1 Teachers College Record Volume 121, 130301, 2019, 14 pages Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University 0161-4681 Introduction to Yearbook on Emotions in Teaching and Teacher Education for Social Justice AMY JOHNSON LACHUK Independent Scholar In this chapter we provide an overview of our understandings of emotion, using Barrett’s work on the construction of emotion. We then link this framework to the discussion of three land- mark texts in teacher education: Waller’s The Sociology of Teaching (1932), Jackson’s Life in Classrooms (1968), and Lortie’s Schoolteacher (1975). We examine these texts for what they bring to our understandings of emotions in teaching. While these landmark texts elide the emotions tied to teaching culturally and racially diverse learners, what excites us about them is how they work together to create composite sketches of classroom teachers at particular points in time. We identify an often unacknowledged emotional undercurrent to their work that fascinates us. We then discuss how this collection’s contributors take up this call to focus on emotion within their particular work in teacher education. Why do we smile? Why do we laugh? Why do we feel alone? Why are we sad and confused? Why do we read poetry? Why do we cry when we see a painting? Why is there is a riot in the heart when we love? Why do we feel shame? What is that thing in the pit of your stomach called desire? —Benjamin Alire Saenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (2012) In How Emotions Are Made, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) ar- gued that the answer to the questions posed above by the novelist and poet Benjamin Alire Saenz is: “Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world” (p. 104). Feldman Barrett’s words significantly altered the way we understood the emotional aspects of our work as teacher educators: for they caused a shift in our mind- sets from understanding emotions as uncontrollable to understanding emotions as socially and culturally constructed. What emotions mean in different geographic places and historical times varies according to who or what embodies them, what expectations accompany them, when their