Prioritising emotion objects: Towards a better understanding of preservice science teachers’ growth in the learning and teaching of socioscientific issues

Abstract

Learning of socioscientific issues (SSI) in the first place, making decisions to teach SSI, and deciding how to teach are affective as much as they are cognitive. The literature has identified positive and negative emotions when teachers decide whether and how to teach SSI. Yet, there is no discernable pattern regarding the association between their emotions and their commitment to teach SSI. This chapter suggests that emotion objects of preservice science teachers (PSTs) (i.e., what their emotions are about) when they were learning to teach SSI revealed to us such a commitment (or a lack of it). Our cross-case analysis revealed that during their 12 weeks of learning, PSTs who developed a stronger and more sophisticated belief towards SSI teaching demonstrated more specific and diverse emotion objects. For example, they expressed emotions about their own competence to teach, student’s learning outcomes, teaching strategies, and political contexts of their teaching etc. These compared with the less committed PST who had rather generic and all-embracing emotion objects (i.e., ‘teaching’). We suggest that identifying emotion objects can better help teacher educators to understand the learning of PSTs and are pieces of information that help us to adjust our on-going teacher education.