Some researchers (Nias, 1996; Lasky, 2005; Hargreaves, 2006; Van Veen & Sleegers, 2006) have studied teacher identity in relation to educational reforms and have considered it as a key factor to understand teachers’ motivation and engagement to the change. Specifically, some papers (Lasky, 2005; Hargreaves, 2006) analyze teachers’ emotions such as vulnerability, anxiety or fear related to processes of educational reform.

In 2006, Andalusia Government gets going the First Plan for Equal Opportunities between Men and Women in Education, whose goal is to promote a new gender culture in schools. In this Plan, teachers are considered a key element for changes in this new gender culture at schools and many measures of the Plan are oriented to teacher education. This study pretends to analyze how teachers live this educational reform. Some researches about identity (Arciero, 2004; Gergen, 1992; Vaillant, 2007) support the la importance of analyzing how teachers live subjectively their job and which are factors in their satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The study of teacher identity also appear to be significant to study the ways that teachers adopt an attitude in relation with others teachers through identifications and attributions (Dubar, 2000; Bolivar, 2006).

In this paper, we approach to study emotion through discursive practices, considering that emotions have a social origin and, to a great extend, these are constructed in social interactions. This approach focuses on show how emocional discourses establish, assert, challenge or reinforce social structures (Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990). According to this view, Zembylas (2005) support that teacher emotions are not private, but are performative—that is, the ways in which teachers understand, experience, perform, and talk about emotions are highly related to their sense of identity. In this sense, emotional discourse allows us to know school settings where teacher identities are constituted, informing about norms and social explicit values that regulate interactions.

In his study, Edwards (1999) shows that emotion discourse includes not only terms such as anger, surprise or fear, but also a rich set of metaphors which serve to action. The choice of emotional metaphors supposes alternative narratives of causal attribution and accountability. In this sense, Edwards (1999) consider that emotion metaphors can be considered conceptual resources that people use in order to empower their cultural identity during interactions in social settings. These resources are used by people in order to get power of influence in the social construction of meanings and actions.

In his study of anger, Gibbs (1994) suggests that different metaphors encode different parts of a complex cognitive model, suitable for use on different discursive occasions, and identify metaphors explicitly active and object-directed and others more passive and experiential. The choice among these alternatives is made according to nature of communicative settings and to their narrative and rhetorical uses in the construction of meanings.

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