The emotional geography of faculty members engaging in virtual teacher professional development (VTPD): evidence from Indonesia

Purpose

Drawing from emotional geography framework promoted by Hargreaves (2000), our research sought to depict the emotional geography of two faculty members who engaged in a virtual teacher professional development (VTPD) sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to focus on capturing participants’ emotional closeness or distance while they were engaging in VTPD.

Design/methodology/approach

This study employed narrative inquiry by exploring three-dimensional narrative inquiry space: temporality, personal-social interaction and place (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). Following this step, the participants were interviewed online through Zoom meetings and WhatsApp to capture critical incidents of their emotional experience. All collected data were transcribed, and some data from Bahasa Indonesia were translated into English. Member checking was also done several times to ensure the accuracy of the data as well as to avoid misinterpretation. The data were analysed inductively to generate coding categories using systemic functional linguistics (SFL) language appraisal (Martin and White, 2007) and emotional geography parameter (Hargreaves, 2001b).

Findings

The findings of the study revealed that both participants experienced greater positive feeling than negative ones. The participants experienced positive feelings such as seriousness, happiness, successfulness and satisfaction. They also experienced negative feelings such as insecurity, unhappiness, dissatisfaction and impatience. Such positive and negative feelings create closeness and distance among participants, mentor and workshop organiser. This study indicates that maintaining positive feelings is a passport to succeed in VTPD.

Research limitations/implications

The study has two limitations. First, its findings cannot be overgeneralised since the analysis was restricted to data gathered from a small number of participants. Second, the scope of investigation was limited in virtual situations.

Practical implications

The present study empirically showed that faculty members need to engage in constructing or maintaining positive emotional bond with the mentor and other participants and create conducive situations to understand their own and others’ emotions (Mayer, 2011). Practically, a mentor in VTPD may ask faculty members to voice and share their emotional experience as an evaluation tool to make VTPD programmes more successful. Future participants can benefit from these findings by engaging in emotional understanding and building a conducive situation during VTPD to develop their academic competence, agency and identity.

Originality/value

While previous research into VTPD in the context of higher education mainly focused on designs, attention to pedagogy of online teacher learning environments, trends toward innovation in teacher collaboration and communities of practice in online settings, the present study specifically looked into how participants emotionally engaged in VTPD, which is inevitably linked to physical, moral, sociocultural, professional and political geographies.