She is “just an intern”: transnational Chinese language teachers’ emotion labor with mentors in a teacher residency program

2.1 Emotion labor of language teachers

Teaching can be an emotionally taxing profession (Hargreaves 1998); While there may be moments of energy and motivation, frustration and burnout are also common in the daily experience of teaching. Such negative emotions are dynamic, fluid, and unpredictable, often emerging from unanticipated changes, a shortage of support and resources from the workplace, and misalignments between the expectations of teachers and school administrators (Benesch 2019; Gkonou et al. 2019). A clash between institutional demands and teachers’ beliefs and expectations often results in emotion labor (Benesch 2019). As noted, teachers often have to manage their emotions in order to conform to the workplace feeling rules discussed earlier. Usually because these feeling rules are implicitly embedded in job descriptions associated with the professional roles, teachers often find themselves having to constantly assess and adjust their internal feelings in order to fulfill institutional regulations and expectations (Benesch 2018). Such an adjustment can subsequently exacerbate the emotion labor experienced by teachers whose agency is curtailed.

Within the body of emotion labor research, it has been reported that English language teachers who teach outside Anglophone countries often have to wrestle with cultural and contextual factors that result in emotional vulnerability. King (2016), for example, investigated an EFL teacher’s perceptions and beliefs regarding emotion labor at a Japanese university. His findings revealed that teachers had to manage their public displays of emotions and conform to their institutions’ expectations in order to achieve their educational goals, resulting in much emotional burden placed upon them that subsequently negatively impacted their well-being. In another study involving two Nepali English language teachers, De Costa et al. (2020) found that the teachers experienced great emotion labor when they were required by their institutions to fulfill pedagogical responsibilities amidst a lack of mentoring support and guidance.

In a similar vein, world language teachers who teach in the U.S. context have also encountered abundant emotion labor while teaching. Acheson et al. (2016), for example, found that students lack motivation in studying foreign languages in a rural public school in the US. Due to a lack of support from both the community and school leadership, teachers’ self-efficacy was greatly challenged, placing a heavy burden of emotion labor upon the teachers.

In a related study, Acheson and Nelson (2020) built upon their earlier work and reemphasized the fact that addressing emotion labor is fundamental to understanding and resolving world language teaching challenges in the U.S. public school system. In sum, the limited research on world language teachers thus far has demonstrated that these teachers are not immune to demands of emotion labor placed upon them. That is not to suggest, however, that teachers are entirely stripped of their agency. It is to the relationship between emotion labor and agency to which we turn next.

2.2 Language teacher’s emotion labor and agency

As mentioned, teachers may experience complex emotions when their inner values contradict institutional values; emotion labor subsequently emerges because teachers find themselves not being able to overturn dominant discourses that might portray them unfavorably (Lee 2023). However, there is a growing body of research that examines how language teachers’ emotion labor can shape their agency at the workplace. Positive emotions stemming from emotion labor can increase teachers’ agency and motivate teachers to engage in meaningful activities. For example, Benesch (2018) argued that emotion labor can be converted into a positive force if teachers exercise their agency by signaling a need for change at the institutional level. In her study, Benesch found that emotion labor served as a motivating force for agentive change when language teachers chose to respond to their emotion labor by resisting institutional draconian measures associated with student plagiarism. Similarly, emotion labor can also bring emotional rewards to teachers. In their examination of the most common emotion responses associated with language teaching, Miller and Gkonou (2018) found that language teachers actively take on a role of “teaching-as-caring” that can yield emotional rewards such as joy, enthusiasm and happiness.

On the flip side, negative consequences of emotion labor can impede teacher agency. In fact, when emotion labor arising from a deterioration of language teaching work environments is left unaddressed, it can add to an increase in teacher attrition that became prevalent during the global COVID-19 pandemic (Benesch and Prior 2023). For example, Kang (2020), who studied a Korean English language teacher’s perceived emotion labor that emerged from parents’ intervention and the lack of support from her school’s principal’s support, reported the emotional exhaustion that her focal teacher had to wrestle with. Such exhaustion coupled with a sense of helplessness subsequently caused her to consider leaving the profession. Relatedly, White (2016), who investigated how emotions and agency are intertwined due institutional rules, found that what teachers want to do and what they feel they have to do has prevented teachers from taking action, for fear of being held accountable for their actions. Thus, emotion labor can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can spur teachers to exercise their agency and trigger positive changes that lead to emotional rewards. On the other hand, when faced with a lack of support, it can impede agency and result in feeling paralyzed with powerlessness. One way to alleviate such pressures is to have a robust teacher mentoring system in place that can help language teachers take advantage of rather than only to suffer from emotion labor.

