Giving emotions the centrality in teachers’ lives: reframing thinking, doing and feeling in Language Teacher Education through the lens of sociocultural theory

The principal aim of this paper is to argue for a reframing of cognition, emotion, and activity in language teacher professional development. We argue for a dialectical relationship between them, following Vygotsky (1978/1987/1994), whose aim was to give an objective account of consciousness on the basis of historical materialism. He saw it as an inherently relational process: humans process a range of mental functions – thought, attention, affect, perception; the key to understanding consciousness is understanding the inter-relations between these functions. Here, we argue that in language teacher education, the dialectic between emotion and cognition plays an essential role in self-enquiry of a novice teacher, and consequently in the self-enquiry of teacher educators, and ways in which it reframes our own understanding as learners and/or teachers. Whilst there has been a substantial body of literature in recent decades addressing the centrality of emotions in teachers’ lives (cf. Schutz & Zembylas 2009; Golombek & Doran 2014), these are often downplayed by teacher educators in the process of novice teachers gaining teaching experience. Drawing on results from a small-case study of novice teachers at the University of Brighton, we aim to readdress the place of emotion in the complex process of teacher development.