Abstract
AbstractFew jobs come without irritations, and foreign language instruction comes with its own particular set of frustrations which, when accumulated, can lead to stress and eventual burnout for teachers. One mechanism for reducing such frustrations is that of emotion regulation, the cognitive and behavioral strategies individuals employ to manage the emotions they experience or display. To date, no known studies have reported specifically on the in-class frustration experienced by language teachers, or on how teachers regulate their feelings of frustration. Herein, the authors discuss the experiences of seven EFL teachers at a university in Japan obtained through a series of semistructured interviews, classroom observations and corresponding stimulated-recall sessions. The authors discuss four salient thematic frustrations: student apathy, classroom silence, misbehavior in the context of relational strain, and working conditions. The results reveal that participants applied contextually-dependent emotion regulation behaviors, the success of which was often contingent on the participants’ levels of confidence and control over the stressors. Thus, participants showed more success in managing pervasive low-level stressors such as apathy and silence, and more support would be welcome to aid them to manage more debilitating stressors such as student misbehavior. The authors offer suggestions for teachers, trainers and institutions on reducing frustration.
Highlights
Teachers may simultaneously achieve multiple goals through regulation, and we have previously shown that stress may arise when teachers need to achieve multiple higher-order emotion regulation goals which are in contention, such as when they are trying to balance the maintenance of warm social relationships against their epistemic notions of teacher responsibility (Morris & King, 2018)
It is well established that the Japanese learning context is replete with complex motivational issues for teachers to navigate, and six of the participants reported that a general malaise exhibited by some of the students at Morizaki University was a perpetual frustration that had caused much stress during their tenures
Rose’s frustrations with apathy were to a high degree informed by her training experiences during her master’s course a few years prior, which had imbued a commendably strong desire to serve her students. Her employment at Morizaki University was her first employment post MA, and when she began, Rose reported complex bidirectional feelings. While she accepted that some students “don't rise to meet the challenge,” she reported feeling “a lot of frustration” at her own efforts within the classroom: “Maybe I didn't give them the skills or I didn't explain things clearly, or like what went wrong with my teaching that they couldn't meet my expectations?” directing frustration towards one’s own teaching could be a potentially rewarding source of reflection, but such martyring to the cultural myth that “everything depends on the teacher” (Britzman, 1986, p. 449), and continued negative assessment of one’s teaching ability is liable to lead over time to reduced self-esteem, of which stress is a potential consequence (Kyriacou, 2001)
Summary
The classroom is recognized as a source of considerable emotion and emotional labor for teachers (e.g., Hargreaves, 1998; King, 2016b; Nias, 1996; Zembylas, 2002), and the management of negative feelings plays important mediating roles in maintaining classroom order, building relationships, enacting professional identities and managing psychological health (e.g., Haeussler, 2013; Hagenauer & Volet, 2014; Hosotani & ImaiMatsumura, 2011; King, 2016b; Sutton, 2004; Yin, 2016). The fact that emotion regulation skills can continue to be learnt across careers (Gkonou & Mercer, 2017; Gyurak, Gross, & Etkin, 2011) means that reporting on the sources and regulation of frustration by experienced language teachers can be conducive to supporting teachers in the management of their psychological health. We outline the sources of frustration that the teachers experienced, the effects of their frustration, the emotion regulation goals they enacted, and the strategies they used to lower their frustration. We show some of the ways that over time the teachers have become able to manage pervasive stressors through a variety of contextually-dependent emotion regulation techniques. The participants’ confidence and control over their stressors is revealed as a connecting thread throughout the discussion, and we conclude with recommendations for teachers, teacher trainers and institutions to support faculty in reducing frustration
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