Caring is pedagogy: Foreign language teachers’ emotion labor in crisis

Abstract

While the shift to remote teaching at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was experienced across all sectors of higher education, university-level foreign language teachers were impacted in particular ways. Interpersonal communication, such as discussion of students’ daily lives and their feelings, is integral to language classroom discourse. The decreases in foreign language enrollments and threats to programs the in U.S. in recent decades have also connected emotion labor to other professional discourses of relevance to language educators, namely those related to recruitment and retention. What has been called “teaching-as-caring” is thus central to language teachers’ work (e.g., Miller & Gkonou, 2018 & 2021).  The collective and aggregate crises of the COVID pandemic provide a complex context for studying questions of how professional imperatives to enact these forms of emotion labor are experienced by teachers of languages other than English. This interview-based study thus examines the experiences of university language instructors during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak. The participants were 19 educators of various languages at institutions of higher education across the U.S. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed qualitatively. Findings reveal the salience of three interconnected feeling rules. The participants routinely enacted and navigated emotion labor as institutionalized and internalized expectations for maintaining personal contact with students, creating a sense of community, and regulating student feelings in ways that emerged from and extended beyond practices directly related to language teaching. The article concludes with implications for expanding the scope of research on emotion labor in language teaching and for the kinds of professional support offered to both pre- and in-service educators.

Introduction

Situated in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study was motivated by what we perceived as an imperative to capture the “collective memories of the extraordinary” (Mills, 2020, p. 159) in the midst of a global health crisis. The campus closures in spring 2020 and move to remote teaching for much of the subsequent academic year will inevitably become part of the “history-in-person” of a whole cross-generational swathe of language educators. At the same time, the (hopefully) unique and heightened context of the current pandemic also enabled us to pay attention to aspects of language teachers’ work and identities that are often neglected, specifically, the affective dimensions of language education. A growing body of scholarship that pre-dates the pandemic reminds us that these emotional aspects of teaching, including care, concern, and personal rapport, are integral to language teaching; language teachers not only experience emotions in relation to their professional work, but they also have to routinely reinterpret implicit and explicit institutional rules about how they should feel (i.e., the feeling rules) and how they should perform affect vis-a-vis their students. Emotion labor in teaching is often framed not as such but as “ethical codes, professional techniques, and specialized pedagogical knowledge” (Zembylas, 2002, p. 52), which further connect to broader discourses of what it means to be a good teacher. By focusing on a moment in which the emotional labor of teaching was brought to the fore, this article considers the feeling rules that teachers associated with their roles as collegiate teachers of languages other than English (LOTEs) and how they made sense of these feeling rules as they strived to support their students during the pandemic.

In what follows, we begin by situating this research within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and providing an overview of research relating to emotion labor and specifically their connections to language teaching. After a description of the data generation process and coding, we focus on how the participants conceptualized emotion labor as it relates to the often-unstated feeling rules that guided their understandings of what it meaning to be good language teachers (de Costa & Norton, 2017). Finally, we discuss implications of this study for future research on the emotionality of language education and for the kinds of professional support needed by teachers of LOTEs today.

Literature review/theoretical framework

L2 teaching during the covid pandemic

Research articles on language teaching in the pandemic began to appear rapidly in 2020 and 2021. Many of these early publications investigated technological aspects of remote teaching (e.g., Ross & DiSalvo, 2020), and teacher perceptions and beliefs related to online teaching that might influence that practice (e.g., Li, Xu, Deifell & Angus, 2021; Moser, Wei & Brenner, 2021). Taking a more critical bent, González-Lloret's (2020) state-of-the-discourse article on collaborative tasks for online language teaching cautioned against the onslaught of digital tools being offered to teachers; most of these tools, she argued, do not address the specific need within language education to encourage “collaborative dialog” (González-Lloret, 2020, p. 261), that is, meaning-focused and relates directly to learners’ real-world experiences. This same concern is echoed in several of the testimonials from L2 educators included in the 2020 issue of Second Language Research and Practice (SLRP) (e.g., Azaz, 2020; Lord, 2020; Mills, 2020; Rossomondo, 2020; Urlaub, 2020). As van Deusen Scholl (2020) described, language educators, because of the nature of their field, felt particular pressure to “find ways to continue a high degree of interactivity in their classes, create opportunities for student engagement in a distributed learning environment, and prepare sufficient activities and materials for their daily classes” (p. 144). Rillard (2020) relatedly noted the role that language classes potentially played in the emotional well-being of students: “for some students, our daily language class was the only class that was taking place synchronously and where they got to engage with their peers, and the only place they had to go to on a daily basis” (p. 180).

A few of the early empirical studies on language teaching and learning during the pandemic do focus on the more affective dimensions of the experience, often in relation to the circumstances of remote education. For example, Li et al.'s (2021) study of teacher intentions about online language education post-pandemic found that stress related to emergency remote language teaching was a strong predictor of negative self-confidence about future online teaching. Maican and Cocorada's (2021) survey-based study examined students’ self-reported behaviors, emotions, and perceptions regarding online foreign language teaching during the pandemic, and it also found that the need to grapple with new technologies was a major stressor for many students, and so was the lack of interaction with peers and teachers. Based on their findings, the authors call upon educators to encourage students to “stimulate positive activating emotions and increase their wellbeing” (p. 17). These statements point to the salience of extreme emotions in a moment of crisis, as well as the relative roles language teachers and students are expected to play in negotiating affect inside and to an extent outside the classroom. MacIntyre, Gregersen and Mercer (2020) took a more explicit approach to affect and language teaching by examining language teachers’ coping mechanisms during the conversion to online teaching in the early months of the pandemic, and their findings noted that teacher stress can negatively impact student learning, which lead them to also conclude that “being a teacher is stressful at the best of times” and “learning how to cope with the stress is therefore an invaluable skill…” (p. 12).

In each of these studies, teachers’ responsibility for both their own affect and that of their students is assumed, and the social and institutional expectations through which educators make sense of their work and organize their emotions accordingly is largely taken for granted (see Benesch, 2017). These institutionalized, often internalized expectations are the focus of a body of work clustered around the concept of emotion labor, which has in recent years expanded to include studies on second language teachers. The next two sections take up these discussions and consider the central role that emotion labor has come to play in language education, before turning to the study at hand to examine the specific context of the COVID pandemic.

