An Exploration of Language Teacher

Reflection, Emotion Labor, and

Emotional Capital
CHRISTINA GKONOU
University of Essex,
Colchester, United Kingdom
ELIZABETH R. MILLER
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

In this article the researchers explore the notion of emotional capital

in relation to language teachers’ emotion labor and the role of
reflection in understanding their emotional experiences. They draw
on interview narratives with teachers (N = 25) working in higher edu-
cation institutions in the United States and United Kingdom. During
these interview conversations, the researchers elicited accounts of
teachers’ emotionally charged experiences that arise as part of their
ongoing, mundane teaching practice and how they respond to these
situations. The researchers argue that as language teachers struggle
to orient to the feeling rules of their institutions, they develop the
capacity to perform the emotions that they believe are expected of
them. This capacity is further shaped through their reflective prac-
tice, as both individual reflection and collaborative reflection with
colleagues. The researchers thus analyze how language teachers’
accruing emotional capital, developed through emotion labor and
reflective activity, can be converted into social and cultural capital.
The authors also point to how language teachers’ emotional capital
is entangled in power relations and thus requires careful scrutiny.
doi: 10.1002/tesq.580

T he significant body of research into emotions within second lan-

guage acquisition (SLA) has disproportionately centered on the
negative repercussions of anxiety on language learners and the process
of learning (see, e.g., Gkonou, Daubney, & Dewaele, 2017). Recent
efforts have, however, focused on more holistic explorations of lan-
guage learner emotions with a view to advancing understandings of

134 TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 55, No. 1, March 2021

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emotions other than anxiety, such as enjoyment (Dewaele & MacIn-
tyre, 2016; Dewaele, Witney, Saito, & Dewaele, 2018). With relation to
language teacher emotions, research has drawn heavily from other dis-
ciplines such as education, psychology, and sociology, with the latter
inspiring SLA scholars through Hochschild’s (1979, 1983) introduc-
tion of the groundbreaking concept of emotional labor. Hochschild
demonstrated that emotion labor efforts are tied to how service work-
ers’ job performances are evaluated, legitimated, and rewarded, even
though these efforts are rarely overtly acknowledged as labor. Hochs-
child additionally highlighted the importance of managing employee
emotions in accordance with organizationally desired emotions for the
sake of higher customer satisfaction, thus depicting emotion labor as
typically negative. However, SLA researchers have concluded that the
performance of emotion labor among language teachers has diverse
consequences for them—both negative, which might pose a threat to
their professional longevity (Cowie, 2011; King, 2016; King & Ng,
2018), and positive, thus enabling teachers to reap emotional rewards
(Loh & Liew, 2016; Miller & Gkonou, 2018).
The voices of scholars from within SLA and beyond thus suggest
that research into emotions and interdisciplinarity in the field is not
new, and that emotions play a fundamental role in teacher identities,
classroom practice, and teacher professionalization. Yet more nuanc-
ing is necessary, and there is still much that we do not know about
how emotions work in practice (Prior, 2019). Rather than categorizing
emotions according to their valence a priori (i.e., positive vs. negative),
as poststructuralists we contend that scholarly focus should consider
what emotions do and explore how emotions could be viewed from a
historical, cultural, contextual, and sociopolitical lens. In taking this
approach, we draw on Benesch’s (2017, 2018) poststructural approach
to language teacher emotions. Emotions thus are not viewed as indi-
vidual psychological phenomena nor as discrete affective states but
rather as feelings or affects experienced and performed in relation to
other people and particular situations—situations that are shaped by
local feeling rules. Feeling rules, a term developed by Hochschild
(1979), refers to the “conventions by which people judge whether
their feelings are appropriate in particular situations or not” (Benesch,
2017, p. 39). The feeling rules of schools and classrooms, though usu-
ally implicit and often only subconsciously recognized, nevertheless
shape what language teachers believe they should feel in their profes-
sional roles and how they should perform emotions. This orientation
to feeling rules crucially points to the role of power in constituting
which emotions are valued in schools and classrooms. For this reason,
we find education scholar Michalinos Zembylas’s (2003) definition of
teacher emotions particularly compelling. He contends that teacher

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emotions involve “matters of personal (private) dispositions or psycho-
logical qualities” as well as their “social and political experiences that
are constructed by how one’s work (in this case, the teaching) is orga-
nized and led” (p. 216). We find this workplace relational structuring
of emotions to be particularly important as we elaborate in this article
on how we understand emotional capital and its connection to emo-
tion labor and how these are mediated through reflective practice.

