Identity, or making sense of self, is defined as an ongoing effort of understanding who we are as projected against the past, present and future experiences (Geijsel & Meijers, 2005). Identity is also understood as a dynamic phenomenon that can be learned and relearned and which is socially constructed in interaction with personal, professional and wider work contexts (Billot, 2010). Amongst the most important variables that form the teacher identity is the experiences teachers encounter in their work. Teacher professional identity results from a complex interaction between teachers’ personal background, characteristics, knowledge, views, attitudes, norms and values, and requirements set by teacher education programmes, schools, and standards for the profession (Beijaard et al., 2004). Looking at this definition of teacher identity development, it is acceptable to view teachers’ professional identity both as a product and process (Olsen, 2016; Schellings et al., 2021). Identity as a product is reflected in teachers’ understanding of themselves as individuals and professionals at a certain point in time and context. Identity is also a process under the influence of new experiences causing changes in the identity of a teacher. This view on teachers’ professional identity implies that learning or growing in the teaching profession is a complex and personally coloured identity-making process (Schellings et al., 2021) and one has to closely look at the variables that influence teachers’ identity changes. While the process of teacher identity negotiation is obviously complex, it also needs to be viewed from the perspective of how teachers feel during identity negotiation processes and what do those feelings mean to individual teachers. In recent decades, the dimension of emotions in teacher identity formation has started to gain more attention by broadening the views on how emotional experiences shape the process of identity formation (Uitto et al., 2015). That being said, achievement emotions theories such as Control-Value Theory were developed (Pekrun, 2006; Pekrun & Perry, 2015). This theory suggests that identity, especially in the classroom context, is shaped based on an individual's values, their control over the occurrences, and the emotions that trigger or are experienced after the occurrences. Emotions, however, are very complex to understand and their activation yields different outcomes.

This study is an ongoing research project that examines broadly how teachers experience curriculum reform and ways that their professional identity influences the gaps between intended and implemented change. The aim of this study is to examine how the emotions teachers experience during curriculum reform implementation influence teacher identity negotiation, i.e. who they are as teachers and how they act in their role as teachers. This research is conducted in Kosovo, a new and developing democracy, which has been implementing a large-scale education reform through a sophisticated curriculum reform that has been under implementation in the last decade. The purpose of the new Kosovo curriculum has been to transform teacher professional practice in view of the competence-based curriculum philosophy. The study explores how teachers experienced changes at the early stages when the reform was introduced and during the implementation process aiming to understand how reform implementation has raised emotions and in what ways the school has provided support to enable teachers to experience positive emotions that lead to the enrichment of teacher identity.

More specifically the study is guided by the following research questions:

-       What emotions do teachers experience at the beginning and during curriculum reform implementation?

-       How do emotions that teachers experienced during the curriculum reform implementation shape teacher identity?

-       How can schools manage curriculum reform in a way that it helps teachers create a positive view of school reform?

This study was conducted using an explanatory approach and drew on the interpretative paradigm (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). It was designed in a way to understand the interpretations and meanings people assign to various experiences during curriculum reform implementation. This approach allowed us as researchers to immerse in naturally occurring social occurrences by following “an interpretive approach to the world” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018, p. 5), whereby providing an in-depth and detailed understanding of meanings, values, attitudes, actions, intentions, experiences, and behaviours that are generated by interpretive enquiry. This research approach allows participants’ voices and opinions to be flexibly represented and prompts issues that emerge beyond respondents actions and behaviours that exist underneath their consciousness (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018). Data for this study were collected through in-depth interviews with (N = 20) teachers from schools throughout Kosovo. Teachers were selected using purposive sampling technique with criteria on variation sampling (Given, 2008) to identify teachers with different characteristics, i.e. age, gender, type of school, qualification, profile, years of experience, and professional development, in order to cover the entire spectrum of perceptions. Denzin and Lincoln (2018) suggest that it is impossible for the interviewer to entirely structure and prepare for in-depth interviews that aim to discuss context-based stories, experiences, values, and practises. Instead, they argue in favour of the interviewer taking the interview facilitator’s role rather than asking many specific questions. This study opted for in-depth interviewing which requires an unstructured and flexible approach to encourage teachers to elicit discussion on how emotions experienced during the curriculum reform implementation have shaped their identity. Data were analysed using thematic analysis with an inductive coding approach method by drawing themes out of initial coding to provide answers to research questions. Atlas.ti qualitative software was used to organise the data.

This study enriches the knowledge base on the links between who teachers are and how this influences school development and more particularly the curriculum reform. As an ongoing research project, this study will provide an extended view to how, in this ever developing context, the reform implementation process is not linear. In this regard, curriculum revision is not constrained to being viewed only as a policy reform but rather it should be embedded within the contextual dimensions of who teachers are and how they are managed during a particular reform initiative. Results of the research provide insights on teacher and school development practises which can best inform curriculum reform implementation in line with the ambitions set out for teachers and restrictions imposed by the environment in which their work is embedded.

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