Emotions and English Language Teaching

Exploring Teachers' Emotion Labor

Sarah Benesch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317566205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1
Introduction

Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’ Emotion Labor examines the relationship between English language teaching and teachers’ emotions in a publicly-funded US university. Using the lens of emotion labor to explore emotions, the book takes a critical approach, one that considers the role of power, and resistance to power, in postsecondary English language teaching. Briefly, emotion labor is the struggle between workplace feeling rules (Hochschild 1983) and employees’ prior training and/or beliefs about appropriate workplace conduct. Feeling rules are tacit expectations about how employees are supposed to react to particular workplace situations. Emotion labor is produced when these implicit rules clash with, or only partially correspond to, employees’ professional training, ethics, and other influences. Though not explicitly stated or written down, feeling rules can be deduced from institutional policies and guidelines, ones that imply workplace demeanor or attitudes. That is, despite their tacitness, feeling rules can be gleaned from explicit workplace rules and from teachers’ interpretation of the affective expectations of those rules.

To give a brief example of feeling rules – one I explore more fully in Chapter 6: university plagiarism policies prescribe guidelines for detecting and reporting instances of student plagiarism. Yet, additionally, these guidelines imply feeling rules, including, for example, that teachers should remain vigilant and alert to the possibility of plagiarism, considered a serious violation of so-called academic integrity. When discovering unattributed copied text in student writing, teachers are supposed to feel indignant, even violated. This indignation is expected to persist and impel enforcement of rules pertaining to investigating and reporting what is considered to be an infraction. Though the feeling rules related to plagiarism are not explicitly spelled out, they can nonetheless provoke emotion labor because they may conflict with English language (EL) teachers’ ethos of caring and mentoring rather than punishing students. Or they might trigger a sense of inadequacy when it comes to preventing plagiarism. They might also evoke a range of other reactions: anger, frustration, concern, and so on. A struggle over which emotions are suitable may therefore be present.

This type of dilemma, whereby emotion labor is produced by dissonance between feeling rules and professional training and/or ethics, is the focus of this book. My claim is that emotion labor is central to EL teaching, often guiding decisions about pedagogical matters, and it therefore merits serious attention. The purpose of this exploration is not to prevent, avoid, or diminish emotion labor, but instead to raise awareness of it. Acknowledging and exploring emotion labor is a step toward its use as a tool for informed decision-making as well as possible resistance and reform.

Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’ Emotion Labor is based on interviews with 13 English language teachers at the City University of New York (CUNY), a publicly-funded US university with a large immigrant population. Two additional CUNY English language teachers answered the interview questions through a questionnaire. Participants responded to questions about four areas of English language postsecondary teaching that tend to be regulated, either through institutional policies or professional guidelines: high-stakes literacy testing, responding to student writing, plagiarism, and attendance. Given the regulation of these aspects of English language teaching (ELT), they are particularly “sticky” (Ahmed 2004), meaning prone to attracting emotions and emotion labor. Discussion of this rich interview data offers an expanded and nuanced understanding of ELT by focusing on an under-researched area of pedagogy: emotion work that may be as demanding as the intellectual work of teaching, if not more so.

As to the organization of the current book, in Chapters 2 and 3, I lay the theoretical groundwork for the analysis of the interview data appearing in Chapters 4 through 7. In Chapter 2, I describe differences between three approaches to the study of emotions found in various scholarly literatures: biological, cognitive, and poststructural/discursive. This discussion clarifies how the latter approach to emotions (poststructural/discursive), the one taken in this book, is distinct from those positing emotions as genetically-determined (biological) and those that consider emotions to be features of the human mind (cognitive), the dominant perspective in the literature on emotions and ELT.

Following my discussion of emotions in Chapter 2, I outline differences between structural and poststructural approaches to emotion labor in Chapter 3. Beginning with the work of Arlie Hochschild (1979, 1983, 2003), who first coined the terms emotion management, emotion work, and emotional labor, I discuss research influenced by her path-breaking studies of workplace regulation of emotions. Yet, while acknowledging Hochschild’s pioneering contribution to understanding the relationship between unequal power in the workplace and emotion labor, I also explain how my poststructural analysis differs from hers. Briefly, I question the following dichotomies present in her work: real vs. fake self, private vs. public self, and inner vs. outer feelings.