Emotion labor and second language teaching

Emotion labor and professional identity in education

The concept of emotion(al) labor was initially proposed by sociologist Hochschild (1979) to capture how workers in certain sectors of labor manage emotions in order to (re)negotiate their sense of self, manage social interactions, and/or make sense of social structures on the job.3 These jobs typically involve face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact between individuals (p. 102). What Hochschild (1979, 2012, [1983]) refers to as emotion(al) labor includes explicit and tacit feeling rules, which compel people in certain jobs to align with the feeling display expectations of the organization and/or profession they work within (Hochschild, 2012 [1983], p. 68), while also attempting to induce or inhibit certain feelings in others. For example, in The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling, Hochschild (2012 [1983]) provides an analysis of the relationship between professional expectations of emotion labor and institutionalized ideologies (e.g., consumerism) in service jobs where the feelings evoked in the consumers are an important part of what is being bought and sold. Because emotion(al) labor in Hochschild's model is fundamentally social and ideological (and not strictly or even primarily psychological), it needs to be understood in relation to the complexity of professional identity and how it may intersect with other dimensions, such as gender, class, and race (Hochschild, 2012 [1983], p. 11 & 105–106). Hochschild further argued that emotion(al) labor is inextricable from an individual's sense of self; when people identify with the feelings they are asked to display in their jobs, they feel genuine and when they are expected to change what they feel or feign, they can experience estrangement and alienation from their work.

A body of more recent work has built upon this foundation to look at the role of emotions in teachers’ professional practice (e.g., Hargreaves, 2000; Nias, 1996). In connection with poststructuralist theorizations of identity, some education scholars have shared Hochschild's view that emotion labor is connected to an individual's sense of self within the multifaceted socio-political structures, while also critiquing her emphasis on the authenticity or genuineness of certain emotions (e.g., Benesch, 2017; Zembylas, 2003 & 2005). Within these frameworks, identity is understood as dynamically constituted in relation to other social actors and the contexts, ideologies, and power structures at play (see de Costa & Norton, 2017; Miller, 2020), and thus emotional affinities, their expressions, and the meanings teachers attach to those in the work place (how we should feel and how the students should feel) can be a key way of making sense of who we are professionally (what kind of teacher we are) (Song, 2016). In the last decade, scholars have begun to argue that emotional components deserve greater attention within teacher identity research (e.g., de Costa & Norton, 2017), because a “teacher's identity is constituted in relation to the emotional rules in the context in which she/he teaches” (Zembylas, 2005, p. 935).

Historically, emotions have been neglected, regulated, and even suppressed at all levels of education and educational research (Boler, 1999). It is only over the last two decades, alongside a general affective turn in the social and human sciences (Pavlenko, 2013), that the affective dimension of teaching have developed into a defined research area within education studies, including language teaching (e.g., Benesch, 2019; Hargreaves, 2000, 2001; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). Teaching practice involves the careful coordination of feelings. Bodenheimer and Shuster (2020) summarize the particularities of teacher emotional labor, writing “in their relationships with students, they are expected to demonstrate warmth on the one hand (e.g., showing encouragement and empathy to promote student learning and wellbeing), and an objective emotional neutrality on the other (e.g., impartiality in terms of assessment and evaluation)” (p. 64). Moreover, scholarship on teacher identity has also shown that emotionality is integral to teachers’ professional identities as being caring and/or kind (see Gholami, 2011; Isenbarger & Zembylas, 2006; Jones & Kessler, 2020; O'Connor, 2008). While emotion labor is essential to tertiary education at large (e.g., Waldbuesser, Rubinsky & Titsworth, 2021), studies from Koster (2011) and O'Connor (2008) have suggested that the pressures for caring behavior and emotion labor may be more heightened in some fields than others; based on their respective studies of undergraduate gender studies and secondary school humanities teaching, these scholars illustrate that humanistic fields of study call for different kinds of emotional work because they address and even critique long-held ideas students may have about their own identities – an aspect which could be extrapolated to the context of language learning (see Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004).

Studies from the broader field of education by Cowie (2011) and Zembylas (2005) show that emotion labor can have positive effects for teachers, for example by enabling them to responsively co-construct learning activities based on their perceptions of student feelings such as boredom or frustration and by promoting a sense of professional satisfaction; however, many of the studies to date highlight the tensions that can arise as teachers navigate feeling rules. Miller and Gkonou (2018) argue that there can also be a tendency to conflate care with emotion labor in language education, which can make it difficult for teachers to maintain critical distance vis-a-vis the social and political pressures that shape their work as teachers (p. 56). This in turn can make it more difficult for teachers to question especially those more tacit feeling rules that discursively shape what it means to be a good teacher. In her research in ESL teaching, Benesch (2017) illustrates that tensions can also arise between institutional policymaking intended to regulate students’ behaviors (e.g., regarding attendance, plagiarism), and the feeling rules teachers are forced to negotiate and publicly perform as the execute these policies. By taking a poststructural-discursive approach to emotions and identity, these scholars are also able to emphasize that emotion labor in teaching is always embedded within power relations, ideologies, and social systems of value that “shape the expression of emotions by permitting us to feel some emotions while prohibiting others (for example, through moral norms and explicit social values, e.g., efficiency, objectivity, neutrality)” (Zembylas, 2005, p. 937). Song's (2016) work illustrates possible conflicts between the emotions that language teachers are expected to convey and the vulnerabilities that they actually experience. Drawing from Lemke's (2008) theorization of how identity unfolds over multiple timescales, de Costa argues compellingly that identities are also shaped in response to various, sometimes conflicting emotional demands of institutions and in relation to discourses and events, which prompt us to take up or resist feeling rules (see also de Costa, 2016). The potential for disalignment between what a teacher views as moral, caring behavior and explicit or implicit institutional policies leads to the oft-cited connection between emotion labor and teachers’ experiences of burnout or demoralization, a sense of “discouragement and despair borne out of ongoing value conflicts with pedagogical policies, reform mandates, and school practices” (Santoro, 2018, p. 3; see also Cowie, 2011).

