Faith-Curriculum Conflicts in Critical Thinking Education: A Qualitative Study of Christian Teachers' Coping Strategies in Korean Public High Schools

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Investigating the nature of teachers' emotions and their management and regulation during the teaching process is essential for evaluating the quality of instructional delivery. Although emotions play a critical role in teachers' professional lives and instructional practices, research on emotion regulation among teachers has not extensively focused on the strategies employed in specific contexts (Aldrup et al., 2024). Building upon the existing literature, this study examined the emotions and emotion regulation strategies of Korean EFL regular high school teachers during teaching English.
This study employed a semi-structured in-person interview methodology to investigate the emotions and emotion regulation strategies of Korean EFL teachers. Over one month, nine Korean EFL teachers from two distinct regular high schools were interviewed. The interview items concerning teacher emotions were developed with reference to the Teacher Emotional Scales (TES) (Frenzel et al., 2016) and the Teaching Anxiety Scale (TAS). The study utilized the Process Model of Emotion Regulation to examine the emotional regulation strategies employed by Korean EFL teachers during instruction (Gross, 1998; Gross & Thompson, 2007). The findings revealed that all participating Korean EFL teachers experience diverse emotions while teaching. The primary emotions identified were anger, sadness, and empathy, with empathy being particularly prominent among Christian educators. Teacher emotions were primarily associated with student misbehavior, as suggested by previous studies (Burić et al., 2016; Chang & Davis, 2009). In regard to emotion regulation strategy, teachers reported employing a range of emotion regulation techniques to mitigate negative feelings during lessons in line with earlier research (Burić et al., 2016; Sutton, 2004). The results further indicated that teachers frequently employed cognitive change strategies and situation modification, aligning with the findings of Sutton (2004). It was also noteworthy that Christian teachers frequently attributed causes to external factors.