Strategies to cope with emotionally challenging situations in teacher education

Abstract

Learning to teach is an emotional endeavour and student teachers challenging emotions are recurrently created in teacher education. The aim of this study was to investigate student teachers’ coping with emotionally challenging situations in teacher education. In the study, 22 student teachers studying their last year of teacher education participated through semi-structured interviews. The data were analysed using constructivist grounded theory methodology. The findings revealed that coping with emotionally challenging situations was connected to student teachers’ main concern of the discrepancies between idealistic conceptions and experiences. This included wanting to have an extensive impact on future pupils as a student teacher and experiencing the ambition as potentially exhausting. In coping with this discrepancy, three strategies were used: change advocacy, collective sharing and responsibility reduction. The coping strategies are discussed in the light of existing literature and potential implications are addressed.