Hargreaves’ (2001) emotional geography framework has shown how particular geographies, including physical and organizational structures, can influence the effects of and potential for emotion labor, for example, by encouraging or discouraging sustained personal interactions. This finding has apparent implications in university-level language teaching and particularly in the context of remote teaching, where experiences of physical distance would be exacerbated. With regards to the latter, Jones and Kessler (2020) noted that “it is difficult to have the conversation about emotions and care when students are missing from synchronous online classes, email exchanges, or physically distanced home visits, as was often the case with remote teaching” (n.p.). The effect is that “Teaching turns into less of a negotiated partnership and becomes more of an ‘assignment’.” This was quite literally the case in some instances of remote teaching when the classroom was replaced largely by asynchronous, non-interactive tasks. In the context of remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, many typical embodied performances of emotions through posture, gesture, and facial expressions (Benesch, 2017, p. 182) would have likewise been more difficult to enact, leaving teachers to discover new ways of expressing emotions such as care.

Emotion labor and feeling rules in L2 teaching

Over the last decade the body of work on teacher emotions and emotion labor has expanded to include research that focuses on the specific context of L2 teaching and learning. The need to mediate and influence learners’ affective experiences, such as motivation and anxiety, has long been a focus within L2 learning research (e.g., Arnold, 1999; Krashen, 1982). Language learning itself may conjure quite intense emotions; while it is inherently stressful for some (Horwitz, 2017), it can be a source of pleasure and joy for others (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2016). Early research frequently aimed at linking affective factors to students’ language learning outcomes, but in more recent work attention has shifted to the kinds of social and relational work that shape emotions and that emotions in return can affect (e.g., Noddings, 2013). As in the poststructuralist approached already described, emotions are conceived not as independent individual affective states but as experienced and performed in specific situations according to the feeling rules (Benesch, 2017; 2018a & b, 2019). Based on interviews with EFL teachers, (Gkonou & Miller, 2019, 2020, 2021; Miller & Gkonou, 2018) and Alzaanin (2021) explore some specific feeling rules typical to L2 education in relation to learners’ anxieties. For example, the notion of the “affective filter,” originally posited by Krashen (1982), has had a lasting impact on language education; the idea that the classroom must be a comfortable, low-stress environment is now commonsense for many teachers (see also Miller & Gkonou, 2018, p. 373). North American discourses on foreign language teaching, which have been shaped through communicative language teaching frameworks, explicitly emphasize the need to keeping students motivated and engaged through interaction around topics of personal relevance (e.g., Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009). King (2016) has shown that language teachers may have to regulate negative emotions in response to the “motivational burden” they bear when students are silent. Although these pedagogical principles are rarely discussed as forms of emotion labor (compare Zembylas, 2002), the emphasis on engaging learners’ while also mitigating any potential negative affective experiences seems central to the feeling rules of the language classroom.

Furthermore, because L2 teachers’ emotion labor is so closely intertwined with language learners’ affect, any demonstration of students’ disinterest or anxiety in the classroom – whether it is actually related to L2 learning – is assumed to be the teacher's work to help manage and alleviate (Gkonou & Miller, 2019). In the case of the teaching of LOTEs in primarily Anglophone countries, the institutional marginalization of language learning in education creates a particular set of emotional challenges in the face of hegemonic discourses of a global marketplace mediated through English (Acheson, Luna, Taylor, 2016; Diao & Liu, 2021), adding further stress for teachers to hold the interest of their students as they vie for institutional support for their programs, which is often synonymous with maintaining or increasing enrollments. Furthermore, because of language teachers’ roles as not only subject experts but representatives of communities of speakers and cultures (compare Song, 2016), the positive emotions they attempt to foster towards the languages and cultures they teach have implications for not only their professional but also their personal identities in unique ways.

Research questions

Despite the clear role that emotions play in the teaching and learning of a second language, few studies outside of ESL/EFL have considered how emotion labor manifests in language education and how it interconnects with the professional identities languages teachers. And yet, as the previously cited scholars have collectively argued, the feeling rules of teaching are inextricably linked to teachers’ sense of selves and their professional practices. The overarching goal of this interview-based research study was thus to examine the experiences of instructors of languages other than English (LOTEs) in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic through the theoretical lenses of teacher professional identity and emotion labor Specifically, our overarching research questions are:

• 1In describing their experiences during the pandemic, what feeling rules do teachers of LOTEs identify as relevant their professional lives?
• 2How do they make sense of these feeling rules in the context of the pandemic and beyond and what does this reveal about emotionally-inflected aspects of professional identity that extend beyond the pandemic?

By investigating these research questions in the context of a collective crisis, this study responds to de Costa's (2016) concept of “scaling emotions,” that is the notion that experiences and expressions of affect are shaped over time across multiple time scales. We view the participants’ recounts of teaching in the time of COVID as speech events that are embedded within larger discourses and ideologies around language teaching that extend beyond the scope of the pandemic.

Methodology

Participants

Participants were recruited using a digital survey made in Qualtrics, which was distributed via a professional listserv (for the American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Language Program Directors, a.k.a. AAUSC) and through the authors’ personal and professional networks. Interested instructors were asked to provide their contact information as well as some basic demographic information (see Appendix). Eligible participants were then contacted by email and invited to schedule an interview. A total of twenty-one US-based, postsecondary educators consented to first interviews in spring or early summer. These participants were then invited to do a follow-up interview in fall 2020 and nineteen responded. These nineteen individuals are the focal participants of the current study.

Of the 19 participants, 17 were women and 4 were men. The majority (17) identified as White, including one who identified as Hispanic and White, and two as Asian. The participants included teachers of seven different languages that are among those most commonly taught on U.S. college campuses (Looney & Lusin, 2019) (Table 1 ). While all interviewees were in-service educators, they occupied a variety of positions representative of language teaching in postsecondary institutions in the U.S. Seven held tenure-track or tenured positions, but the majority held less permanent academic positions, including eight non-tenure-eligible positions, one visiting faculty position, and four graduate students. Two participants (Nedda and Ying) were already experienced language instructors, who started PhD programs alongside their teaching positions. Over a third of the interviewees were serving as language program director or level coordinator, which in U.S. higher education typically involves some combination of training and overseeing graduate student instructors and adjunct instructors.