2.3 Mentoring and emotions of language teachers

In the US, between a third to a half of teachers leave the profession within their first five years of teaching (Smith and Ingersoll 2004); however, novice teacher attrition can be mitigated with adequate support for novice teachers from well-designed mentorship programs (Stewart et al. 2019). Thus, mentoring is a critical component in training new teachers, including TWLTs, as they can acquire new strategies to reduce stress and get to know more about the teaching profession during their residency school placement by engaging in a host of practices that include observation, discussion, and reflection (De Costa et al. 2022; Zhang and Unger 2022). Most research to date has emphasized the effectiveness of mentors in helping novice teachers confront pedagogical and emotional challenges that the latter will inevitably face early in their careers (e.g., Bullough Jr and Draper 2004).

Butler and Cuenca (2012) identified three major roles for mentors, namely: instructional coach, emotional support system, and socializing agent. A mentor’s emotional support is a crucial factor in the development of all kinds of relationship-building in the mentoring process, especially in engaging a trusted and respectful relationship (Davis and Fantozzi 2016). In their emotion-inflected study on teacher mentors, Zhang and Unger (2022) found that good teacher mentors were (1) perceptive of their student teacher mentee’s stress and anxiety during their first-year teaching, and (2) created a relaxing learning environment and set realistic learning-to-teach goals for their mentees. As a result, mentees reduced their emotional stress and enhanced their self-confidence and self-esteem. In another study, Mann and Tang (2012), who investigated a group of English novice teachers in Hong Kong, found that mentors’ collaborations, such as collaborative lesson planning and shared teaching resources, and their emotional support had a positive impact on the novice teachers’ first year teaching and contributed to their identity-building. Mentoring can also be achieved effectively through effective socializing practices. The two English language teachers in De Costa et al. (2022) found that their pedagogical advancement was fueled by their mentor teachers’ emotional support.

While some experienced and good mentors can make a positive difference for their teacher mentees, studies that have investigated mentors who do not fulfill their professional responsibilities have revealed that such mentorship may exacerbate challenges for mentees, often leading to issues such as bullying new teachers, stealing new teachers’ work, competition with new teachers, even as mentees work to negotiate power relations in the mentorship process (Maguire 2001). According to Lawley et al. (2014), a lack of effective communication between mentor teachers and the mentees can result in barriers for mentees to learning lesson planning, receiving constructive feedback, and reducing the quality of their overall practicum experience. In another study, Yangın Ekşi et al. (2019) found that a failure to model teaching, establish welcoming practicum environment, and provide adequate of comments and feedback from mentor teachers can impede a mentee’s professional development. In general, mentees lack the power to negotiate problematic issues with mentors. One reason for this is that a hierarchical mentoring style that discourages spaces for dialog has been more of the norm than the exception in traditional teacher preparation programs (Hyland and Lo 2006). Hence, research exploring effective mentoring processes that can impact their emotional bearing is crucial to mentee’s learning success, particularly in world language teaching contexts, which have traditionally been given less attention in teacher mentorship research (Wang and Bale 2019).

2.4 Mentoring transnational language teachers

Our study focuses on TWLTs who are certified teachers in their countries of origin but who are undergoing re-certification in the US through a graduate teacher residency program. Transnational teachers often face unique challenges when teaching in a new country as they must adapt to language learning and teaching environments that are culturally unfamiliar to them (Alshakhi and Ha 2020). Depending on their prior teaching experience, TWLTs may be (re)positioned as novice teachers regardless of their actual years of teaching experiences (Ennser-Kananen and Ruohotie-Lyhty 2022). Crucially, unlike world language teachers of more commonly taught languages (e.g., Spanish and French language teachers), Chinese language teachers in the US are often recruited from overseas, namely, China. Many of these teachers have limited experience with and knowledge of teaching in the U.S. K–12 school contexts; thus, they often face many linguistic, cultural, and pedagogical challenges (Liao et al. 2017).

In a rare study that involved both the study of transnational Chinese teachers’ mentorship experiences, Wang and Bale (2019) worked with four Chinese teachers, of which three can be considered TWLTs. However, it was not clear if Wang and Bale’s teacher participants had teaching experiences in their country of birth. Drawing on data from teaching journals, field instruction observations, and interviews with the Chinese teachers to better understand the factors that impacted their successful mentoring experience, the authors found that schools are often unable to provide well matched mentors for Chinese teachers in terms of disciplinary or language backgrounds. Despite their focus on Chinese teachers in the US, Wang and Bale did not explore the intercultural negotiations required of new TWLTs. Based on Author 1’s experience in working with Chinese TWLTs,^[1] we posit that Confucian ideologies do impact and guide Chinese TWLTs’ interactions with others. In the next section, we explore unpack aspects of Confucian ideologies that we view as particularly important in shaping Chinese TWLTs’ pedagogical practices and (inter)personal emotion labor negotiation.

