‘They didn’t mean anything bad’: emotive shielding in novice teachers’ responses to immigrant student scenarios

This study examines how novice teachers discursively and emotionally navigate dilemmas involving immigrant students in U.S. schools. Drawing on a sociocultural discourse framework and analysis of written reflections from 21 preservice teachers, the study identifies four emotional-discursive typologies: the Avoider, the Meritocrat, the Empathizer, and the Critical Reflector. These typologies reveal how novice educators engage in what this paper terms emotive shielding, a discursive pattern in which emotional language (e.g. empathy, guilt, discomfort) serves to obscure or deflect structural critique. While emotional engagement was common across participating novice teachers, only a small subset moved beyond personal resonance to interrogate systemic inequities. This is one of the few studies to explicitly map emotional-discursive typologies in preservice teacher responses, offering a nuanced lens into how language and feeling shape novice teacher identity. The findings underscore the limitations of unstructured reflection in teacher education and call for more intentional scaffolding of sociocultural analysis, especially in preparing teachers to work with culturally and linguistically diverse students.