Secondary Students’ Narratives of Emotion Work While Engaging in Extended/Open Science Inquiry Projects

There is growing evidence showing the significance of student emotions in influencing student engagement and achievement. However, naturalistic studies that provide insights into contextual factors that engender students’ emotion experiences and how students manage these experiences to promote the achievement of their academic goals have been sparse. This study investigated secondary students’ emotion work (i.e., attempts to change the degree or quality of emotion experiences) within a distinctive learning environment. The forty-four participants (15-17 years old) were high-achieving students in a selective, science specialist school in the Philippines, who were undertaking two-year open school science inquiry projects with links to real-world research. Students’ emotion work narratives (68 written narratives and 57 narrative interviews) were collected over a ten-month period (which included an eight-month field work). Data analysis focused on situations that engendered emotion work and the strategies students used. School artefacts and students’ narratives were examined for ideas about achievement that were transmitted to and apprehended by students (i.e., achievement discourses), and how these discourses were linked to students’ emotion work. Five thematic groups of situations and four families of emotion work strategies were identified. The emotiveness of the situations was heightened by discourses that associated achievement with students’ social identities and extraordinary performances. Students’ emotion work served the instrumental goals of sustaining engagement in school work, managing the impact of problematic relationships with peers and teachers, and maintaining students’ social identities. Students demonstrated agency in how they harnessed for their emotion work the resources and opportunities afforded by their social networks and by the achievement discourses. This research underscores the role of emotion work in students’ effective functioning in a demanding learning environment with high levels of uncertainty. Its findings suggest the need for more research that explores students’ potential to shape their school experiences through emotion work.