2.5 Emotion labor and Confucian ideologies

As one of the most influential philosophies in Chinese history, ethics, and culture, Confucian ideologies has an immense impact on Chinese education, laying the foundation for social behavior and rules of social interaction for a majority of Chinese people (Choi and Nieminen 2013). One part of key principles of Confucian ideology is its emphasis on teachers as individuals who have high social standing; hence, high expectations are placed on teachers who are constructed as authority figures (Li and Rao 2000). Many Confucian-inspired parents who subscribe to this aforementioned principle thus encourage their children to value discipline, self-control, and hard work when receiving an education. Students are socialized early from a young age to listen to authority figures, to obey, and to conform to group norms, even when they may not completely understand the rationale behind these norms (Biggs 1998). Biggs (1998), particularly, maintains that these expectations have become normalized in education over time, thereby creating limitations on both teacher and student agency. As these students become teachers and their social positioning shifts into one of greater power, they often continue to work under a Confucian paradigm that contributes to pressure to conform to other established norms and authority (e.g., institutional expectations and teachers or administrators with greater seniority), pressures which contribute to the emotion labor that they juggle in their workplace. It is this conformity that we focus on in the present study which is guided by the following research questions:

1. What factors contributed to transnational Chinese teacher candidates’ emotion labor while working with their mentor teacher in a teacher residency program?

2. What are the consequences of this emotion labor on teacher agency?

3.1 Research context

The mentorship context informing this study is a part of a two-year Chinese Language Teacher Certification Program (CLTCP) that is housed in a graduate teacher residency program at a U.S. university that grants Chinese language teacher endorsement at the elementary level. The CLTCP came as a result of official partnerships between schools and local universities, and an important function was to recruit teacher candidates to address school staff shortages in the surrounding area in exchange for some form of financial support for the graduate degree in Chinese teaching. This support was in addition to a commitment to teach in the sponsoring school for a certain number of years, much like many other teacher residency programs across the US (Guha et al. 2017). The program requires 32 h of teaching each week in a Chinese dual immersion classroom. In addition, teachers in this program are required to take 3 classes each semester, adding up to a total of 40 h of work per week for the duration of the program. In the first year, CLTCP teacher candidates are placed in a classroom with a Chinese mentor teacher and are expected to shadow the Chinese mentor teacher earlier on in the academic year before transitioning to co-teach or even teach independently in their mentor teacher’s classroom in the latter months of the academic year. CLTCP teacher candidates are also assigned an English mentor teacher with whom they work much less frequently and directly.

In the second year, CLTCP teacher candidates are assigned their own classrooms and students. While they still have access to a mentor teacher, the mentor teacher’s role is more advisory in nature. We situate our study in the first-year mentoring experience, with a particular focus on the working relationship between the CLTCP transnational teacher candidates and their mentors. The goal of the mentoring experience, as expressed by the CLTCP program supervisor to Author 1, was to allow students one-on-one support in relation to “attending faculty meetings”, “taking responsibilities on teaching”, and “participating in the parent conference”. In other words, the CLTCP’s expectations were for the teacher candidates to be treated as authentic teachers in their mentor’s classroom.

3.2 Data collection

Our data consist of five semi-structured interviews conducted with five teacher candidates who were originally from China. In this article, we present representative excerpts from two of the five teacher candidates to illustrate our findings. These two teacher candidates were chosen because their interviews most richly demonstrate the emotion labor that can arise in mentorship programs. They also share the same mentor teacher, Mrs. Liu [the mentor teacher, a pseudonym], who was a K–12 teacher for some years in China before leaving the teaching profession about two decades ago. During her time away from teaching, Mrs. Liu had immigrated to the U.S. At the time of the interviews with teacher participants, Mrs. Liu had returned to full time teaching, and this time in the U.S., for about three years.

Our teacher participants were offered the option by Authors 1 and 2, who interviewed them, that they were free to use whatever language most comfortable to them in the interviews; this offer resulted in the majority of the interviews being conducted in Chinese and on occasion, some English. The teacher participants were reminded before commencing the interviews that all responses would be kept anonymous. Our semi-structured interviews, which focused on participants’ experiences with their mentor teacher at their placement school, included open-ended questions that allowed them to share their stories freely. Interviews typically lasted an hour each and were conducted through Zoom during the summer after the participants’ first year as teacher residents in the CLTCP.