Table 1.

Distribution of languages, institutions, and positions among the participants.

Languages	Chinese =2	French = 5	German = 6	Italian = 4	Japanese = 1	Spanish = 1
Institutions	Large State = 12	Small Public = 1	Private= 4	Comm. College = 1	Private Rel. = 2
Positions	TT = 8	NTT = 8	Visiting = 1	Grad = 5	LPD/Coord. = 7

Because the professional communities of educators working in these languages in higher education in the US are often relatively small, we have opted to not only provide pseudonyms for all participants, but also to strategically omit some other personalizing information in the presentation of data. Specifically, the type of institution is only mentioned in relation to a particular person where it is clearly relevant. Table 2 offers an overview of the participants, the languages they teach, and their positions.

Table 2.

Participants’ teaching profiles.

Pseudonym	Language	Position	Language Program Director?
Alejandra	Spanish	Faculty (TT)	N
Alice	French	Faculty/Admin	N
Annetta	Italian	Faculty/Grad	N
Claudia	German	Faculty (TT)	Y
Edmondo	Italian	Faculty	N
Erika	German	Faculty (TT)	Y
Holly	French	Faculty	Y
Kai	Chinese	Faculty (Visiting)	N
Lily	French	Grad	N
Linda	French	Faculty (TT)	Y
Nathaniel	Italian	Grad	N
Nedda	Italian	Faculty/Grad	N
Rachel	German	Faculty (TT)	N
Regina	German	Faculty (TT)	Y
Ruth	Japanese	Faculty	N
Tyler	German	Faculty (TT)	N
Violet	German	Faculty	N
Ying	Chinese	Faculty/Grad	Y
Yvonne	French	Faculty	Y

Researchers’ positionality statement

As scholars and educators working in the same broader academic field as the individuals interviewed, our roles in this study allowed us to take on both emic and etic perspectives. We were both working as university instructors, teacher educators, and in Chantelle's case as a language program director in the time period during which data generation took place, and many of the experiences recounted by the focal participants resonated with our own. Several of the interviewees were already acquaintances from our professional networks. We, like our participants, are speakers and teachers of multiple languages, including those LOTEs at the core of our professional work: Mandarin Chinese (Wenhao) and German (Chantelle). Our own experiences living and working across countries and cultures, gave us a sense of rapport with participants who referenced varying institutionalized tendencies relating to emotion labor and different media discourses relating to the pandemic and other current events. And other aspects of our personal identities intersected in moments with participants in the study; for example, we are both mothers and related to the culturally-conditioned ethical struggles to balance between parenting and academic work expressed by many participants. In addition, Wenhao's experience as an Asian immigrant woman living in the U.S. may have shaped particular moments in which the participants shared the simultaneous racialization and gendering that they and/or their students encountered, although our data generation largely took place before the surge in anti-Asian racism and violence became thematized in media discourse later in the pandemic.4

Reich (2021) argues that qualitative research offers not only a “closer” look at human phenomena but perhaps more importantly a “a methodological obligation to critically examine how and why that closeness matters” (p. 575). In the case of this study, our social proximity to the participants and to shared contexts shaped the unfolding of the interviews as social practice (Talmy, 2010). At the same time, our closeness to the communities and experiences prompted us to recognize and consider an ethic of care (Reich, 2021) in both the generation and presentation of data for this study. This involved expressions of concern and rapport at various moments in the interviews, and, in some instances, the exclusion of identifying information about participants that might prove harmful to them in the study at hand. It is also important to recognize the differential positionalities that a focus on closeness can sometimes obscure. For example, Chantelle's identity as a white, American woman, may have made it less likely for participants to discuss racialized aspects of their experiences. We are both tenured professors at a research university, while the majority of our interviewees were not, which may have shaped discussions about labor disparity and the precariousness of academic positions in LOTE fields.

Data generation

The primary data for this study were two rounds of semi-structured interviews. The first round of interviews lasted between 38 and 100 minutes with an average duration of about an hour, and included questions falling into three main categories: 1) participants’ background and experience with language teaching prior to the COVID pandemic; 2) participants’ experience during the spring semester of 2020 when teaching was switched to remote on most (if not all) college campuses; and 3) participants’ plans and expectations for the coming fall. The second round of interviews were intended as a follow-up to further delve into the teachers’ experiences during the fall semester of 2020. Interviews in this round varied more in length, lasting between 22 min and an hour and 20 min, with an average of 37 min. Because of the proximity of the two interviews (sometimes only one month apart, e.g., Annetta), the goal was not to conduct a comparative analysis of these sets, but rather to take each as a moment in an ongoing experience (see Table 3 ). The interviews were conducted and recorded using Zoom. Although we conducted the interviews primarily in English, there was occasional codeswitching when another language was shared by the interviewer and interviewee, and one first interview (Ying) was almost exclusively in Mandarin Chinese, a language shared with Wenhao. Digital transcriptions of the English-language portions were generated by Zoom and we then manually reviewed and edited these for accuracy. The one interview in Chinese as well as other moments where the participants code-switched into Mandarin (with Wenhao) or German (with Chantelle) were transcribed and translated by the respective author into English.

Table 3.

Interview Dates, all in 2020.

