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The aim of the present study was to use the narratives of beginning teachers to investigate the emotionally challenging situations they face, with a focus on how their perspectives and definitions of such situations guided their actions and made coping possible. A short term longitudinal qualitative interview study was adopted. Twenty participants were interviewed at the outset of their last year of teacher education and then followed up with an interview at their first year of teaching. In between self-reports were written in addition to the interviews. The material was analysed using constructivist grounded theory tools. The findings show that new teachers experienced conflicts that were both interpersonal (with students, parents and colleagues) and intrapersonal (being 'good enough'; establishing boundaries related to time and engagement; suppression of emotions) as they started out in teaching. In order to cope with these challenges, the beginning teachers used various strategies including collaboration, conformity, influencing and autonomy.

Learning to teach is an emotional endeavour and student teachers challenging emotions are recurrently created in teacher education. The aim of this study was to investigate student teachers' coping with emotionally challenging situations in teacher education. In the study, 22 student teachers studying their last year of teacher education participated through semi-structured interviews. The data were analysed using constructivist grounded theory methodology. The findings revealed that coping with emotionally challenging situations was connected to student teachers' main concern of the discrepancies between idealistic conceptions and experiences. This included wanting to have an extensive impact on future pupils as a student teacher and experiencing the ambition as potentially exhausting. In coping with this discrepancy, three strategies were used: change advocacy, collective sharing and responsibility reduction. The coping strategies are discussed in the light of existing literature and potential implications are addressed.

Student teachers have to cope with distressing emotions during teacher education. Coping is important in relation to both attrition and bridging the gap between being a student teacher and starting work. The data consist of semi-structured interviews with 25 student teachers, which were analysed using a constructivist grounded theory framework. The aim of the current study was to examine student teachers' perspectives on distressing situations during teacher education, as well as how boundaries were established as a way of coping with emotions related to these situations. The findings show that the student teachers' main concern was to make sense of the imbalance between resources and the demands placed by distressing situations. As a coping strategy, student teachers established professional boundaries linked to emotional labour and relationship maintenance.

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