My point in questioning those dichotomies is to challenge the notion of a unitary authentic self whose essence is compromised when having to display workplace emotions that violate the putative real self. In place of a fixed and essential self, poststructural theorists propose discursively-constructed selves “whose meaning emerges out of reflexive social interactions with others” (Tracy and Trethewey 2005, p. 170). Along these lines, a poststructural/discursive approach to emotion labor engages with ways in which discourses of power constitute selves in the “destabilized and multivocal” (p. 171) contemporary world. Furthermore, in this book, emotion labor is not considered to be pernicious, as it was in Hochschild’s formulation (1983), but rather, inevitably embedded in human interaction and therefore a promising area of investigation and transformation in ELT.

Chapters 4 to 7 are each focused on one topic about which the 15 EL teachers answered questions: high-stakes literacy testing, responding to student writing, plagiarism, and attendance. Each of these four chapters begins with a review of the literature on that topic, followed by analysis of the interview data related to the questions I posed to the respondents about that topic. The aim of the literature reviews at the start of Chapters 4 to 7 is to include studies that have examined emotions in the context of each of the four areas. Even in cases when the research did not explicitly theorize emotions or emotion labor, but instead suggested the presence of emotions, I included it to encourage further discussion of the relationship between pedagogy and emotions. Chapter 8 concludes the book by summarizing the findings, discussing pedagogical implications, and offering suggestions for future emotion-labor research.

The rationale for Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’ Emotion Labor is offered next in the form of a personal history of my emotion labor. This history aims to demonstrate my investment in exploring emotion labor as an important area of ELT and to explain why I chose to investigate the four topics presented in Chapters 4 through 7. As I’ll show in this history, the four issues taken up in those chapters have been the stickiest in my teaching and therefore the ones provoking the strongest emotion labor. The title of each subsection is a question meant to suggest the struggle between opposing approaches that provoked my emotion labor.

Rationale: My Emotion-Labor History

High-Stakes Literacy Testing: Standardized Assessment or Pedagogical Reforms?

In 1985 I was hired as an assistant professor in the English department of the College of Staten Island, one of 17 colleges of CUNY. Thrilled to land an academic position in New York City, where I had attended graduate school, with the prospect of teaching open-admissions students in a publicly-funded college, I entered with little knowledge of the politics of literacy testing, an area that had not been explored in my graduate studies in applied linguistics. Despite my lack of prior knowledge of testing policies, it quickly became clear how fraught they were. The reading and writing assessment tests given to entering students determined who would be required to take English as a Second Language (ESL) or developmental courses and who would be permitted direct entry to first-year composition. Because many of the students had exited from ESL programs during their primary or secondary education, they had not expected to be placed in ESL courses in college. Therefore on the first day of each semester, students displayed a range of reactions, including dismay, anger, fear, and shame, that deserved to be taken into account.

Hoping to educate myself further about literacy testing in CUNY, I joined the CUNY ESL Council, established in 1971 as a forum for discussing pedagogical issues. It was clear from the first meeting I attended that the reading and writing tests, and their uses, were controversial. Though some members believed in the inevitability of standardized university-wide literacy testing to flag students who were deemed unready for college-level work, others were dubious about the tests themselves and their uses. Instead of excluding those who failed the literacy tests from the mainstream, these detractors proposed pedagogical solutions across the curriculum, such as paired language and content courses, that would provide all entering students with instruction customized to their literacy backgrounds and needs (Benesch 1988, 1991).

The ambivalence about literacy testing was my first experience of emotion labor in academia, though I didn’t conceptualize it as such at the time. However, I can see in retrospect that conflicts among my training in ESL pedagogy, my support of open admissions, and the mandated standardized tests that excluded students from the mainstream generated emotion labor. My training as an ESL professional led me to gravitate toward sheltering English language learners in classes where they would receive instructional and personal attention surrounded by other non-native speaking students, thereby offering a refuge as they acclimated to college.

On the other hand, my support for equal educational opportunity, grounded in my public school education in Washington DC in the 1960s (Benesch 2012), led me to question the exclusion of ESL students from first-year writing courses. Yet, I wondered about the impact of the inferior education my students had received in overcrowded and underfunded New York City public high schools. Immigrant students’ attendance at these schools was marked by neglect, especially when it came to language education. How was CUNY to compensate for the years of inattention, except by offering the shelter of ESL instruction?

