Teacher Identities, Beliefs, and Goals Related to Emotions in the Classroom

This chapter highlights teachers' experience related to emotional transactions during classroom events. In any discussion of classroom transactions, it is difficult to extract one individual from the rest of the participants in the classroom. Classrooms involve both teachers and students who come to that activity setting with their own personal histories that have emerged from transactions within their own social-historical contexts. In Bronfenbrenner's model, the various microsystems teachers are involved in, are nested within a mesosystem that represents the transactional activities among teachers' various microsystems (a teacher's family or self-influencing classroom transactions). This mesosystem is nested within an exosystem that includes the social-historical influences that affect teachers, even though teachers may not be directly involved in the process. The exosystem in turn is embedded in a macrosystem, which represents the larger society and the potential social-historical influences on the other systems (cultural values, the federal government's proposed educational mandates, or the historical treatment of various groups within the society). Finally, the chronosystem adds the dimension of time as it relates to teachers' transactions. This model reminds that a particular classroom and the activities that occur in that classroom do not occur in a vacuum. They are part of a complex social-historical contextual web. © 2007