Pseudonym	Interview 1	Interview 2
Alejandra	7/27	10/15
Alice	07/10	10/27
Annetta	07/09	8/24
Claudia	08/19	10/19
Edmondo	07/06	10/06
Erika	08/09	10/08
Holly	07/15	10/19
Kai	07/15	11/17
Lily	08/13	10/20
Linda	07/06	11/9
Nathaniel	7/13	10/06
Nedda	07/24	11/16
Rachel	8/24	10/09
Regina	08/28	10/16
Ruth	07/28	10/30
Tyler	08/21	10/06
Violet	07/07	10/05
Ying	07/24	11/30
Yvonne	8/27	11/12

Analysis

Multiple rounds of coding were implemented in the analysis of this qualitative study. The interview transcripts were first analyzed in order to inductively identify recurring themes. Participants’ original language was used to label the themes. During this first round of analysis, the broad themes of emotions and emotion labor emerged as salient aspects of the teachers’ recounts of their experiences, and this shaped the research questions that guide the current study. Using Dedoose, a qualitative analysis program suited for collaborative work, both authors collaborated on the next round of coding and focused on participants’ expressions of emotions as well as their beliefs and attitudes toward emotion labor and language teaching. During this next phase of analysis, we used emotion coding (Saldaña, 2016, pp. 124–125) to further group thematically similar expressions of emotions, perceptions, and beliefs together to identify overarching themes in the interviews. This generated a set of three overarching themes based on who or what was characterized as the primary agent and recipient of the feelings expressed. These categories are presented in brief in Table 4 along with sample comments from the interviews.

Table 4.

Coded themes in the interview analysis.

	Overarching themes	Sample comments from interviews
1	Feeling Rules in the Teaching of LOTEs	I have been available, there is no, really no limitation for the students. (Nedda, Interview 1)
2	Expression of Teachers’ Emotions	It was awful. (regarding the first weeks of remote teaching (Rachel, Interview 1) I'm, I mean I'm always worried that I…I spend more time on that [teaching] than on any of my research. (Claudia, Interview 1)
3	Expression of Teachers’ Perceptions of Institutional Contexts	There was no guidance. There was no guidance whatsoever, which is…I just sent an email to our team in the morning because today we got the guidelines for Zoom. We've been in session – since, you know, last week. (Erika, Interview 1)

For the purpose of this study, we are focusing only on the first theme, which relates to feeling rules and the teaching of LOTEs. In the next phase of analysis we engaged in patterned coding (Saldaña, 2016, p.160), inspired by the earlier research on teacher emotion labor and feeling rules (e.g., Benesch, 2018; Miller & Gkonou, 2018). This was also done collaboratively using Dedoose. Both researchers reviewed the groupings and discussed any cases that were difficult to categorize. Where there were clear points of overlap and interplay between these categories across a moment of talk, the excerpt was coded within both categories. This process yielded three feeling rules, which are discussed in the subsequent section.

Findings: Feeling rules in the teaching of LOTEs

In this section, we focus on the main feeling rules emphasized by the participants in the interviews in relation to their work as teachers of LOTEs and consider how they connected these to their professional identities as language and culture educators. Starting first with naturalistic coding, and then categorizing those quotes thematically, what emerged were three feeling rules (listed in Table 5 ). These all seem to orient towards what Gkonou and Miller (2019), following Noddings (2013), describe as an ethic of care, an imperative to foster feelings of comfort and well-bring in students and to express concern. In what follows, we examine how each of these feeling rules manifest within the interviews, before discussing what we can learn from this about how they shape teachers’ sense of what it means to be a committed and engaged language education.

Table 5.

Feeling rules and sample comments.

Feeling rules	Sample interview comments
Language teachers must establish/maintain personal connections to students	And just so I could talk to them what I always do is I meet with every student about every essay once they get to that 300/400 level. I have a conference with them, you know, they say it really cuts down on plagiarism. […] And but also because I care about them. And I want to talk with them about their ideas and it's a good way to kind of make, make a connection. They know that the professor knows their name, which is not, you know, universal on campus and, and that kind of stuff. (Tyler, Interview 1)
Language teachers must create/maintain a sense of classroom community between students	I feel like we've built a good classroom community, which was one of my main goals for the class. I, I feel like that's a strength of mine, as a teacher, when I'm face to face, but I find it very challenging in an online environment. (Alice, Interview 2)
Language teachers should offer/express emotional support beyond the course	I care about them and then that encourages me to spend more time preparing my course and prepare how to teach more effectively and how to help them even more and how to just support them as extra resource outside their family during the pandemic. (Kai, Interview 1)

Language teachers must establish/maintain personal connections with students

The importance of maintaining close connections and being available to students during the pandemic was a common theme across all of the interviews, especially in relation to remote language teaching. Four of the participants (Nathaniel, Nedda, Tyler, Kai) emphasized their efforts to make themselves available to their students at all times of the day and even on weekends. Nedda cited this as a benefit of using Zoom; even on a Sunday students could get in touch with her. For Tyler, teaching over Zoom generally decreased some of this sense of connection, and so he felt it was necessary to compensate with “other forms of mediated contact that they associated actually within intimacy and sociability.” He used the networking platform Slack to create discussion channels with the students that could be used outside of class time but also served as an alternate mode of communication during class. This same platform was also mentioned by four other participants (Edomondo, Erika, Yvonne, and Claudia) as one of the new communications tools they implemented during the pandemic. Tyler described one student whose work schedule had been changed in ways that often competed with her course work, but who was able to log into Slack on her phone even while at work to join in on discussions of the readings for that day. Kai exchanged cell phone numbers with his students and created conversation groups using the social media tool WhatsApp. Like Tyler, Kai perceived these to be more authentic forms of contact for his students.

Regina, Lily, and Yvonne all recounted how they deliberated at length whether to include synchronous components such as Zoom meetings in remote instruction, when moving to remote teaching. Both Regina and Yvonne originally opted to teach asynchronously because they felt that this could offer their students maximum flexibility, thus recognizing the multiple upsets and disruptions students might be experiencing, including moving from campus and for some international students, even changing countries and time zones. But both also changed their courses in the fall to integrate some synchronous meetings. Even though several of her students had been unable to return to the US from China, Yvonne decided to include synchronous meetings as a way of helping everyone to feel less “insulated” in their respective locations. Regina described the decision to integrate synchronous instruction as part of a process of professional learning about the social/emotional aspects of remote instruction:

So, um, through our training and through reading about that, about how synchronous sessions make students feel more connected and how one of the main reasons that people drop online courses is because they don't feel like they're connected to anybody else. They feel alone. (Interview 1)

Regina's reference here to professional literature positions personal contact as a kind of emotion labor that is required by the online teaching contexts, but she also references here the pressure to maintain enrollments and motivate students to continue in the course (compare Acheson, Taylor & Luna, 2016).