Emotional Capital and Teachers’ Capacity for Emotion Labor

In this article we draw on the notion of emotional capital in making

sense of our participants’ accounts of their emotional experiences and
efforts to control their emotions as language teachers. Attention to
language teachers’ emotional capital has only recently begun to be
addressed by language scholars (see Song, 2018), and we find that this
concept helps us understand how experienced teachers’ conscious,
reflective awareness of their ongoing struggles to manage their emo-
tions “appropriately” can lead to other desirable symbolic goods.
Though Bourdieu never used the term emotional capital, his influence
on this notion is clear. Much like the social and cultural forms of capi-
tal that Bourdieu (1986) conceptualized, emotional capital is under-
stood to develop over time, as an embodied capacity, within socially
constructed and regulated fields, and as part of one’s habitus. Like
economic capital, it can be exchanged for other forms of capital.
In exploring the role of emotions in teachers’ habitus (their socially
formed system of dispositions), Zembylas (2007, p. 444) contends that
we need to treat emotions as resources that can be “circulated, accu-
mulated and exchanged for other forms of capital.” For example, emo-
tional capital can be converted into social capital in the form of better
relationships with students or higher regard by one’s peers or adminis-
trators. It can likewise be transformed into greater cultural capital in
the form of enhanced professional confidence and “positive self-im-
age” (Song, 2018, p. 460). Such enhanced cultural competence can
empower teachers to advocate for themselves or their students or pur-
sue professional advancement. As with all forms of capital, teachers’
emotion-based knowledge and embodied capacity for emotional con-
trol is unequally distributed, as Song’s (2018, p. 462) study of nonna-
tive English language teachers demonstrated. Her study showed how
powerful nativist discourses that positioned such teachers as having
diminished authority on linguistic issues led to a “deep sense of inse-
curity” among the nonnative teachers. They often felt that they were
not recognized as equals with their colleagues who were native users
of English. The circulation and exchange of language teachers’

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emotional capital in schools and classrooms always occurs in power-
laden, often inequitable, socially inscribed contexts. Given the ideolog-
ically shaped contexts in which emotional capital forms, we argue that
it inevitably develops through and in relation to the feeling rules of
those contexts.
Benesch’s (2017, 2018) research focuses on the intersection of lan-
guage teachers’ emotion labor with unequal power relations, and par-
ticularly the kinds of “dissonance” teachers might experience in
navigating the feeling rules of their schools that conflict with their
own beliefs, values, and professional training (Benesch, 2017, p. 2).
For example, she examines the emotion labor language teachers
undertake in their struggles to resist or reinterpret problematic institu-
tional policies relating to plagiarism and student attendance as well as
instructional practices involving high-stakes literacy testing and
responding to student writing. These situations pitch less powerful
teachers against more powerful institutional policies and discourses.
Benesch does not, however, view teachers’ ensuing emotional struggles
simply as negative experiences to be overcome, but rather as “useful
signals . . . about whether current conditions are favorable or not,”
information that can then be used to guide teachers’ efforts at “collec-
tive action and educational reform” (Benesch, 2018, p. 61). She, in
fact, argues that emotions can be viewed as agents in themselves when
they provoke teachers to undertake emotion labor through resisting
inequitable policies and practices.
In this study, we expand the frame for the kind of emotion work
that can constitute emotion labor among language teachers by elicit-
ing more holistic accounts of teachers’ emotional experiences in their
everyday classroom teaching rather than focusing on particular institu-
tional practices. In thinking about how teachers work to develop an
“appropriate” system of dispositions or habitus, one that aligns with
the feeling rules of their professional contexts, we examine their strug-
gles to maintain emotional control—efforts that they believe are neces-
sary to perform their professional duties. Zembylas (2007, p. 447)
writes that feeling rules in school contexts “delineate a zone within
which certain emotions are permitted and others are not permitted,
and can be obeyed or broken, at varying costs.” He adds that such
norms “reflect power relations and thus are techniques for the disci-
pline of the habitus in emotional expression and communication
between teachers and students” (p. 447). Elsewhere Zembylas (2003,
p. 119) discusses the many kinds of emotional experiences that teach-
ers confront “on a daily basis,” noting that teachers are “urged and
incited” to learn to control feelings such as “anger, anxiety and vulner-
ability” and must learn instead to “express empathy, calmness and
kindness” in classrooms and among colleagues.

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It is the ongoing, daily, mundane struggles of language teachers to
bring their emotions in line with feeling rules when confronting chal-
lenging emotional situations that we focus on. We do not, as such,
focus on emotion labor exclusively as resistance to feeling rules but
include the emotion work teachers undertake as they struggle to align
with them. Though one might argue that this aligning work exhibits
conformity to power relations, it is important to recognize that such
work still is shaped and necessitated by power relations. We find that
as language teachers develop the capacity to perform the kinds of
emotions expected of them, they can gain emotional capital in their
professional context. It is also true that teachers often reproduce feel-
ing rules as they accumulate emotional capital (Edgington, 2016; Zem-
bylas, 2005, 2007). Developing emotional capital holds no guarantees
that teachers will resist social inequities. However, rather than treating
emotion management as universally desirable, as suggested in concepts
such as emotional intelligence, conceptualizing emotion labor—
whether as resistance to or as alignment with feeling rules—in terms
of emotional capital gives emphasis to the social regulation and return
value of particular kinds of emotion work. On this point, Yarrow
(2015, p. 354) contends that the “idea of emotional capital” enables
“emotions and emotional work to become visible as a distinct phe-
nomenon, economically and culturally.”
Most important, as Ward and McMurray (2016) have argued, emo-
tional capital enables individuals to persist in undertaking difficult
emotion labor. That is, the accumulation of emotional capital does
not diminish the need for teachers to struggle to conform to or resist
the “written or ‘unwritten’ rules of the field” (Edgington, 2016, p. 4),
but, as a resource developed in relation to the feeling rules of their
school contexts, it can be exchanged for an expanded capacity to work
through those struggles. It is for this reason that Ward and McMurray
view emotional capital as “the socially, culturally and economically
informed capacity to labour emotionally” (p. 92). Language teachers’
commitment to undertaking emotion labor often provokes reflection,
which can facilitate their development of emotional capital.