Still, I balked at CUNY’s tacit language policy that constructed literacy as a set of skills to be remediated before students were allowed to be mainstreamed. English departments and ESL programs were expected to prepare students not just to pass the literacy tests, but also to master academic reading and writing so that faculty in other departments would not have to engage with language issues. This expectation failed to consider that language is the shared responsibility of all postsecondary instructors, given that curricula in each discipline are imbued in language. According to this language-across-the-curriculum (LAC) perspective, faculty at every instructional level should tailor their courses to open-admissions students rather than expecting students to meet a predetermined literacy standard before being allowed to enter the mainstream. LAC posits reading and writing as the domain of all departments, not just English departments. The struggle to reconcile the sheltered ESL and LAC approaches is another example of what I’m characterizing as emotion labor.¹

Though the emotion labor of high-stakes literacy testing is discussed further in Chapter 4, I’ve introduced emotion labor through that topic in this chapter to illustrate ways that professional training and institutional regulations may interact. They may initially coincide as they did in my support of sheltered ESL courses. Yet, they may also come into conflict as real politics become more apparent, leading to increased emotion labor, as they did for me when it came to LAC issues. Another way to put it is that emotion labor can serve to signal a problem requiring attention and an area in need of reform. Another example of this type of conflict is discussed next.

Responding to Student Writing: Toward Revision or Correctness?

Before being hired at the College of Staten Island (CSI), I was enrolled in the English Education/Applied Linguistics doctoral program at New York University (NYU) in the early 1980s. This was the heyday of the process-writing movement. Therefore the courses emphasized what Berlin (1988) later labeled “expressionistic rhetoric” (p. 485), based on the assumption that the writing teacher’s job is to encourage students to develop their personal voice. Pedagogically speaking, process writing was carried out through invention strategies, multiple drafts, and feedback toward revision of the individual writer’s ideas. Editing was almost an afterthought, believed to come into play only when the writing was in its final stage and ready to go public. In fact, a text assigned in one of my doctoral courses, Writing Without Teachers (Elbow 1973), described editing and self-editing unfavorably, as impediments to writers’ free expression and elaboration of their ideas:

The editor is, as it were, constantly looking over the shoulder of the producer and constantly fiddling with what he’s doing while he’s in the middle of trying to do it. No wonder the producer gets nervous, jumpy, inhibited, and finally can’t be coherent. It’s an unnecessary burden to try to think of words and also worry at the same time whether they’re the right words (p. 5).

A key precept of the doctoral program, then, was for teachers to encourage students’ voices and avoid derailing their personal intentions. Another influential text in that regard was written by two of the NYU doctoral faculty: Brannon and Knoblauch (1984), Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Among other ideas, the authors urged writing teachers not to impose an Ideal Text on their reading of student texts by imposing their own. The Ideal Text, then, became the third rail of composition pedagogy: one to be avoided at all costs. To prevent ourselves from supplanting student writers’ intentions with our own, we were taught, for example, to ask students to write their intentions in the margins of their papers. These margin notes served as guidance for our feedback, with the hope that they would keep us from misinterpreting students’ aims and imposing our own.

We were also taught to encourage peer feedback by setting up small groups in our writing classes and having students read and respond to each other’s writing. This was the dominant pedagogy of the NYU first-year writing courses taught by doctoral students when I was a graduate student. As one of those writing instructors, I found peer groups such a compelling way to teach that my doctoral dissertation explored three of my students’ peer group conversations over the course of a semester.

That is to say, I was steeped in an ideology of expressionistic rhetoric that called for freeing student writers from intrusive feedback to allow them to explore their intentions through talk and writing. Furthermore this was the ideology promoted by ESL compositionists, Zamel (1976, 1982, 1983) and Raimes (1985). Their work, and that of Britton (1970), Berthoff (1981) and others, influenced the process pedagogy adopted in an ESL composition textbook, Academic Writing Workshop, which two of my peers and I wrote while in graduate school (Benesch, Rakijas and Rorschach 1987). In the “Introduction to teachers” we wrote about the “almost overwhelming” anxiety ESL students experience about “their ability to produce correct written English” (p. xiii). To address our claim about that anxiety, we recommended freewriting and journal writing as invention techniques.

Despite my co-authors’ and my passionate embrace of process pedagogy, this approach was not fully supported in the ESL composition community. Rejection of the process approach was particularly strong among advocates of English for academic purposes (EAP), the field that aimed to prepare students for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theorizing Emotions
• 3 Theorizing Emotion Labor
• 4 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor
• 5 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor
• 6 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor
• 7 Attendance and Emotion Labor
• 8 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications
• Index