Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’ Emotion Labor

Description

Taking a critical approach that considers the role of power, and resistance to power, in teachers' affective lives, Sarah Benesch examines the relationship between English language teaching and emotions in postsecondary classrooms. The exploration takes into account implicit feeling rules that may drive institutional expectations of teacher performance and affect teachers' responses to and decisions about pedagogical matters. Based on interviews with postsecondary English language teachers, the book analyzes ways in which they negotiate tension—theorized as emotion labor—between feeling rules and teachers' professional training and/or experience, in particularly challenging areas of teaching: high-stakes literacy testing; responding to student writing; plagiarism; and attendance. Discussion of this rich interview data offers an expanded and nuanced understanding of English language teaching, one positing teachers' emotion labor as a framework for theorizing emotions critically and as a tool of teacher agency and resistance Preface vi Acknowledgments viii 1 Introduction 1 2 Theorizing Emotions 14 3 Theorizing Emotion Labor 37 4 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 56 5 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 80 6 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 111 7 Attendance and Emotion Labor 148 8 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications 177 Index 191