Reflective Practice on Emotion Labor and Emotional Capital

Sch€
on’s (1983) introduction of the concept of reflective practitioner
has revolutionized the way in which teacher reflection is theorized,
understood, and enacted. Specifically, Sch€
on moved beyond the classic
conceptualization of professional practice as being entirely or solely
rational and cognitive, contending that emotion and experiential
learning are powerful tools that can enrich the process of teacher

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reflection. At its most mundane level, reflection refers to the process of
“thinking about something” and “might happen ‘in the head’ or
through writing (e.g., diary writing) or talk (e.g., collaborative explora-
tory talk)” (Mann, 2016, pp. 7–8). It does, however, encompass both “in-
tellectual and affective activities” (Boud, Keogh, & Walker, 1985, p. 3) in
that emotions—particularly strong emotions—can influence the recall
of an event and skew how an event is interpreted; it is also likely that the
event itself unfolded in the way it did due, in part, to emotion. We have
discussed elsewhere (Gkonou & Miller, 2020) how emotionally charged
certain classroom episodes—so-called critical incidents (Tripp, 2012)—
can be and how emotions contribute to which (parts of) events are
recounted. Thus, it is not just the interpretation of the event according
to the feeling rules of the context that is influenced by emotion but also
an individual’s agentic efforts to act and respond to the event, both of
which responses are examined through reflective practice (Archer,
2007; Miller & Gkonou, 2018; Wolff & De Costa, 2017).
When reflection takes emotion into account, emotions can come to
be understood as socially, historically, relationally, and politically con-
stituted (Denzin, 1984; Schutz, Hong, Cross, & Osbon, 2006). In com-
menting specifically on the relational nature of emotions, Zembylas
(2014, p. 211) discussed the notion of “critical emotional reflexivity”
and argued that reflexive processes help to “legitimize or delegitimize
certain teaching practices” and also determine whether practices
should be reproduced or interrupted. It is worth noting that numer-
ous scholars have distinguished between reflection and reflexivity,
highlighting that the two terms are often confused or misinterpreted.
Finlay (2012, p. 317) suggests that “reflection can be defined as ‘think-
ing about’ something after the event. Reflexivity, in contrast, involves
an ongoing self-awareness” (italics in the original). Holmes (2010) cau-
tions that reflexivity is not about just calculating how satisfied or dissat-
isfied an individual is with a practice or aspect of their life—such as a
language lesson or a teacher’s classroom performance— but rather
what emotions such a practice brings and to what extent it fits or does
not fit with others’ emotions, thoughts, and actions. As Holmes suc-
cinctly puts it, “reflexivity is emotional and comparative and relies on
interpreting emotions” (p. 148). This is particularly salient in cases
where reflection is happening with other people—such as teachers
reflecting together with colleagues like in our study. Not only does
reflection benefit individuals in that they compare their emotions
about practice with colleagues and take action to improve current con-
ditions, but it can also circulate and reproduce a form of social capital
(Bourdieu, 1986), which stems from their appreciation of social rela-
tions, networks, and existing social structures (Cottingham, 2016; Zem-
bylas, 2007). For this reason, emotional experiences can be seen as

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opportunities for teachers to reflect on the influence of power rela-
tions and feeing rules on the emotions that they value and the disposi-
tions that they seek to avoid. As Zembylas points out, teachers need to
explore how they have been “taught to feel the world through an ideo-
logical lens” (italics in original) and develop the capacity to critique
many of their assumptions regarding “appropriate” emotions (p. 218).
The emotionality associated with reflection and reflexivity is also
underlined in writings in which the “emotional self” (Howe, 2008, p.
185) is depicted as an integral part of the professional self, and reflective
practice requires that practitioners “analyze what [they] think, feel, and
do, and then learn from the analysis” (Howe, 2009, p. 171; italics in origi-
nal) in order to inform their teaching. Learning through reflection does
not emanate simply from enacting professional work but also from evalu-
ating the emotions that this work has engendered in oneself and others
(Ferguson, 2018; Redmond, 2006), thus leading to higher levels of emo-
tional self-awareness and resilience in the face of struggling to display
appropriate emotions in front of students and/or colleagues, especially
in other-oriented professions such as teaching (Grant & Kinman, 2014).
With relation to teachers who have been in the profession long enough
—such as the ones in our study—reflection and action can facilitate the
process of learning how to manipulate and even modulate their emo-
tions to project the emotional equipoise expected from them in their
professional roles. Reflection can be even more beneficial for teachers
when it is turned into social practice among them (i.e., teachers reflect
together with colleagues on emotion-related experiences that are con-
cerning them), on feeling rules and decisions that they may have to
resist or follow, or on matters relating to students that they would other-
wise be unsure of how to tackle.
In analyzing the language teacher interview accounts, we formulated
three research questions:
1. How do the participating teachers orient to feeling rules?
2. How does emotion labor enable teachers to develop emotional
capital?
3. How does teacher reflection contribute toward developing emo-
tional capital?

