“It felt like I became a part of her”: Employing embodied narrative to develop teachers’ relational agency in navigating emotional struggles

Abstract

Teachers’ emotional struggles in the workplace have received increasing attention due to their impact on teacher well-being and student development. Existing literature adopted a deficit-based approach, emphasizing individual emotion regulation skills while overlooking the social and interpersonal dynamics that shape their emotional struggles. Grounded in embodied theories and narrative inquiry theory, this study designed and implemented an Embodied Narrative intervention to support six teachers in navigating emotional struggles over a semester. Data sources included workshop recordings, teacher interviews, and reflective artifacts. Findings suggest that teachers’ emotional struggles are not merely individual psychological reactions but are embodied and embedded within complex relational dynamics. By exercising relational agency, teachers identified and leveraged interpersonal collaboration to expand their understanding of emotional complexity and coordinated and practiced more constructive and innovative actions. In doing so, they transformed individual emotional struggles into collective learning resources and drivers of institutional change. The development of relational agency was supported by the embodied and relational approaches of the intervention grounded in care and trust. This study contributes to existing research on teacher emotions and professional development, while also providing a generative framework for interventions addressing teacher emotional struggles in culturally similar contexts.