Additional study data included observational field notes taken by Author 1 as the CLTCP transnational teachers’ field instructor throughout the participants’ school placement where they worked as interns in their respective mentor teacher’s classrooms. Virtual reflective journal entries produced every 2 weeks by participants about their mentorship experiences throughout the semester as a part of their teacher certification coursework with Author 1 were also collected. A total of 8 journal entries from each teacher candidate, each ranging from 300 to 800 words, were collected. In these journal entries, they described how they experienced different kinds of emotion labor in the first month of their teaching residency, which continued through the rest of their first year of the residency program. While data from all participants were transcribed, and Author 1’s observational data and participant course artifacts were analyzed in addition to interview transcripts for references to instances of emotion labor, for the purpose of this study, we have elected to present representative samples of salient themes from our interviews with our two focal participants, Caichun and Yanfang (see Table 1).

Representative samples were drawn from Caichun’s and Yanfang’s interviews since they were among the CLTCP residents who were the most vocal about the different sources of emotion labor they experienced. They also shared the same mentor teacher, which allowed us to compare and contrast how two CLTCP residents constructed their stories of emotion labor while working with the same mentor and classroom constraints.

3.3 Data analysis

After Authors 1 and 2 transcribed all interview data, including creating an English translated version for Author 3, all three authors familiarized themselves with all the data sources described earlier. Initial coding to assist with data familiarization involved in vivo (i.e., codes that mirror wording found in the data) coding and values (i.e., codes that pay particular attention to the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the participant) coding, which allowed for a focus on participants’ own words to describe their situations as well as to “capture and label participant perspectives” (Saldaña 2016, p. 8). For example, Caichun talked about her mentor teacher referring to her as “just an intern” to their students. We used this in vivo quote to signify a key point that Caichun was trying to make in her interview. A second round of coding led us to interpret other vivo codes to attach specific values reflected in the initial codes. In this case, the value we attached to “just an intern” was “frustrations at being looked down on.” Multiple rounds of coding and recoding occurred as we negotiated any differences in interpretations. We then connected similar codes with each other (e.g., “feeling powerless,” “feeling illegitimate,” and “frustrations at feeling suppressed” under a theme of hierarchical mentoring arrangement) until we were able to identify salient patterns or themes that emerged from the data. Our codes and initial analyses were also guided in part by our intention to identify factors that contributed to CLTCP teacher emotion labor, resulting in these three overarching themes:

1. hierarchical mentoring arrangements and resulting in delegitimization;

2. misalignment in pedagogical identity resulting in challenges to identity; and

3. constraints on agency from Confucian ideologies.

4.1 Hierarchical mentoring arrangements and resulting in delegitimization

One of the major sources of stress reported by the participants involved a recognition of the strong hierarchical relationship established by their mentor teacher in their placement classroom, with the mentee positioned at the lower of a power hierarchy vis-à-vis the mentor. Because the teacher mentees were viewed as unpaid guests in the mentor’s classroom, they had access to less power, authority, and legitimacy in the classroom, causing much emotional burden when there were things that they wanted to but could not do because of a lack of legitimacy. The following excerpt illustrates this issue from Caichun’s perspective:

Mrs. Liu has told her students that I was not a teacher, that I was just an intern, and that the school doesn’t pay me. Of course, this is the truth, but it also shows in her heart, she did not consider me a true teacher…. If you did not give me the authority, that actually does a lot of damage to my ability to manage my classroom. This way, even students won’t see me as an authority figure. This makes my classroom management more difficult. (Interview)

Despite having already had three years of teaching experience in China in addition to being told by the CLTCP that her responsibility during the field placement portion of her program was to support her mentor teacher in the classroom over the course of the school year, it did not seem that her mentor teacher saw Caichun’s role the same way. This was also in spite of the fact that Cauchun had also begun to teach students herself. Thus, it was very hard for Caichun to reconcile the space in their mentor’s classroom that they had been given and what they were told they should be doing by the CLTCP. In fact, both Caichun and Yanfang’s endeavors to work as authentic teachers alongside their mentors were suppressed by their mentor’s hierarchical approach to mentoring, leading, and teaching. From Caichun’s perspective, not only did her mentor teacher not consider her to be a “true teacher”, thereby negating her past teaching experiences and qualifications, her mentor teacher also actively labeled her as “just an intern” with no pay. Even though Caichun was allowed in her mentor teacher’s classroom, she was not given due authority by her mentor, resulting in great emotion labor as Caichun attempted to reconcile the extreme power differences between her and her mentor which in turn greatly constrained how Caichun was able to teach in the classroom, positioning Caichun as powerless and illegitimate.