METHODOLOGY

Context and Participants

The participants in this study were English language teachers work-
ing in tertiary education programs in the United States and United

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Kingdom and who were invited to participate in a larger study that
focused on language teacher emotions and agency (Miller & Gkonou,
2018). For the first phase of the larger study, 30 teachers from six pro-
grams—three in the United States and three in the United Kingdom
—completed an anonymous online questionnaire. Of these, 25 teach-
ers took part in follow-up, semistructured interviews with the
researcher who was based in the same country as them. This study
draws only on the interview accounts provided by these 25 teachers.
Table 1 provides a summary of the demographic information for the
participating teacher interviewees.

Data Collection Process

We conducted semistructured interviews with the participating

teachers, most of which took place on university premises. Due to tim-
ing issues and inability to travel, 10 interviews were conducted via
Skype. In line with our poststructural approach to researching emo-
tions, we regard interviews as meaning-making encounters in which
knowledge is socially constructed. When scripting the questions for
our interview guide, we sought to align them “to the theoretical con-
ceptions of the research topic” (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2015, p. 157)
and so drew on key readings on the topic of teacher emotions. We
crafted questions that would enable us to find out as much as possible
about each interviewee’s background, perspectives, and experience
with emotions while teaching. The resulting interview guide included
11 questions that concentrated on teachers’ responsibilities in their
current positions, aspects of their teaching that they enjoyed the most
or least, strategies for managing their emotions while teaching, the
extent to which emotion management was easy or difficult for them,
issues related to teacher autonomy, job-related stress, and advice on

TABLE 1
Demographic Information of Teacher Participants

Location United States: 15

United Kingdom: 10
Gender Female: 19
Male: 6
Prefer not to disclose: 0
Full-time/part-time Full-time: 20
Part-time: 5
Highest academic qualifications MA: 20
PhD: 5
Language teaching certification: 10
Years of teaching experience Mean: 16.4 (min = 2, max = 45)

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emotion management for newly qualified teachers and colleagues.
Although the interview guide helped us focus on the topics of interest
to us, we allowed interviewees to speak freely and encouraged new
topics to emerge organically in the interview conversations. The inter-
view questions—albeit not intended to elicit narratives of emotional
history per se—allowed interviewees to share experiences, deliberate,
and tell past stories to a listener who showed interest (i.e., the inter-
viewer). Such reflection might not have taken place if we had not
asked teachers these specific interview questions. In other words,
although, as argued earlier, reflection encompasses both cognitive and
affective dimensions, in the case of the present study the latter is likely
to have been accentuated in response to our interview questions.
Reflecting on the interview conversations ourselves and acknowledging
the consequential role of interviewers (Roulston, 2016), we did not
observe differences in the amount of disclosure and type of reflection
undertaken by teachers between what Mann (2016) classes as acquain-
tance interviews (i.e., the research participant is known to the
researcher) and interviews with teachers whom we met for the first
time on the day of the interview.
The average length of the interviews was 33 minutes, with some of
them lasting up to an hour. Although there were no questions that
specifically addressed the topics of emotion labor or emotional capital,
we did specifically ask them about how they managed their emotions.
Upon rereading the interview transcripts numerous times, we were
struck by the salience and recurrence of teacher references to how
much they felt they had learned about working through difficult emo-
tional situations throughout the course of their teaching and also by
their frequent references to reflection in enabling that emotion labor.
We therefore decided to examine how they characterized the role that
emotion management—which we here regard as emotion labor for the
reasons outlined in the literature review and as evidenced later in our
Findings section—played in the emotional texture of their teaching
practice.

Data Analysis

The 25 interviews were transcribed verbatim, resulting in a data cor-

pus totaling 99,925 words. The corpus was first analyzed using the
qualitative data management software Atlas.ti. However, we found it
more useful to develop deep familiarity with the interviews by reading
the transcripts multiple times. This iterative engagement allowed us to
identify salient themes inductively, as part of an “organic and flexible
process” of qualitative thematic analysis (Terry, Hayfield, Clarke, &

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Braun, 2017, p. 20). Each researcher analyzed the data separately, pro-
ducing a draft of codes and memo writing associated with relevant
excerpts. In coding the data, we were interested in teachers’ subjective
experiences and personal histories and in how they talked about their
emotion labor and gave implicit indications of accumulating emo-
tional capital. All of these accounts were guided by the interview guide
and the additional questions that we felt were necessary to ask depend-
ing on the direction each individual interview took. Thus, we coded
the interview data mainly on the basis of teachers’ subjective accounts
of their emotional experiences without, however, approaching each
interview as an individual case study. We then consulted together to
refine the codes and develop the themes that aligned with our interest
in language teachers’ emotion labor and emotional capital. The reflex-
ivity that teachers exhibited during the interview activity allowed us to
explore the emotional self-awareness that they had gained throughout
the years and their perceptions of good language teachers as necessar-
ily including being good emotional managers while often undertaking
emotion labor too. Our analysis of the emotional capital that they had
gained throughout their careers is illustrated in more detail in the dis-
cussion of the findings that follows.