In other interviews, the need to establish personal connections was associated with recognizing the human, affective elements of the pandemic. In his first interview, Edmondo described the main pedagogical imperative during the pandemic as “trying to maintain a sense of being looked at as like humans, first and foremost.” He contrasted this with university-imposed attendance policies, which emphasized compliance rather than personal connection (see also Benesch, 2017).  Several of the educators mentioned that students had complained to them that many of their other classes were just carrying on as if things were normal. As a contrast, Lily described how she shared her own difficulties balancing simultaneously the roles of instructor, graduate student, and parent, but also that she felt that this expression of her own humanity was appreciated by the students:

It was almost disheartening actually how many of them reached out to me at different points in the semester toward the end and said that I was kind of the only instructor they had who was acknowledging how difficult it was. And that a lot of their teachers were just sort of business as usual, but online. (Interview 1)

Display of negative emotions in education has historically been policed and equated to signs of weakness or even hysteria, particularly among women teachers (e.g., Boler, 1999); however, Lily's quote shows how talking about her own vulnerabilities as a student and a mom became a form of emotions as action (de Costa, 2016; Song, 2016) and a pedagogy to connect with her students who were also struggling in various human ways.

Rachel had a contrasting experience with remote teaching in fall 2020. She described one of the classes she taught as particularly difficult to teach online:

It was hard to be enthusiastic about being there because I wasn't. It was hard. Because you they were a very low energy group anyway, right, like I've had them all before and they were all like the good quiet students, whose kind of resting face is resting bitch face like they just look angry and I know they're not.  […]

And so my attempt to perform was way up initially, trying to, like, get – evoke some kind of reaction. (Interview 2)

Rachel's quote here reveals that personal connection in language teaching is about a particular kind of engagement (not “quiet”) and energy The implicit feeling rule to main a connection with her students required the regulation of her own emotions, i.e., in the performance of enthusiasm. Her comparison of students’ silence to angry-looking “resting bitch face” illustrates the affective challenge that emergency remote teaching created.

Language teachers must create/maintain a sense of classroom community between students

The importance of classroom community and the challenge of maintaining a feeling of belonging among students in remote teaching was mentioned by all participants and was a common theme in both sets of interviews. Community building was often treated as a normal part of language teaching that had taken on an even greater importance during the pandemic (e.g., Claudia, Edmondo, Kai, Regina, Violet, Yvonne). Edmondo, for example, described using the application Flipgrid to create an environment, in which students could feel comfortable with one another.

So Flipgrid for me, while it does not replace in person instruction, for me it took care of two things – to ensure that there was some level of practice. That they could speak every day in that online asynchronous class, but also that they would have to respond to one another so that they would have some stimulus to get to know one another at least to a minimum extent instead of considering the whole course as an individual exclusive individual endeavor.

Regina shared that she had embedded small partner conversations into the remote courses in order to help students develop their interpersonal language abilities, but this also had the added benefit of keeping them connected with other peers. “Some of them really got into that. One guy said ‘it's the only time I've smiled all week.’” (Interview 1).  Here the need to not only maintain personal connection between the teacher and students but to create a sense of community among the learners is directly related to what are often considered core communicative objectives for second language teaching (e.g., Glissan & Donato, 2017).

Several of the interviewees described, especially in the first interview, how they had created groups on social media to keep the class connected; at least two classes (Yvonne's and Ying's) formed their own using the app GroupMe. Yvonne shared that at some point the conversations in the group her students had created began to extend beyond the coursework, “So it wasn't even about the class at all. It was just about keeping the, yeah, it was about life” (Interview 1). Community building for Yvonne was thus fundamentally about creating feelings of belonging and connectedness. Nathaniel similarly noted that through these uses of communicative technology the language class became “[a] place they can go” even as they were all isolated in their homes.

Several participants expressed that community building was trickier in the fall when that sense of rapport had to be established within the online course exclusively (e.g., with students who just transitioned into college), unlike in the spring of 2020 when they could still draw upon what had already been fostered in the in-person classroom prior to the pandemic. Regina noticed that the online format made it easier for students to stay on task, but harder to engage in the kinds of side talk that build that sense of rapport:

And now that they're online and you – people don't have that opportunity to just hang out and talk. […] they're not doing as much of the- the side conversations, which makes it easier to teach sometimes, but still, it's not, they're not able to build more communities because they're always focused on the task. So one of the things I've been trying to give. I've been asking my team to do is just to give the students five minutes, the beginning of each class to talk in English with each other in the breakout rooms to just have that time to talk to each other and build a community that way. (Interview 2)

Here Regina depicted time on task, which might in a different context be construed as a sign of an effective teacher (see Mozgalina, 2015), as incomplete for remote language learning. In his second interview, Edmondo similarly described using English more than he normally would, in order to encourage students getting to know each other “at a human level.”

Beyond the kinds of pedagogical imperatives for “building a classroom discourse community in which communicative discourse can be nurtured” (Glissan & Donato, 2017, p. 74), these participants viewed fostering the social/emotional wellbeing of their students through community building as one of their most important jobs during the isolating months of lockdown and self-quarantining.

Language teachers should offer/express emotional support beyond the course

A sense of responsibility for students’ feelings emerged as a highly salient theme across the interviews. There were several key words that appeared across multiple interviews, which are represented in the subcategories below (Table 6 ). The first six of these (those highlighted in yellow) are negative emotions and the latter three are positive emotions.

Table 6.

Key words and sample comments related to the theme of student feelings.

