JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

This study is about recognising the prominent role of emotions in the educational context. Its core is the recognition of emotion regulation as a phenomenon that is ingrained in the nature of teachers’ work with implications for holistic understanding of the ways in which teachers perceive their emotion regulation. This study thus focuses on the investigation of different qualitative ways of perceiving emotion regulation, as to render results for more efficient coping on both teachers’ personal level and in the classroom. The nature of teachers’ work is always related to a specific social situation and an emotional climate that is often demanding. Therefore, this study aims at delivering more specific uses of emotion regulation as conceptualised by the participant teachers in this study. The first part of this work discusses the findings of previous researches related to emotion regulation, with special emphasis on teachers’ emotion regulation and the implications of such regulation in the classroom. The second part of the thesis discusses the methodology — the construction of this phenomenographical study. The relativistic nature of knowledge is recognised as the teachers’ answers collected through semi-structured interviews are interpreted through the lens of their individual perception of emotion regulation. The analysis of the data through the identification of meaningful utterances is described and the results are interpreted through the categories as shown from the data. The abstract themes are established as a result of combining lower level categories, and these themes are the main findings of the research, namely description categories which conceptualise teachers’ emotion regulation in versatile ways. The first category establishes teachers’ emotion regulation as necessary for sustaining their various roles. The second category relates to teachers’ emotion regulation in connection with their students. The third category discusses different emotion regulation strategies that teachers reported using, as well as the relation of emotion regulation to the school community. Teachers taking part in this study conceptualised emotion regulation as a very important, even necessary part of their work, as well as for establishing boundaries between their work and their personal life. These results can be beneficial for individual teachers, as well as the recognition of emotions in planning the training of the teachers and other educational strategies.