FINDINGS
“Being Professional”: Orienting to Feeling Rules

Each of the teachers in our study demonstrated awareness of emo-

tion norms in their classrooms and institutional contexts, particularly
in regard to the need to create momentary distancing, both physical
and emotional, from challenging situations (see also Miller & Gkonou,
2018). In their descriptions of this intentional emotional distancing
from challenging moments, roughly one-third of the teachers (9 of
25) explicitly used the word professional. That said, “being professional”
was not explicitly defined (nor did we as interviewers follow up on
what they meant); rather, the teachers seemed to orient to this notion
as common sensical—that is, everyone knows what “being profes-
sional” means in a classroom context. However, we can see in the
selected excerpts below that teachers’ comments about “being profes-
sional” include descriptors such as not telling students anything they
“shouldn’t be hearing . . . anything that is not appropriate,” not get-
ting “overexcited,” “contain[ing] emotions,” “keeping a firm track of
how you are behaving,” “controlling emotions,” and “trying not to get
too personally involved.” The teachers’ comments provided here were

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produced in response to the interviewer’s question regarding what
advice they would give to novice teachers on dealing with emotions:
Excerpt 1

I would say they [new language teachers] should be honest in terms of

their relationship with their students and, therefore, in a sense, in
terms of their emotions. Honest but still professional. I don’t mean
going and telling them something that students shouldn’t be hearing.
. . . So I’d say be honest, while at the same time being professional,
obviously. Not telling the students anything that is not appropriate.
(T16)

Excerpt 2

If somebody got so overexcited, just naturally that it verged on the

unprofessional, then I think that would be a case for trying to contain
emotions. But I suppose, with regard to, yeah. I think professionalism
is the guide really, what you are doing in the classroom. . . . You can’t
allow anything, your personal beliefs or personal emotions to override
your professional values or to compromise your professional values in
any way. So I think keeping, you know, keeping a firm track of how
you are behaving within the class is very important . . . you know,
maybe trying not to get too personally involved but still be professional.
(T20)

Importantly, as the language teachers in our study provided

accounts of “being professional,” none of them advocated showing no
emotions but rather appeared to strive for moderated displays of emo-
tions, a toning down of both excitement and frustration. As T16 in
Excerpt 1 suggests, for her “being professional” is equated with a kind
of middle ground in which teachers can be “honest” about their emo-
tions with their students while still “being professional” and being “ap-
propriate.”
More important, T20 in Excerpt 2 describes the implicit feeling
rules of professionalism as a “guide” for what one does in the class-
room and indicates that controlling one’s personal beliefs and emo-
tions is part of one’s professional values. The notion of beliefs and
values points to shared discourses or ideologies. In this way, teachers’
comments regarding the need to constantly work at controlling their
emotions indicate “wider regimes of control” (Ward & McMurray,
2016, p. 50). Zembylas (2005, p. 213) argues that teachers’ self-knowl-
edge and self-regulation work “owes something to the emotion

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discourses, pedagogical practices, professional codes, and power rela-
tions in teaching.” It is true that the discourses that teachers value can
lead to inequitable positioning of students and/or teachers (Song,
2018). However, they also can function as “regimes of thought,
through which teachers can accord significance to aspects of them-
selves and their emotional experiences” (Zembylas, 2005, p. 213).
In showing awareness of the need to be professional and giving
accounts of enacting emotional control, the teachers in our study
point to their accumulating emotional capital. Cottingham (2017, p.
273) describes teachers’ emotional capital as knowledge of local emo-
tion norms along with the resources or capacity to meet “the practical
and interactional demands” of particular situations. Likewise, Yarrow
(2015, p. 355) notes that teachers’ emotional capital develops from a
“lifetime of practices and experiences . . . rather than emerging spon-
taneously from them.” We see in the selected excerpts introduced in
this section that being professional through practicing emotional con-
trol appears to index an emotional resource, what we view as emo-
tional capital, that requires but also enables ongoing emotion labor as
well as conscious reflection, as we discuss in the following section.

Emotional Capital Mediated Through Reflective Practice

Nearly all of the participating teachers in our study (24 out of 25)
highlighted the importance of reflection in controlling their own emo-
tions, becoming more self-aware emotionally, and thereby enhancing
their classroom practice. They frequently constructed their reflection
activity as developing in moments of emotional struggle, such as when
feeling caught between their sense of needing to align with institu-
tional norms but also needing to attend to students’ resulting emo-
tional distress as shown in Excerpt 3 below. This response by T2 was
provided in answer to the interviewer’s question regarding what she
does to minimize difficult emotions (“guilt” had been identified earlier
as one of the emotions this teacher contended with). Here T2
describes situations when students’ language learning outcomes do
not meet institutionally mandated benchmarks of performance, which
then require her to inform the students that they will not be pro-
moted to a higher level. This kind of information is often highly con-
sequential for students in these university language programs because
it can significantly delay their matriculation to the university or pro-
long the time required to complete their university degrees if they are
already matriculated. As such, receiving such news often provokes
“hurt faces” and “tears” and leaves the interviewee sometimes in tears
herself and wondering, “What do I do with that?”