When Author 1 asked Yanfang how receptive Mrs. Liu was to the pedagogical activities shared by Yanfang, Yanfang shared a story demonstrating a similar sense of unbelonging in the classroom and a lack of self-efficacy. Yanfang noted that she felt as if she could not contribute meaningfully in the classroom:

I never said it. I think this will not be very respectful to her. I have tried to mention it less directly, for example, the last time when this person did this I used this way to talk to her, and I think it was quite helpful. Next time we can try this way together as well. She has said before, maybe that worked with this student, but it won’t work with other people. Mrs. Liu has mentioned before, the things you learn in university are useless. For example, if you encourage students, they will step over you. So I think she is very strong in her belief, and as a mentee, I don’t have enough position to interfere. (Interview)

Here, Yanfang described being in a position where she had tried to intervene or to suggest alternative teaching approaches to her mentor, Mrs. Liu. She was intimately aware of the power that Mrs. Liu held over her as a paid, full-time teacher with her own classroom in the school. This awareness was heightened by the nonchalant way that Mrs. Liu would invalidate knowledge Yanfang gained from her ongoing graduate coursework in Chinese pedagogy from the CLTCP which the former deemed as “useless”. This was despite Yanfang’s prior transnational teaching experiences. Together these actions by Mrs. Liu left Yanfang with little to no room to “interfere,” or to make much difference in the classroom.

Successful mentoring experiences entail the building of trust and respect for different experts during open communication (Andreasen 2023; Izadinia 2016). However, given the large disparity in power held by Caichun and Yanfang and their mentor teacher, Mrs. Liu, open communication and collaboration were not possible, leading to compromises and compliance on the part of our teacher participants, rather than what Leshem (2012) describes as an aspirational exchange of knowledge and ideas for mutual pedagogical gains. For example, upon reflecting on the times she used to attempt to suggest different ideas to Mrs. Liu, Caichun noted:

I realized at the end that the mentor teacher will hold on to her way of thinking and will persevere with her approach to handling the classroom management needs. So I will let the mentor teacher completely take over, and let her have the authority. I will only help when there are things that really get out of control. Other times, I would just sit there silently observing.

After several attempts at creating opportunities for open and frank communication with Mrs. Liu about the things Caichun hoped to do in the former’s classroom, Caichun still found it difficult to establish a dialogic relationship with her since Mrs. Liu would not allow Caichun to be fully involved in the classroom. In fact, based on Author 1’s observational field notes, Caichun was often instructed to simply sit at the back of the classroom and watch her mentor teach instead. The fact that Caichun was neither able to attempt to put into practice the pedagogical content that she learned from her CLTCP coursework nor apply her own experiences as a teacher back in China contributed to Caichun’s emotion labor. Caichun’s experience here shows that unless specific structural changes are made to facilitate an equal exchange and negotiation of expectations between the mentor and mentee, and to reduce the power differential between them, it seems that a change in the hierarchical mentorship arrangement is unlikely to occur.

4.2 Misalignment in pedagogical identity and resulting challenges to identities

Understandably, the CLTCP transnational teacher residents often wanted to engage in mentoring relationships where their own pedagogical identity arising from their past teaching experiences and teacher training are valued. Thus, another cause for the intense emotion labor that they experienced during their teacher residency was the serious misalignment in pedagogical identities between them and Mrs. Liu. Pedagogical identity, which is a crucial part of a teacher’s professional identity (Bernstein 2000), is usually negotiated and constructed at both vertical level (e.g., social values) and horizontal level (e.g., workplace cultures), and thus shapes teachers’ pedagogical decisions. In this section, we provide examples of how our two teacher participants’ pedagogical identities were misaligned with Mrs. Liu’s. And given that emotion and identity are inextricably linked (Wolff and De Costa 2017), we illustrate how this misalignment amplified Caichun’s and Yanfang’s emotion labor.

Even prior to receiving her bachelor’s degree in the U.S. Yanfang was already relatively familiar with the U.S. education context as she had completed her high school studies in China at an international school that followed the U.S. education curriculum. Yanfang’s early exposure to both Chinese and American education and curricula led her to be very aware of how different classrooms were set up and the ways that resources (or lack of them) may impact pedagogical delivery and classroom management styles. In the following excerpt, Yanfang expresses frustration with what she saw as a rigid importation of traditional Chinese teaching practices (e.g., didactic teaching, and transmissive learning and repetitive practice) associated with resource constraints in China to the U.S. from her mentor teacher:

Like if you gave her 40 tables [i.e., a large class], all the students are Chinese students who have grown up under an education system that emphasized respect to teachers and their teachings, then I think she can teach quite well … But American students and Chinese students really are very different. The kinds of classes that they [students] want and can adapt to are also different from Chinese classes. (Interview)

From Yanfang’s perspective, her mentor teacher approached teaching American students in the US the same way that a Chinese teacher in China who has to manage a large class of 40 students and high-stakes examinations would. Given our (i.e., the three authors’) familiarity with teacher-student relationships and student-classroom norms in Asia, we interpret Yanfang’s assertion of “respect to teachers and their teachings” to mean that teacher-centered lectures are more commonplace in Chinese classrooms, and that there is a much stronger expectation for compliance and conformity to the teacher’s authority (rather than Yanfang literally believing that Chinese students are inherently more respectful to teachers).

