EMOTIONAL LABOUR IN TEACHERS

Emotional Labour in Teachers

Emotional Labour in Teachers

Section 1

This section concerns the literature searching element of the project rationale and accounts for 50% of the marks for this assignment.

The Proposed Title of Your Project

The proposed title of the project is 'Emotional labour in teachers.'

The Proposed Research Question for Your Project

The research question sets the direction of a research. For my project, the research question is: How teachers describe and interpret their emotions when working with SEN pupils?

Relation of your research topic DD307 course materials

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 productive 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 truthful responses.

Outline Three References That You Consider Relevant For Your Project

Most jobs involving interactions with others, for example, waiters, flight attendants, salespersons, nurses, doctors, police officers, teachers, and academics, require that employees control and regulate their emotions in order to display certain emotions toward their counterpart, be it clients, patients, suspects, or students. A waiter might have to stay calm and considerate toward an angry customer, a doctor might have to display confidence although she is worried about the patient's state of health, and a teacher needs to be friendly, understanding, and patient although he might struggle with personal problems at home. These emotional job requirements are summarized under the term of emotional labour. In a study by Hülsheger et al, the authors attempt to find the causal direction of emotional labour, performance and strain. For the purpose of the study, the authors used the Structural Equation Modelling to assess the impact of emotional labour on teachers' strain and performance levels. The researchers wanted to explore the impact of emotional labour strategies like surface acting and strong acting. The participants of the study comprised 151 trainee teachers. The findings of this research indicated that surface acting was an antecedent of strain while strong acting led to increases in teachers' job performance, ...