Emotion words describing students	Teachers interview comments
Struggling/struggle/hard	Some of them really struggled to finish. I had two in particular who were very strong students who just kind of struggled and that's sad. (Alice, Interview 1)
Frustrated/frustration	I have one elderly student who really struggles with technology. So she's very frustrated by the online environment. (Lily, Interview 2)
Worried/anxious/upset	I think students are possibly more worried than usual about my grading system. (Claudia, Interview 1)
Stressed/overwhelmed	The one thing I will say is it seems relatively apparent that they are overwhelmed that they just have so much to do. (Tyler, Interview 1)
Distracted/absent	Just the students were always easily distracted. Always looking at- always looking at the windows. (Ying, Interview 2)
Not comfortable	And some of them you know they have said in surveys to me that they don't feel comfortable with their camera on, (Ruth, Interview 2)
Happy/comfortable	A lot of students told me that they were happy that they were they were feeling comfortable with the things we were doing. (Edmondo, Interview 1)
Optimistic/confident	They're pretty confident and they ended up learning well, so that [pass/fail] was an option, but not, not a whole lot of students took it. (Kai, Interview 1)
Grateful	I said it took a long time but um they were really grateful. They were really like this is amazing. Thank you. (Regina, Interview 1)

It is noteworthy that when positive student emotions were described in our data (e.g., “optimistic,” “grateful,” “happy”), it was almost exclusively in relation to feelings about their language classes. The interviewees also often framed their own “happiness” as contingent in part on positive emotional feedback from the students. For instance, Lily said that she was “very happy” with her pedagogical decisions for remote teaching in the fall, because her students “are happy” (Interview 2). Similar to the findings of Gkonou and Miller (2019), the participants were not only aware of the students’ emotional states, but depicted the regulation of these states as an integral part of the work as language educators.

The participating language educators frequently described their students as “struggling” in a myriad of ways, ranging from financial, social, familial, and other kinds of personal hardships exposed or exacerbated by the pandemic and the subsequent policies that were put in place. The quote below is from Tyler, who described how the sudden campus closure led to the loss of employment and housing for some of his students.

I had one student I know was experiencing homelessness and had lost her on-campus job, did not have an internet connection that was especially reliable, was working from her phone. I had another student who moved back home to his parents’ house and, you know, I found this out later but I sort of intuited that this was going on. That he basically had to get a job. There was no way that he was going to be — alright, so he's working, you know, he works at a QuikTrip, so the gas station basically. And there was no way that he was going to be able to sit on Zoom during, you know, business hours on the two, on the three days a week, right, that we… So what I did with that class was I turned it into a correspondence class, I scrapped the rest of the syllabus. (Interview 1)

Tyler establishes himself here as aware, even intuitive, of the hardships suffered by his students, but also responsible for adapting his pedagogical practices to their situations.

Many interviewees expressed specific concerns about the international students in their classes. For example, Yvonne, who originally came from France, described the situation of international students as “brutal” (Interview 1). Yvonne identified herself as international faculty and projected a specific responsibility for these students, who were made to leave their homes in the U.S. quickly when campuses shut down. She then goes on to describe how she made special accommodations for these students in terms of meeting times. Kai similarly rescheduled one of his classes to Friday nights in spring 2020 because it was the only time when “everyone was available.” These quotes highlight how immigrant educators have to not only learn to be and do while working in American institutions of education because of cultural differences in education (Smith, 2018), but also negotiate their feelings between their institutional expectations and their personal experience as immigrants.

Although the need to support students emotionally was constructed as a professional feeling rule in the interviews, the participants did not always characterize this as an aspect of teaching prioritized by their institutions. For example, Kai viewed caring for his students as an integral part of his teaching practice and as part of his “calling” as an educator:

It doesn't matter how fancy the technology is. It doesn't matter how well we design our courses. It's- If students are not taken good care of, I mean emotionally and logistically, and we are going to fail. (Interview 1)

However, Kai's choices of how to engage in emotion labor butted up against institutional policies. Like Lily, he initially conducted conferences with small groups of students to ensure interaction and sustain connections with each of his students, but in the fall he switched back to synchronous meetings with the entire class due to concerns related to institutional policies on contact hours:

[This semester] I kind of hesitated to do it again because it's risky. Because students might be complaining or the school might be, you know, worried or concerned if I don't have enough contact hours. So, so I didn't do I didn't do the radical change anymore.  (Interview 2)

Kai's quote here points the potential tension that can arise between language instructors’ engagement in professional emotion labor and institutional proprieties, here expressed through the reference to university policies about contact hours (comp. Benesch, 2017).

For those participants who not only taught themselves but also served as language program directors (LPDs), supervising graduate student instructors (GSIs) created an additional layers of emotion labor that came with its own feeling rules. Talking about this aspect of the closures in the spring, Yvonne emphasized that her stress was mostly related to how she could support the graduate students teaching in her program:

The stress was that - was like how I will end up with all my Tas to make sure they stay in contact with our students. […] Then we'll- won't stress. Because there were- everybody was stressed. We didn't, we didn't understand what's going on. […] So what I did, I stayed very calm. I tried. (Interview 1)

Although she identifies herself as having the same emotions of stress and confusion as the graduate students, for Yvonne a key part of her job as LPD was maintaining this sense that everything would be okay for the GSIs, so that they in turn could offer the kinds of personal contact that the undergraduates needed. In contrast to Lily's establishment of rapport through the performance of shared struggle discussed above, for Yvonne emotional support of the GSIs involved the regulation of her own emotions. Regina, similarly, described her role as language program director as that of a “mama bear” and, recounting a moment when her 7-year-old asked her why she had been working so many hours creating materials for the instructors, explained “my job is to like protect them” (Interview 2).

Multiple participants who supervised GSIs also mentioned that the mental health of the graduate students had been negatively affected, and as supervisors they were also serving as confidantes and mentors for these students (i.e., Linda, Erika, Regina, Yvonne). Linda and her faculty colleagues worked together to check in with graduate students in between weekly seminars and coordination meetings, to make sure that no one was left alone to struggle. Participants also mentioned worrying about the various pandemic-related challenges that their graduate student instructors might encounter, e.g., falling ill, loss of funding, inadequate access to the technology and internet and their possible feelings of being “overwhelmed” and “freaked out.” These feelings became another layer of emotion labor.