In fact, elsewhere in her interview, Yanfang shared a more detailed example of Mrs. Liu’s preferred way of interacting with students. In a situation where a student may have talked out of turn, Yanfang mentioned that Mrs. Liu would tell the student, “you need to go somewhere else”, suggesting that the student should disengage, step out of class, and not push the point any further. And when students pushed back to ask for a reason for being asked to leave the class, Mrs. Liu would not explain why, instead, her response was often, “because I tell you to, so you must do it.” Mrs. Liu’s expectation for compliance from her students may have been unquestioned and even in keeping with cultural expectations in China, but Yanfang felt that it was neither effective teaching, nor was it culturally appropriate in the US. Expressing her disagreement with how things were conducted in Mrs. Liu’s class, Yanfang asserted, “even though it’s obvious it’s because she [the student] spoke out of turn, you must still let the student know why they are being disciplined.” This teaching belief may not have been ratified by Mrs. Liu, but Yanfang did indeed receive positive feedback for this belief when she was alone in a separate room with a student who was told to stay there as part of Mrs. Liu’s disciplinary action. The student told Yanfang, “if you become the teacher next year … tell the kids what they did wrong when punishing them. Otherwise, they don’t know what they did wrong.” Knowing these differences in expectations as she herself had experienced both Chinese and American-style classrooms, Yanfang was a firm believer in the importance of adapting her teaching style to be more culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings 1995) and appropriate for a U.S. audience, despite being a Chinese teacher.

Similarly, Caichun was very aware of differences in pedagogical identities between herself (a facilitator identity) and Mrs. Liu’s (an authoritarian identity). While Caichun did not have as much exposure to the U.S. education system compared to Yanfang, who had a U.S. undergraduate degree (review Table 1), Caichun also subscribed to a more student-centered approach to pedagogy and classroom management. The following excerpt reveals Caichun’s reflections on how she negotiated fundamental differences in their pedagogical identities after Mrs. Liu made it clear that she did not agree with Caichun’s way of handling student misbehavior:

I think my classroom management style is correct. I know [Mrs. Liu’s]’s classroom management style and my beliefs are not the same…. I think, maybe in her heart, she might feel a bit uncomfortable. After all, there is someone who thinks differently from you and did not follow what you said to do, but she won’t express that …. I will worry. I will wonder, when will she stop me? (Interview)

Caichun mentioned that sometimes, despite knowing that her classroom management style and instructional pedagogies diverged from Mrs. Liu’s, she would still go ahead and do things her way. As she did this, however, Caichun was very much aware that Mrs. Liu would probably not have approved of her actions. In fact, she often worried about when she would be stopped by Mrs. Liu. Such emotional burdens were thus shouldered by Caichun because of the deep misalignment in their teaching beliefs and practices, which were further compounded by the hierarchical relationship she had with Mrs. Liu. This, in turn, led Caichun and other CLTCP transnational teachers to feel compelled to comply with Mrs. Liu’s directives for the most part went against how they wished to act. Teacher learning is most effective when it occurs within a supportive interpersonal relationship, which provides space for the development of creative pedagogical practices and skills (Daloz 1986). This valuable social infrastructure was, unfortunately, lacking in this context which was characterized by almost diametrically opposed pedagogical identities; such a conflict, in turn, reduced the opportunity for the development of innovative pedagogies.