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Excerpt 3

I think with guilt, I have to kind of analyze it. Many times in my career
I sat there feeling really, really uncomfortable telling the students
something but nevertheless, “I cannot promote you to the next level.
You’re not ready to go. I can’t write a letter in favor of you entering
university right now because I really can’t do it.” So those kinds of
things. Their hurt faces, their tears, I’ve had tears. What do I do with
that? I have to think it through. Am I just being pompous and throw-
ing my power around, what little I have? And the answer is no. I never
try to step on someone because I can, and it helps, but it doesn’t mean
I’m not affected by tears. . . . Once you keep focusing on what’s best
for student learning, that really helps to minimize the stress.
(T2)
This teacher, like most in our study, is highly experienced. As she
indicates here, she has confronted the situation she describes “many
times in [her] career.” Although she is still “affected” by students’
tears, the teacher indicates that “think[ing] it through” allows her to
come to a resolution to focus on “what’s best for student learning,”
which helps to “minimize the stress” of such situations. It seems that
working through situations like this continues to require emotion
labor on her part, but through reflective activity and repeated engage-
ment with such challenging moments (i.e., “you keep focusing on what’s
best for student learning”), she has learned to work through her own
feelings of discomfort and guilt as well as students’ tears. In this way,
we find that T2’s emotion labor contributes to the development of
emotional capital, an emotional resource that enables her to continue
teaching (now for more than 30 years) and find ways to address stu-
dents’ needs.
Similar to T2, other teachers in our study frequently referred to
their past experiences with emotionally challenging situations as mate-
rial for reflection in response to interviewers’ questions regarding the
strategies they use to manage their emotions. In one such case, a lan-
guage teacher described a situation from her early days as a language
teacher. She had organized a prewriting activity by posting categories
of influential people around the classroom (heroes, historical figures,
etc.) and then asked students to post their ideas of influential people
whom they could write about under each category. One student
posted Hitler as one of the historical figures he most admired. The
teacher noted that at the time she did not know whether she should
“ignore it or address it” and wondered what she should say or do. She
then indicated that she addressed the situation “in a way [she]
thought was appropriate” and added that she still reflects back on that

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moment and draws “on that experience for confidence” (T8). Another
teacher described having to deal with a “hostile” student and the “anx-
iety” that the situation provoked for her because she felt that the stu-
dent upset “the dynamics with the classroom” and negatively affected
all of the students. She indicated that she has learned the need to “re-
view” such “negative” situations. Her response continues in Excerpt 4:
Excerpt 4

If it’s a negative, then I think it would—then I would have to review

what I have done, or I would have to have a think about if it’s a partic-
ular problem with a particular student. I’d have to think about, “Right,
how am I going to deal with it? Should I speak to the student individu-
ally? What will I say?” So maybe a little forward planning or just think-
ing around it, you know. So I try to go away from it and have a think.
It’s not always done here. It’s often done when I am driving home. I
will be thinking, returning over my mind, and I think, “Oh, all right, I
will try that.” . . . So that’s how I do it. I was thinking it through at the
end of the day.
(T18

T18 describes her reflective activity as often occurring on her drive

home from the university and indicates that while turning things over
in her mind, she comes to a decision about what to do (“Oh, all right,
I will try that”). She also suggests that this is an ongoing process that
she undertakes (“So that’s how I do it”).
It seems that teachers’ conscious reflection on their emotion labor
over years of teaching practice provided them with “a form of embod-
ied cultural capital” in terms of a “configuration of emotion-based
knowledge, skills and capacities” (Cottingham, 2017, p. 273). One tea-
cher referred to her “backlog of experience” that now allows her to
deal with emotionally challenging situations much more easily. She
laughed as she noted that a situation such as when a student turns in
a late assignment is “unfortunate, but it’s nothing really” for her to
stress over (T5). In each of the above cases, the teachers demonstrated
that the emotion labor that was required for them to work with stu-
dents whom they regarded as challenging or difficult was made possi-
ble, in part, through reflective activity during which they could think
about appropriate plans of action. Such reflective activity points to
their accumulating emotional capital. Much as Ward and McMurray
(2016, p. 108) found in their studies of individuals across different
professions, for these language teachers “emotional labour is both a
source and a product of the emotional capital that individuals build

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over a lifetime.” That is, although these teachers continue to confront
emotionally challenging situations, they positioned themselves as hav-
ing developed the emotional capacity to continue to address such situ-
ations—through undertaking yet more emotion labor. Their
developing emotional capital does not lead to a triumph over difficult
emotions, but it does seem to provide them with the resources neces-
sary to continue to thrive as language teachers.
Finally, we found that a particularly salient aspect of the interview
narratives was that reflection was described as most helpful when it
would occur in collaboration with colleagues. One teacher, for exam-
ple, described how “helpful” and “supportive” she finds speaking to
her colleagues about difficult issues. She commented on the positive
effects of meeting regularly with a colleague for lunch so that they
“could just speak to each other, just around emotions about the stu-
dents” (T16). Another noted that “just being able to talk about it and
share experiences [with your colleagues] goes a long way with process-
ing your situation, thinking about what choices you have, what you
can do about it” (T6). In describing collegiality and the process of
reflecting with colleagues and through colleagues’ similar experiences,
teachers used the words friendships, relationships, trust, and respect. These
were depicted as important qualities to survive “in a particularly stress-
ful environment” (T7) and to deal effectively with “some kind of an
issue” (T13), which were also found in previous research to sustain
quality interpersonal relationships in the workplace and protect tea-
cher well-being (Brackett, Palomera, Mojsa-Kaja, Reyes, & Salovey,
2010; Gkonou & Mercer, 2017).
We, however, view these supportive relationships as forms of
acquired social capital for the teachers in our study. For example,
when asked what advice she would want to give to new teachers, T18
discusses the importance of “finding perspective” through reaching
out to colleagues (Excerpt 5). She urges new teachers to “give it [a dif-
ficult emotional situation] to somebody and get them to know” about
it. She further recommends that new teachers learn how other, pre-
sumably more experienced, teachers handle such situations by observ-
ing them in the classroom.
Excerpt 5

