Emotions have been consistently ignored or cursorily acknowledged in sociocultural approaches and research into teacher development and studies in the classroom. Emotions have been commonly understood as incidental conditions that take place independently of the context in which they occur as if they were solely individual, mostly physiological and subjective responses to the environment. In the case of teachers for example, they have been mainly studied through interviews (Hargreaves 2000 and 2005). On the other hand, Vygotsky insisted on the unity of cognition and emotion, but emotions have hardly been studied by researchers from cultural historical perspectives. In fact, Vygotsky (1999) broadly discussed the shortcomings of the two main psychological poles in the study of emotions, i.e. idealist psychologies and mechanic materialist psychology. However, he did not have time to build a theory that discussed emotions in line with his seminal contributions in relation to thinking, language, learning and development. In Vygotsky’s (1999) critical analysis on the teachings about emotions, he offers some hints about where a unified non-dualistic psychology, a science that incorporates emotions, could lead. Finally, to this landscape we can add the fact that the enormous amount of literature from other psychological perspectives can hardly illuminate a cultural historical stance, because it generally focuses on the individual physiological or psychological aspects of emotions, paying little attention to the social contexts in which emotions take place (Encinas, 2008). Based on the premise that emotions have a social existence, my argument is that a social understanding emotions is fundamental for studying emotions embodied. With an ethnographic approach that involved working with four experienced Spanish (mother tongue) teachers in a Mexican urban secondary school (junior high school), emotions were unveiled during the phase of analysis. This ‘discovery’ of emotions implied working along two strands: the construction of a sociocultural theoretical approach to the study of emotions as social, and the close analysis of the data video recorded during class time. The first strand benefits from my study of Vygotsky’s work in the construction of a non-dualistic (non-Cartesian) psychology. The second strand, the close examination of emotions in teaching-learning situations, implied the construction of a methodology accordingly. In this paper, I present the way in which theory and methodology were woven together in order to study emotions as embodied in pedagogic practices. This approach allowed to tackle the challenge of considering emotions as concurrently embodied in the body and in cultures.

The data are integrated by 45 videos of class observations, field notes of the 7 months spent in the school and semi-structured and unstructured interviews with the four teachers and other members of the staff. In spite of considering that emotions are always present, according to the non-dualistic approach developed, in order to study emotions as social I decided to identify classroom situations of ‘extreme emotion’ (Greenfield, 2000). With this criterion, a variable number of excerpts were selected in each video (over 100). Two ways in which emotions appear in the classroom were identified: (1)in accompaniment of the teaching and learning tasks (working with curricular content) and (2)becoming the centre of the teaching and learning tasks, and thus the ‘content’ of the lesson. The interviews were used to retrieve contextual information. The writing involved the weaving of the ethnographical data (image included), with the theoretical discussion of a sociocultural approach.

There are theoretical, methodological and practical outcomes. A sociocultural approach for the study of emotions implied weaving together theory and methodology. The theoretical outcomes include an understanding of (1)emotions in context, where emotions emerged when dealing with curricular content is analyzed; (2)subjectivity as built through participation in social practices, where emotions as ‘content’ were analyzed; and (3)emotions as part and parcel of the social practice of teaching and participating in schooling. The methodological outcome is the construction of a sociocultural embodied approach to the study of emotions. Such approach implied the analysis of video, and the insertion of images (drawings that represent ‘movement’ within pedagogic practices) while dealing with the ethnographic data. The practical implications of this study have an impact in teacher development, workplace research, and sociocultural theories. Finally, the outcomes include questions for future interdisciplinary research together with neurosciences, i.e. the study of the brain within social practices.