Emotion labor in response to supervisor feedback: is feedback a burden or a blessing?
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Mostafa Nazari
and
Mohammad Nabi Karimi
Abstract
In recent years, research on the emotional side of language teachers’ work has grown exponentially. One progressively-developing subset of this line of inquiry concerns how institutional discourses/expectations interact with teachers’ internal feelings, which bears on how they manage their emotions in response to such an interaction and is known as emotion labor. One type of institutional expectation of concern to the present study is the feedback that institutional supervisors provided for the teachers and could be a source of emotion labor. Motivated by this consideration, this study explored 12 Iranian EFL teachers’ emotion labor in relation to supervisor feedback on their classroom instruction. The context of the study was a language school governed by mostly top-down policies, especially those of classroom observation, realized mainly through providing post-class feedback by school supervisors, with little interaction between them and the teachers. Drawing on data from interviews and narrative frames, we report on how supervisor feedback on the teachers’ classroom instruction functioned as a source of emotional tension for the teachers and how they engaged in surface- and deep-acting management of their emotions to navigate the supervisory feedback. Based on the findings, we provide implications for teacher educators and school supervisors to reconsider their post-class supervisory feedback so that teachers experience less emotional tension.
Acknowledgments
We would like to cordially thank the participating teachers and reviewers of the paper.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Research ethics: We declare that all of the ethical considerations in data collection and analysis, especially in relation to participants, have been observed.
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Author contributions: Mostafa Nazari designed the study and the collected the data. Mohammad Nabi Karimi engaged in checking the themes and together with Mostafa, and both wrote the manuscript.
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Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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Data availability: The raw data can be obtained on request from the corresponding author.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Emotion as pedagogy: why the emotion labor of L2 educators matters
- Research Articles
- “I’ve just lived inside a tumble dryer”: a narrative of emotion labour, (de)motivation, and agency in the life of a language teacher
- Emotion labor in teacher collaboration: towards developing emotional reflexivity
- Teacher emotions and the emotional labour of modern language (ML) teachers working in UK secondary schools
- Emotional labor of a Brazilian public school teacher: domination and resistance in a neoliberal context
- Translanguaging and emotionality of English as a second language (ESL) teachers
- Emotion labor in response to supervisor feedback: is feedback a burden or a blessing?
- She is “just an intern”: transnational Chinese language teachers’ emotion labor with mentors in a teacher residency program
- Emotionally (in)hospitable spaces: reflecting on language teacher–teacher educator collaboration as a source of emotion labor and emotional capital
- Teaching English in an engineering international branch campus: a collaborative autoethnography of our emotion labor
- Commentary: exploring “the pinch” of emotion labor in language teacher research
- Advancing language teacher emotion research: a nuanced, dialectical, and empowering stance
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Emotion as pedagogy: why the emotion labor of L2 educators matters
- Research Articles
- “I’ve just lived inside a tumble dryer”: a narrative of emotion labour, (de)motivation, and agency in the life of a language teacher
- Emotion labor in teacher collaboration: towards developing emotional reflexivity
- Teacher emotions and the emotional labour of modern language (ML) teachers working in UK secondary schools
- Emotional labor of a Brazilian public school teacher: domination and resistance in a neoliberal context
- Translanguaging and emotionality of English as a second language (ESL) teachers
- Emotion labor in response to supervisor feedback: is feedback a burden or a blessing?
- She is “just an intern”: transnational Chinese language teachers’ emotion labor with mentors in a teacher residency program
- Emotionally (in)hospitable spaces: reflecting on language teacher–teacher educator collaboration as a source of emotion labor and emotional capital
- Teaching English in an engineering international branch campus: a collaborative autoethnography of our emotion labor
- Commentary: exploring “the pinch” of emotion labor in language teacher research
- Advancing language teacher emotion research: a nuanced, dialectical, and empowering stance