So that would be my main advice, I think, to a new teacher, because

that’s how they are going to manage their own emotions. Don’t carry it
[fear] in, give it to somebody and get them to know. . . . It’s not a
mountain, it’s a molehill, and then recognize that if that is an area that
is concerning you, then go with somebody and observe them with that
as your item for its part of the observation. So then you’ve got, then

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you’ve got that, you’ve closed that, that complete circle. And then you
can decide what you want to do with it. You can put it to one side or
you can build on it. Yeah.
(T18)
In this excerpt, T18 treats new teachers’ developing awareness of
how to deal with emotionally challenging situations as a resource,
something to “build” on. It is cast, implicitly, as a form of capital that
can be converted into other desirable symbolic goods.
These accounts of working through emotionally difficult situations
by talking about and reflecting on them with colleagues demonstrate
how as language teachers develop emotional capital they also can gain
greater social and cultural capital. Interestingly, in response to the
interviewer’s question regarding how much autonomy she feels she
has in making pedagogical decisions, T6 in Excerpt 6 emphasizes the
ongoing collective reflection activity among the language teachers in
her program. She indicates that it allows them to “tackle” their teach-
ing “professionally” and enables them to “push” each other to “plan,
attend, and present at conferences.” She further notes that this collec-
tive reflection work feels “very energizing,” so when she does feel “un-
happy” about “an instance in the classroom,” she does not feel
“powerless” but is rather “empowered to seek support and to make
changes quickly.”
Excerpt 6

We do a lot of reflecting as a faculty, videotaping observations, we’re

thinking about what we’re doing, trying to talk about teaching as a
craft, tackling it professionally or articulate what’s happening, how we
think about what’s happening, how we change what’s happening, we
push each other to plan, attend, and present at conferences, so I think
in the environment, this autonomy is very energizing . . . so if there’s
an instance in the classroom that I’m unhappy about, I don’t feel pow-
erless, I feel empowered to seek support and to make changes quickly.
(T6)
The forms of capital described here point to teachers feeling sup-
ported and empowered (social capital), feeling confident in furthering
their professional identities through improving their teaching practices
and presenting at conferences (cultural capital), and feeling energized
rather than unhappy (emotional capital). It seems that as teachers
undertake (collective) reflective activity, they often come to better
understand emotionally difficult situations, develop strategies for
addressing them, which in turn enables them to continue to under-
take emotion labor, pointing to the “generative capacity of emotional

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capital” (Ward & McMurray, 2016, p. 105). This approach aligns with
Edgington’s (2016, p. 5) understanding regarding how our “past
choices, experiences, hopes and expectations that we bring with us to
every situation and relationship, and which interact together, form
what Bourdieu called habitus and provides an opportunity for action,
or operationalizing capital” (italics added).

DISCUSSION

In this article we have attempted to advance our understanding of

what language teacher emotions do in actual practice by drawing on
instances of teachers’ conscious use of reflection as a resource that
contributes to increased emotional awareness and capacity to respond
to what is happening in class. Throughout this process, teachers
demonstrated the impact of implicit feeling rules on their practice
and in undertaking emotion labor to align with norms such as “being
professional.” In considering these accounts of emotion labor, of par-
ticular interest is T20’s comment in Excerpt 2 that she finds “profes-
sionalism is the guide really.” Emotion labor can accrue as emotional
capital, over time, equipping teachers with the capacity to reflect on
and address emotionally challenging situations in ways they believe are
appropriate.
For the teachers in our study, reflection was conducted in writing,
in teacher discussion groups, or through lesson observations. It also
often involved very informal reflective practices such as reconsidering
a classroom event on the way home after work. However, on all of
these occasions, reflection incorporated a robust affective dimension,
which we see as further contributing to teachers’ emotional capital.
Teachers admitted to thinking carefully about their emotions—and
also those of their learners—and, through their accumulated emo-
tional experiences and emotional capital, they learned about how
emotions function and how they could be managed. T19 specifically
advocated that such practices could be particularly insightful for new
teachers, who could take their concerns to someone else and observe
what they do; this way they could “build” on their concerns and decide
how to address them. Importantly, the participating teachers indicated
that reflection works best when it takes place in groups and through
opportunities to connect and network with others, processes that point
to how emotional capital can be developed and converted into social
and cultural capital (Cottingham, 2016; Song, 2018). Teachers benefit-
ted from individual reflection that enabled them to gain emotional
capital through learning how to manage their emotions in line with

