The Emotions Embedded Within Educators’ Holistic Professional Development

The present lecture aims to highlight the role of emotion in education. In recent years, emotion has gained increasingly greater attention in the study of professional development, at least in part because education is an emotional practice.

There are two contrasting perceptions of educators’ development. One is the traditional approach that focuses on the acquisition of theoretical and pedagogical knowledge in education, as well as ethical aspects and intellectual involvement (Korthagen, 2016). A review of professional development programs reveals that this approach focuses on procedures for the purpose of improving teaching skills and methods (Robinson, 2019).

The second is the alternative approach to educators’ development (Furlong & Oancea, 2005) that is based on a humanist-holistic philosophy in education (Buber, 1958; Maslow, 1998), and focuses on the relationships between the personal, interpersonal, and professional dimensions in educators’ training (Oplatka &Iglan, 2020). This holistic approach is grounded in the acquisition of teaching techniques as an integral part of professional development, along with development of the personal dimension – i.e., emotion.

Researchers point out that educators whose training is based on the traditional approaches operate on a technical level, rather than on a personal level (Allender & Allender, 2008). Moreover, emotion is absent (Rosenblum ,2015) even in educator teacher training models (Peter and Walter, 2010) that integrate techniques from the personal dimensions (such as drama, movement and guided imagery) and are based on educational and experiential theories (Gardner, 1993). The gap of knowledge that this study aims to address is the understanding of the impact of embedding emotion within professional development of educators, and its contribution to teaching.

The research questions in this study, therefore are: (1) How do educators perceive holistic-integrative professional development based on personal development? (2) What is the impact of the holistic-integrative personal and professional development on educators’ practice in general, and on construction and regulation of their emotion in teaching in particular?

The current research will increase our knowledge concerning the complex connection between personal and professional development, and in doing so we will enhance our scholarship concerning the role of emotion within professional development and its contribution to holistic practice.