EMOTIONAL LABOUR

Emotional Labour in Teachers



Title and Abstract

The title of the research paper is 'Emotional Labour in Teachers.' My research topic is related to Chapter 4 - Emotions, Section 4.1 - Emotion and Social Identity. This chapter refers to how emotions are related to situations in which they occur. When we perceive a situation as personally significant, we experience emotions in different ways. What affects our emotions and how we experience them is also what happens to people who are important to us. Emotional labour is explained briefly in this chapter by being described as a way of controlling and expressing your emotions in order to meet the requirements of the job and an employer. Depending on the social structure (type of employment) people will try to 'make themselves' experience emotions in appropriate ways using various techniques such as learning to interpret negative situations in a positive way and responding with positive emotions. My research relates to the idea of emotional labour because its aim is to show that teachers will apply the same techniques to respond with caring, positive emotions to situations which in other setting would elicit other responses. Teachers will use positive language to describe how they experience emotions, which will show how they learned to cope with difficult situations and how they have trained themselves to react with sincere responses.

Table of Contents

Title and Abstractii

Background and Research Question1

Research Question2

Literature review3

Methodology4

Research Design4

Data Collection4

Ethical Considerations5

Analysis6

Crying6

Frustration7

Happiness7

Attachment7

Hiding Emotions7

Discussion8

Conclusion9

Appendix11

Emotional Labour in Teachers

Background and Research Question

Student voice and pupil empowerment projects are common in many mainstream schools. However, such initiatives are more challenging to implement in the provision for students experiencing (social), emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD). As a consequence, they are less frequently attempted. This article reports one such attempt at an SEBD special school, where a student research group was formed to evaluate the school's behaviour policy. The students' views remind professionals of the need for consistency, positive relationships and communication underpinning behaviour management strategies. The article also reflects on a number of issues to consider when implementing such projects in special education contexts (Edward Sellmana, 2009, p. 12).

Teaching is a profession that involves a high level of emotional labour. This includes such behaviours as surface acting (displaying an emotion that is not actually felt), deep acting (the activity undertaken to actually feel a required emotion), and suppression of emotion. In many professions, this emotional labour is thought to be related to high levels of burnout. The aim of our study was to show that emotional labour has a unique relationship with burnout that is separate from its relationship with the variables of the Demand Control Support (DCS) model. Emotional labour was studied, together with the variables of the Karasek Job Demand Control Support model, in a random sample of 365 mathematics teachers, in the Netherlands. We used the Dutch Questionnaire on Emotional Labor (D-QEL) that measures (1) surface acting, (2) deep acting, (3) suppression, and (4) emotional consonance. In line with other studies, job characteristics were found to be specifically ...