In a world full of political trauma, educational organizations and the actors within encounter various states such as wars, terrorism, natural disasters or mandatory immigration, creating distinctive emotional experience (Hutchison and Bleiker, 2008). The latest phenomena affecting the Turkish education system in this respect are the culturally diverse school settings as a result of the Syrian refugee flow since 2011.Turkey, due to the international agreements and her own open door policy for the refugees, has welcomed the Syrian refugees in masses. Education is the sole remedy for the post-traumatic children, unquestionably the most disadvantage group in such contexts. Considering the fact that the country had never experienced such massive migration flow before, the policy makers, education professionals as well as the parents were initially inexperienced at all levels when faced with the phenomena. Evidently, the sudden encounter with the idea of multicultural education have challenged the education community in distinct ways. Hence, the provision of education had become the primary issue. Therefore, a state-of –the- art school type was introduced as Temporary Education Centers (TECs) for the inclusion of the Syrian children, who are in post-war traumatic state. TECs are located either within the refugee Camps or within the transformed public schools. These are specific forms of schools pertinent to the Syrian students. If the TEC is located within a transformed public school, the school operates in 2 shifts; where the morning shift accommodates mixed classes of Turkish and Syrian children, offering the standard public school curriculum, whereas the afternoon shift only hosts Syrian students, offering an adapted Syrian curriculum in Arabic and a 15 - hour Turkish language course per week. Their staff include both Turkish and Syrian teachers, whereas the school principal is Turkish. These are now called Syrian Schools within the education community.

TECS, receiving greater numbers of Syrian students, face complexity, as the teachers and principals are unfamiliar with such multicultural school contexts, yet still ambitious to help and care for the students. Education is an emotion work after all. Therefore, this research seeks to depict a rich case of a school principal through exploring his emotions and how he de/regulates them in a large suburban TEC school whilst performing his professional duties as a school leader in in Turkey. In doing so, the socio-political background of the issue, the features of the wider education context and the particular school context will be provided referring to the embedded social justice element inevitably. Drawing on the cultural view on emotions (Ford & Mauss, 2015) particularly in complex school settings, this individual school leader’s peculiar emotions and his ways of emotion regulation will be analysed whilst challenging some points in the relevant literature.

Evidence shows that culture and emotions are interrelated either positively or negatively and have a reciprocal link (Butler, Lee and Gross, 2007). Research offers variety of ways to understand emotions (Hochschild, 1983) and emotion regulation (Gross, 2013).In this context, emotions are considered as social and culturally constructed practices (Blackmore, 2010). Zembylas (2012) explicates this link stating that “cultural, discursive and social phenomena are constitutive of emotions and affect the ways in which people feel, perceive and conceptualise life events (p.469).  It is well-evidenced that school leaders’ behaviour is shaped by the culture, policy and emotions in their interaction with the others and the wider context (Arar, 2017; Devine, 2011). Furthermore, emotions are alleged to play a significant role influencing the relationship between the leaders and followers (Lewis, 2000), whereby the impact of leader emotions creating variably consequent emotions in others is notable in the literature (Maxwell and Riley, 2017).Therefore, acknowledging the uniqueness of the context where the emotions take place is important (Halperin& Pliskin, 2015).

A qualitative single-case study (Yin, 2011) was utilized to comprehend and reflect the emotions of the school principal in relation to his cultural links. The individual school principal was identified a priori in a located school as the single case purposefully for 2 reasons. 1. He is the most experienced school principal in a TEC setting, and he informally provides guidance to the other TEC principals. 2. His school is an example of the unique school structure created for the Syrian refugee children in an inclusive fashion. These 2 unique qualities were considered to serve the purpose the study. Data was drawn from semi-structured interviews and narratives (Czarniawska, 2004) of the school principal as well as the observation notes by the researcher in order to explore his specific emotions and emotional regulation process throughout his experience in a TEC-attached public school. This is a new phenomena for the Turkish education system and for the principal himself. The researcher paid a visit to the school 3 times in 3 months for observations and interviews with the principal. Questions addressed the emotions and emotion regulation strategies before his school was transformed into a TEC and Syrian students were registered and after the phenomena emerged. Moreover, indirect questions exploring in what ways culture and policy has an impact on the construction of emotions and emotion regulation style were also raised. Each visit to the school contributed to the enrichment of the data and the understanding of the phenomena by revealing more insights on the cultural layers surrounding the principal and his emotions. Ethical permissions were officially received. Informed consent was taken from the principal at the beginning of the study. Pseudonyms were used to ensure anonymity. Data Analysis Interview data was transcribed and read in detail together with the field notes to get a holistic view. Data was analysed through the four stages described by Marshall and Rossman (2014). First, the data was organized, then, through coding, the categories and themes were identified. After that, the researcher, in rigour, tried to get the sense out of the data to place it in the cultural approaches to emotion and sought for alternative explanations peculiar to the given context. The narrative style of reporting was utilized to communicate the findings Zeller (1995). Expert opinion were sought on the codings and themes to achieve trustworthiness.

The analysis still continues, yet the initial data from this single case of principal located in a unique school setting culturally and physically (Halperin & Pliskin, 2015) revealed the impact of the cumbersome reality of culture- a blend of religion, faith, traditions and consequent values- on the emotions and on the strategies selected for emotion regulation. His emotions and forms of emotion regulation as well as his idiosyncratic strategies in balancing the emotional labour in school principalship, catering for the needs of the school community and facilitating the policy naivité is notable. Moreover, some evidence emerged on the gender aspect of emotions and emotional regulation in school leadership as well as the social justice element. The necessity of taking a more critical stance whilst exploring fragile settings and the realities they pose for school leaders is worth reconsideration. Yet, this case also inherits controversial features to the international literature, which will be elaborated on during the presentation. This case study does not attempt to make generalizations; however, the findings could be compared and utilized for similar phenomena in other localities, which necessitate inclusive education practices for refugee students and staff in culturally diverse school forms at global level.

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