The Emotional Side of Language Teaching & Learning

Brent A. JonesKonan University, Hirao School of Management

Overview

Why the concern?

Literature Review

Key Concepts

Current Study

Why the concern?

Teaching as a “caring” profession

Teaching as “emotional work”

Status of “language teacher” and “identity”

–Denzin, N. (1984). On understanding emotion. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

“Teaching is not only a cognitive and behavioral practice where improving

teaching involves attending solely to what teachers should

know and be able to do.”

Literature Review

TATE articles from 1985 - 2014

(1) emotions in teacher identity and professional learning,

(2) emotional exhaustion among teachers,

(3) teachers, emotions and relationships,

(4) teachers' emotions in historical, political and societal contexts and educational reforms,

(5) teachers' impact on students' emotions,

(6) teachers' emotional intelligence, skills and knowledge, and

(7) teachers' emotions and regulation of emotions.

Uitto, M., Jokikokko, K. & Estola, E. (2015)

Literature Review

1. Teaching is an emotional practice

2. Teaching and learning involve emotional understanding.

3. Teaching is a form of emotional labor.

4. Teachers’ emotions are inseparable from their moral purposes and their ability to achieve those purposes.

Hargreaves (1998)

–Hargreaves, A. (1998). The emotional practice of teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(8),

835-854.

“Along with achievement of purposes, a sense of security about oneself and

relationships with others is, indeed, a basic correlate of happiness,

satisfaction and willingness to take personal risks in learning”

Emotional Intelligence

Ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others.

(1) Emotional awareness, including the ability to identify your own emotions and those of others;

(2) The ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problems solving;

(3) The ability to manage emotions, including the ability to regulate your own emotions, and the ability to cheer up or calm down another person.

psychologytoday.com

Emotional Labor

Refers to the process by which workers are expected to manage their feelings in accordance with organizationally defined rules and guidelines.

Hochschild's (1983) The Managed Heart introduced this concept and inspired an outpouring of research on this topic.

Wharton (2009)

Emotional Geographies

is a subtopic within human geography, dealing with the relationships between emotions and geographic places and their contextual environments. Emotional geography specifically focuses on how human emotions relate to, or affect, the environment around them.

Wikipedia

–Day, C., Kington, A., Storbart, G. & Sammons, P. (2006). The personal and professional selves of teachers: Stable and unstable identities. British Educational Research Journal, 32(4), 601-616.

“Sustaining a positive sense of effectiveness to subject, pupils,

relationships and roles is important in maintaining motivation, self-esteem or

self-efficacy, job satisfaction, and commitment to teaching . . .”

Current Study

Semester-long (15 weeks) Reflective Journaling Project (PD)

10 Teachers

Data - Journal entries, semi-structured interviews (weeks 8 & 15)

Qualitative Analysis (NVivo)

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

FlowTheor

y

The Experience Economy:B. Joseph Pine and James H.

Gilmore

CommoditiesProducts

Services

Experiences

Entertainment

Educational

Escapist

Esthetic

In esthetic experiences, individuals immerse themselves but remain passive.

–Pine & Gilmore (1999)

“The richest experiences encompass aspects of all four

realms.”

Abraham Maslow

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side; it has revealed to us much about man’s

shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable

aspirations, or his psychological height.

ProfessionalismThe concepts of professionalism and professionalization are ‘essentially contested’, as philosophers say. Outside education, professions have been represented theoretically, in the image of those who belong to them, and who advance their interests as having a strong technical culture with a specialized knowledge base and shared standards of practice, a service ethic where there is a commitment to client needs, a firm monopoly over service, long periods of training, and high degrees of autonomy (Hargeaves, 2000).