Emotionally (in)hospitable spaces: reflecting on language teacher–teacher educator collaboration as a source of emotion labor and emotional capital

Abstract

Abstract While various aspects of language teachers’ emotional experiences have been gaining attention, including emotion labor and emotional capital, less attention has been placed on the emotional experiences of teacher educators supporting language teachers in emotionally challenging situations. Following calls to examine language teachers’ emotional experiences ecologically and as socially and institutionally shaped, we engaged in collaborative autoethnography to explore how language teacher and teacher educator emotion labor reflects answerability to multiple commitments in the face of external feeling rules. Our findings highlight how language teacher–teacher educator collaboration can mitigate as well as reproduce emotion labor. This study contributes to research on language teacher emotion labor by focusing on the role of the teacher educator in supporting language teacher emotional capital and highlighting the complexity underlying emotion labor and emotional capital as multi-directional. Furthermore, the study illustrates how collaborative autoethnography can generate reflexivity and emotional capital for language teacher educators.