How culture shapes Chinese teacher’s compassionate love

ABSTRACT

Background

Love could play a role in motivating teachers to help students and is closely related to students’ achievement and prosocial behaviour. Though influenced by culture, teachers’ love is not adequately studied.

Purpose

This study explores how Chinese teachers’ compassionate love is expressed and how situational factors such as Chinese culture and history influence or motivate teachers to perceive and express compassionate love for students.

Method

This study adopted a qualitative approach of narrative study by describing and investigating the experience of a Chinese middle school teacher and two middle school students and their parents during COVID-19 pandemic.

Findings

Chinese teacher’s compassionate love demonstrates some universal features in terms of emotional response, cognitive understanding and behaviour. Furthermore some Chinese culture-related features are also found: Chinese teachers behave in a caring and supporting way at the cost of sacrificing their own free time and comfort; an enduring long-term teacher-student relationship is valued; the Chinese culture encourages, sustains and motivates Chinese teacher’s compassionate love.

Discussion

Teacher’s compassionate love is a multi-dimensional concept entailing some universal traits in cognition, emotion and behaviour. The perception and enactment of teacher’s love is subject to situational factors. Some measures for compassionate love could be built into teacher’s education programme.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese culture
• teacher’s love
• narrative study
• emotion
• cognition
• behavior

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Informed consent statement

Informed consent was obtained from all participants in the study.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17482631.2024.2357147

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Education Ministry of Hubei province, with grant number 2022GA076” and “Research Start-up Funding of Hubei University of Education Grant” and open-end fund project of Hubei Teacher Education Research Center of Social Science Research Foundation (jsjy202315) and Hubei University of Education (x2023063).

Notes on contributors

Ling Lin

Ling Lin, associate professor, has been working in Hubei University of education since 2021. Her research interests are positive psychology and second language learning and teaching, student teacher development.

Meng Chen

Meng Chen, lecturer, is working in institute of educational science of Hubei University of education. She earned her doctor degree in major of Higher Education from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests are higher education administration, student teacher training and development.