• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.227-238
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• 2022

One of the main roles of the science teacher is to help students become active agents in their learning of science. This study described how an elementary science teacher used students' emotional resources to conduct emotionally responsive teaching and what were the learning outcomes of this approach. The participants of the study included the teacher himself and his 6^th grade students, and emotionally responsive teaching was applied in the science unit of 'Various Living Things and Our Human Lives'. Multiple types of data, including the teacher's teaching logs, video recordings of the lessons in the unit, and interviews with the students, were collected. The data were analyzed qualitatively, and the results were described using a self-study method. The teacher took advantage of three kinds of students' emotional resources (i.e., character drawing, t-shirt design, and raps) to organize his emotionally responsive teaching. The learning outcome included the students' positive emotions and active participation in science lessons, their epistemic practices such as explorations and justifications of knowledge, and the students' reconstruction of knowledge in consideration of their everyday lives. It was suggested that emotionally responsive teaching can promote elementary school students' active participation in science learning, resulting in meaningful learning outcomes in emotional, cognitive, and conceptual aspects. Further studies should thus be conducted to understand the characteristics of emotionally responsive teaching and its detailed teaching strategies.