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“being professional,” but they also reflected in groups, a practice that
fostered collaboration, solidarity, and positive group dynamics.
Reflection requires interpreting one’s own and others’ emotions
but also, perhaps most importantly, recognizing and sometimes chal-
lenging emotional schemas, thus giving possibilities to invoke change
in teaching practices (Edwards & Thomas, 2010). Reflection is not just
about reconsidering and assessing experiences and what is being done,
but also rethinking long-held values, beliefs, and practices (Mezirow,
1990). Holmes (2010, p. 143) suggests that reflexivity, with its more
self-oriented dimension, is an “achievement” that can enable individu-
als “to exercise some control and to be the kind of person that they
want to be, within the roles available to them” (italics added). Thus, on
the one hand, teachers can reflect on how and to what extent they
should tweak or adapt their emotions depending on what is happen-
ing at any given moment in time in their settings (Wetherell, 2012);
on the other hand, “the roles [that are] available to them” (Holmes,
2010, p. 143) and the feeling rules of their organization can serve as
points of departure for reflection that provoke “moral questions” and
responses to how emotions are entangled with power relations (Zem-
bylas, 2014, p. 214). Developing emotional capital to continue under-
taking the emotionally challenging work of teaching thus invites
scrutiny.
The “positive” outcomes of emotion labor that lead to emotional
capital often accrue when teachers align with institutional feeling
rules. Benesch (2017, 2018) has argued that there are many times
when feeling rules need to be resisted. Wetherell (2012) furthermore
argues that scholars need to consider “the unevenness of affective
practices” such as by asking, “How are practices clumped, who get to
do what when? . . . Who is emotionally privileged, who is emotionally
disadvantaged and what does this privilege and disadvantage look
like?” (p. 17). Song’s (2018) discussion of diminished emotional capi-
tal among “nonnative” teachers of English who often lack confidence
in their professional capacities when compared to their “native” coun-
terparts shows very clearly that emotional resources among language
teachers can be distributed unequally due to socially and ideologically
generated feeling rules rather than individual psychologies. The path-
way toward developing greater emotional capital through reflection
and emotion labor will undoubtedly be experienced differently by
teachers in more precarious positions, such as part-time teachers or
teachers who have not yet been granted permanency in their institu-
tions. Given this ambiguous potential of emotional capital, we urge
language teachers and teacher educators to critique, contextualize,
and practice reflexivity in relation to these concepts. Emotion labor
and feeling rules are not always bad and emotional capital is not

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always good, but as concepts they can function as framing devices that
allow us to better understand the social constitution and emotional
shaping of language teacher practice and identity.

CONCLUSION

Our present study shows how emotion labor can contribute to emo-
tional capital and the important role that teacher reflection can play
in developing that capacity as well as social and cultural capital. We
are cognizant of the fact that our study constitutes one of the very few
attempts to discuss emotional capital within TESOL research and prac-
tice (see also Song, 2018), thus showing that research into this concept
is still in its infancy. As such, more studies are needed to allow for
more in-depth understandings of emotional capital across settings and
among teachers with differential levels of teaching experience. Addi-
tionally, in our study, language teachers’ reflexive comments on their
emotion labor and emotional capital were produced in response to
questions that were not targeting these topics per se. Although we
acknowledge the cross-sectional nature of our collected data, we keenly
encourage researchers to approach reflection more holistically and
longitudinally, by considering its affective dimension and exploring
how it contributes toward changing teacher practices and experiences
of emotions. We have also come to realize that the way reflection is
taught in teacher education programs often conspicuously excludes
emotional practices for the sake of technical, “hard” skills, despite
emotions being so central in teacher self-awareness and practice after
teacher training. Teacher education curricula could thus include
reflective practices that would encourage teachers to analyze what
emotions do, how they are performed and dealt with in light of their
struggle for displaying “appropriate” emotions in the workplace, how
they can potentially enhance future practice, and how emotional capi-
tal can be achieved through reflecting individually and with others
given the intra- and interpersonal character of emotions. Self- and col-
laborative reflection could be explicitly taught in teacher education
programs by highlighting their value and promoting reflection in ways
other than the traditional, writing-based approach to reflection. We
learned from the teachers participating in this study that open and
candid reflective conversations about their emotion-related experi-
ences facilitated their gaining of emotional capital. Finally, raising
awareness of emotion labor and helping teachers acknowledge the
omnipresence of organizational feeling rules in everyday teaching
practice through reviewing case studies of other teachers—with

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differential levels of experience and holding a range of roles in their
positions—should be incorporated into teacher education programs.

THE AUTHORS

Christina Gkonou is an associate professor of TESOL and MA TESOL programme

leader in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex.
Her research explores language anxiety and how emotions contribute toward
shaping language teacher identities and teacher professionalization. She has pub-
lished extensively in academic journals and edited collections.

Elizabeth R. Miller is a professor in the English Department at the University of

North Carolina at Charlotte. Her early research focused on identity, ideology,
power, and agency among adult immigrant learners of English in the United
States. More recently, her work has focused on emotion labor and agency among
language teachers.

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