As illustrated above, there was a clear divergence in terms of how both of our teacher participants approached classroom management compared to their mentor teacher. This divergence subsequently led to unresolved tensions between them and Mrs. Liu whose preference was to administer a “punishment system”. A specific example that Caichun gave regarding how their pedagogical identities and practices diverged is described below:

When I am doing a lesson demonstration, and there are students who disrupt my class, I might ignore this issue. I won’t focus on this issue in front of the entire class, but in these moments, Mrs. Liu will jump out and say, Ms. Caichun, do you want to use this punishment system? Do you want to deduct these points or something like this? Personally, I really don’t like this style of centering the entire class’s attention. I think this style can be very damaging to children’s self-esteem …. I don’t want to do it. (Interview)

Rather than publicly shaming a disruptive student through exacting the punishment system put in place by Mrs. Liu, Caichun preferred to ignore the disruptive student or address the issue on the side later. However, Mrs. Liu felt strongly about enforcing her punishment system, even during Caichun’s turn to teach. This led Caichun to feel as if she was being coerced into subscribing and being complicit in her mentor’s classroom behavior management style, despite being strongly against it. This course of action also posed a challenge to Caichun’s teacher identity which entails how teachers make sense of themselves in classrooms and also how they perceive they present themselves to others (Alsup 2006). Especially for a novice teacher like Caichun, her confidence in her own teacher identity and her teacher beliefs were heavily impacted by her frequent negative experiences in Mrs. Liu’s classroom. Overall, the ongoing struggle between having to seek positive affirmation of the appropriateness of her teaching beliefs and practices undoubtedly contributed to the emotion labor Caichun felt as a transnational teacher working under Mrs. Liu’s direction.

4.3 Constraints on agency from Confucian ideologies

Though our teacher participants were in the process of getting certified to teach Chinese in the US, the spaces they navigated as CLTCP transnational teachers with their mentor teacher during their practicum are effectively Confucian heritage cultural spaces. Thus, a third major source of emotion labor that we found from our analysis comes from the way that the CLTCP transnational teacher residents perceived limits on their agency when facing tensions with their mentor teachers.

When narrating stories of frustration and a sense of helplessness regarding her interactions with Mrs. Liu, Caichun disclosed:

Part of the reason is that she is hard to communicate with, and another reason is that I think I am influenced by Chinese culture. We ourselves won’t really go ask elders for things, and say, I hope you treat me this way or that way. What we are more likely to do is do our best to adapt to the elder’s style …. She is truly quite traditional. Her teaching style makes me think 20 years of how primary school teachers taught. (Interview)

Even though Caichun did not specifically mention that she was influenced by Confucian thinking, her interactions with Mrs. Liu and her reference to “Chinese culture” indicated her awareness of the source of difficulty in resolving tensions between them. The implicit social rule of someone of her standing (i.e., a novice teacher) is that she should be respectful to her elders, including her mentor teacher. This resulted in Caichun never challenging her mentor’s directions and beliefs, which in turn restricted options available to her to negotiate change. Such compliance, albeit with reluctance, prevented Caichun from implementing creative pedagogical solutions to improve instruction.

More often than not, to maintain a sense of a cordial working relationship, even if only at the surface level, both transnational teachers tended to actively avoid conflicts rather than attempt to confront these conflicts. In the following excerpt, Caichun described her thought process behind this course of action:

I myself am not too willing to do these kinds of communication that will result in conflicts. I am not willing to be in situations of conflict with people …. I think my mentor doesn’t really know how to communicate with others. So it will erase my desire to communicate with her … I could already see that … through the intern experience, including her interactions with students …. Like students need to express something and she will not listen to students, which causes students to slowly have an antagonistic reaction to her, and this negatively affects her classroom management. (Interview)

Multiple reasons create the difficulty in open communication between Caichun and her mentor. However, despite seeing deep issues with the way her mentor teacher approached communication not just with her, but also with the students, Caichun did not consider addressing the issues directly with her mentor. Conflict avoidance was Caichun’s preferred course of action not just simply because of her personal preference for saving each other’s face. It also stemmed from the great difficulty of confronting someone with a relatively higher status than her. Not feeling equipped with the power and resources to deal with the problem further exacerbated the emotion labor experienced by Caichun and is illustrative of the sociocultural circumstances reported in Benesch (2019) that generate emotion labor.

Like Caichun, Yanfang also demonstrated a sense of constrained agency in negotiating differences with Mrs. Liu:

The Chinese education I received when I was small won’t allow me to challenge my mentor, especially since she is the primary person managing this class. So our relationship from the basic level is quite good, a kind of work site relationship, and not outside interaction. If we have perspectives that don’t align, I won’t refute her on the surface. Our relationship just won’t be very close. What is different is that my undergrad mentor and our relationship was quite good, we will privately have interactions too. For example, we both like baking, so if she makes some dessert, she will take it to me. (Interview)

Though framed in slightly differently, Yanfang’s words echoed much of Caichun’s sentiments. Additionally, Yanfang showed that working under such strict hierarchical expectations of social interaction does not always result in poor mentorship relationships, particularly when disagreements between mentor and mentee are minor. Our findings echo Leshem (2012) who found that mentees more often than not tend to accommodate mentors rather than challenge any dissonance identified in their mentoring relationship. However, we would like to point out that for Chinese transnational teachers, this is an even more deeply rooted issue.

