Chapter 2 “Solemn as the Kremlin”? Emotions of Teachers in Soviet Classroom Photos

Abstract

Teaching and learning are emotional processes. Therefore understanding, disciplining or normalizing, suppressing, and displaying emotions present a field of research for educational psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists – a field in which extensive research experience has already been invested. Since the end of the twentieth century, emotions have also become a thriving and dynamic (sub)field of historical studies, joining many “turns” in the history of education, too. Whereas in psychology, emotions are viewed as “located in the individual,” historians are among those who take emotion research outside of the human psyche. They reveal emotions as social constructs, that is, as generated by standards, values, and beliefs rooted in an individual’s experience and developed in certain historical, sociocultural, political, and institutional contexts. Thorough examination of these contexts lets historian’s questions in emotion research be answered. In turn, studying