mora, 2016), among other examples (Berrios et al., 2015; Cross et al, 2020; Davis et al., 2004; Larsen et al., 2001; Scherer, 1998).
Regarding the pedagogical perspective, there have been numerous studies that have addressed the transition between traditional and innovative teaching (Jeong et al., 2019; Nurutdinova et al., 2016; Wilhelm et al., 2019). In this field would be the so-called active methodologies, where learning strategies play a fundamental role in the acquisition of competencies (Abar & Loken, 2010; Prince, 2004; Sinatra & Taasoobshirazi, 2011; Soria & Giner, 2021; Weinstein et al., 2011).