4.4 Overall consequences of emotion labor

An immediate and enduring consequence of the emotion labor experienced by the Chinese transnational teachers is that their emotions of stress, frustration, sense of helplessness, and conflict remain unresolved, unaddressed, and hence became internalized. When discussing what she wished was different about her year of working in Mrs. Liu’s classroom, Yanfang noted:

I think this mentor needs to make me as a mentee feel that there are things I can learn… when I look at her classroom, her strategies are not working. I am very frustrated. But as a mentee, what I can do is very limited. Because the mentor is the official teacher, and you are only an intern, so you have no qualifications to fight back. I also don’t know how to improve this. (Interview)

Similarly, Caichun was frequently overcome by negative emotions when it came to entering Mrs. Liu’s classroom each day:

Actually, I struggle every time I step into [Mrs. Liu]’s classroom. I will have a burden in my heart. I will think, “oh, today my head will hurt”. It is a lot of pain, but there’s no solution. Have to just bear it. Because this is the school’s requirement, I cannot change anything. I can only do my best to adapt, and then in class, if I see things that go against my beliefs, or things that are different from what I’ve learned, then I will think, next year when I teach, I definitely cannot be like this. (Interview)

The issues between Mrs. Liu and our teacher participants remain unresolved because a relationship of trust and openness could not be established for reasons reported earlier. While there was not much that neither Caichun nor Yanfang could do to make changes, they were able to try and make sense of their emotions through personal reflection, which in a way, constituted a form of resistance to their situation. For example, Caichun stated:

When classroom management is going very poorly, I will feel like there is nothing that can be done. But I won’t say that the problem is only due to Mrs. Liu. I will think, I am not good enough. And I will slowly persuade myself, even though my mentor is struggling, so it’s not my problem. I cannot create a completely new classroom-based environment that she cannot successfully manage. I try to do this to convince myself, in order to make myself less frustrated. (Interview)

Thus, Caichun tried her best to not allow self-doubt about her own teaching competence to creep in, and instead recognized the structure in place that caused the difficulties she faced in teaching. Even though this did not make it easy for her to enter her mentor teacher’s classroom to teach daily, it was sufficient to help her persevere until the end of the mentorship experience.

Another way that the transnational teachers kept themselves adequately motivated was to recognize that the mentorship experience would eventually end at some point. Yanfang shared how she endured the mentorship experience:

To replace this, the whole teaching style must be replaced. The main thing is I don’t think their [the students’] final goal in learning Chinese is to learn how to write these few words. I think this basic belief is different. So what I need to change is her [Mrs. Liu’s] teaching style. I think I am only teaching for a month or two or three months, it is not worth it. Also, I personally don’t have enough power to do this. So I might as well follow her, and within my power, try to design something that is interesting for students. (Interview)

After weighing the required effort and costs of confronting Mrs. Liu about their pedagogical differences, Yanfang decided that it would not be worth it, given the different factors that contributed to her emotion labor; so she elected to simply wait out the mentorship experience. Rather than seeing their internship experience with mentor teachers as a learning opportunity, both transnational teachers looked to their second year in the program with hope instead. Since they would be given their own classrooms to teach in their second year, they would not have to deal with emotion labor generated from constant pressures of power and hierarchy, misalignment in teaching philosophies, and be constrained in how they could respond to a mentor since they would be in charge of their own classroom. Yanfang notably added this point about her relationship with Mrs. Liu: “Maybe the difference in teaching philosophy really creates a pretty big gap. I am also very thankful for what she did outside of class. I can count her as a very good elder, but she definitely cannot be considered to be a very good mentor” (Interview).

Yanfang’s words point out a consequence related to the unresolved emotion labor that occurred during the mentorship experience. While she acknowledged that her mentor teacher was a good elder, she did not think Mrs. Liu was a good mentor. Caichun also summed up her year in the mentor’s classroom in a way that questioned the value of spending a whole year in Mrs. Liu’s class. When asked how she would describe her mentoring experience, she said:

Struggling. I learned a lot from her class about things that I should not do. I cannot recall a particular event. It’s just if a teacher treats you very well and was able to help you a lot, you will be able to remember what this teacher helped you with. But in my memory of the past school year, I don’t think I can remember anything specific, as in nothing special that I can think of. (Interview)

It definitely seems like a lost great opportunity for the CLTCP transnational teachers like Caichun and Yanfang to be spending 32 h a week in a mentor’s classroom for an entire academic year, only to recall negative experiences or examples of what not to do in class, rather than learning positive things that would help them teach independently in the second year of their program.