Conflicting feeling rules

There was one striking moment in the interviews where the imperative to create personal connection seemed to stand in tension with students’ expectations for emotional support. In her second interview, Nedda burst into tears as she described negative feedback she had recently received from one of her students. As an experienced Italian teacher, Nedda understood feeling rules for foreign language teaching as bound to student engagement and personal connection. In remote synchronous teaching, she attempted to replicate classroom interactions by requiring her students to have their cameras on during class time, and she would call on students who appeared distracted. However, she had to confront the reality of students’ changing schedules and unpredictable access to the Internet.

And one time I would call her there. She would put the camera on. She was on the bus or in the car. […] This is the email that I received. The way she just listed all kinds of things that she had going. And I said, you know, I wish you had told me at the beginning that you could not do this synchronously. Because if you do tell me. Yes, yes. But then you still are not. The situation is not improving. Of course I am asking you, and I don't want to single you out, but I need to know. Why are you telling me that you connect, when in reality you're never there? Or if I call you and then she doesn't answer so I think- […] you probably needed to say I'm I'm- impossible- I am not able to connect to synchronously to this class. I finished work in the middle of the class and then I don't have internet I have to find a place and- […] I mean, she just was very critical and accused me of not understanding of the whole situation. (Interview 2)

After this, as she broke down crying, Nedda repeatedly stated “maybe I did not do enough” and “I could have done more” in tears, while recalling the student's email during the interview. Nedda thus shifts from a focus on the student's responsibility, emphasized through words such as “need” and “needed”, to communicate her inability to attend class; she then began to take on the students’ assertion that it was the teacher's duty to alleviate and even anticipate students’ struggles and to extend their emotion labor during the COVID crisis extended to various aspects of students’ lives that were not related to language teaching per se, such as internet access and work schedule conflicts. Nedda's distress thus reveals the possible tensions between the feeling rules of engagement and those of support for language teaching during the pandemic.

Discussion

Feeling rules “define what we should feel in various circumstances” (Hoschschild, 1975, p. 289). During the pandemic, institutions of postsecondary education and language teaching research (e.g., Li et al., 2021) alike quickly addressed the urgent imperative to prepare teachers to adopt technologies; yet, as shown in our findings, various aspects of emotion labor and words related to feelings and affect were the most salient recurring themes when university-level language educators were asked about their experiences during the early months of the COVID pandemic. The importance of creating a sense of connection and community, communicating care and concern, and providing support in a moment of collective crisis were described by the participants as central to their understanding of what it meant to be language educators. While technology use was frequently mentioned, it was often framed as a channel for mediating emotion labor (e.g., sustaining individual interactions, creating a sense of community, etc.). In absence of the kinds of embodied performances of feeling rules described by Benesch (2017), the use of communications media became a primary way for teachers to enact a pedagogy of care. The feeling rules that guided the participants in this study developed directly from practices that are associated in the professional literature with good language pedagogy; the imperative to keep students engaged and motivated is often presented as a central principle for language teaching (e.g., Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009), but in the context of the COVID pandemic the responsibility the teachers assumed as part of their professional profile also extended beyond the objectives of language learning, and into the social-emotional lives of the students. There was a sense across the interviews that good language teaching is about caring, connecting, and community building both within and outside the classroom.

Some of these findings echo recent work on emotion labor and EFL teaching (e.g., Benesch, 2017; Gkonou & Miller, 2019), but the focus on languages other than English and the “disorientating dilemmas” (Crane, 2020) posed by the multifaceted hardships educators and students confronted during the early months of the pandemic highlights the emotional dimensions of language pedagogy as a form of social activity. In performing their identities as engaged, caring language educators, the participants often encountered what they experienced as tensions between feeling rules expected or imposed by students, institutions, or internalized senses of good teaching. They also perceived disconnects between the kind of professional support being offered by their campuses, which tended to focus on technological aspects of remote teaching, and the emotional exigencies of teaching during a public health crisis. These findings point to the acute need to acknowledge emotion labor as a salient aspect of work in foreign language teaching and teacher training, and for future research to further delve into the affective dimension of language teaching and language teacher identity, during both moments of crisis and — for lack of a better word, normal — times.

Implications for future research

Our study departs from the oft defacto focus of English in the research on emotion labor in language teaching. Language intersects in a myriad way with social structures such as race (Alim, Rickford & Ball, 2016), and the institution of language teaching has contributed to racialization and racism (e.g., Anya, 2021). The current global and domestic language teaching landscape that prioritizes English is the product of long-term settler colonialism, White supremacy, and European imperialism (Von Esch, Motha & Kubota, 2020). By including seven different LOTEs in this study, our findings can help the field move away from English hegemony. However, while our sample involved racially minoritized speakers and languages that are conventionally not associated with Whiteness (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, and for some participants Spanish), several of the LOTEs in our dataset have still historically excluded speakers of color and specifically Blackness (which is the case in Chantelle's home field of German studies). Emotion labor can be strategically employed to create pedagogies of empathy for anti-racist work in higher education (Zembylas, 2012); while our findings can contribute to the important and emerging conversation about linguistic and racial equity and diversity in applied linguistics, to our knowledge the recent wave of racial reckoning (Smith, 2022) has yet to enter the research on emotion labor and its potential in language teaching and language teacher education. In addition, although a few of our research participants mentioned the Black Lives Matter movement that was resurging while we were conducting second interviews and expressed a strong desire for action, it was unclear in our data whether these feelings materialized into pedagogical practices or emotion labor (possibly because of the timing of our interviews). Future research must explicitly incorporate the complex affective experience with racism and emotion labor among racially minoritized teachers of LOTEs (see Diao, Xu & Xiao-Desai, 2022 for a discussion of Chinese language teachers’ experience during the anti-Asian racism), and also consider the ways in which feeling rules themselves are racialized and coded by other aspects of social identity.

The study does have limitations. The interview-based design of the study allowed us to hear directly from language educators’ while they were experiencing things first-hand, and we were able to conduct the research while following public health guidelines during these early months of the COVID pandemic; however, relying almost exclusively on interview data also meant that we were unable to observe how emotion labor in relation to these feeling rules unfolded in the practice of teaching. Also, while seven different languages were included in our participant pool, the actual distribution of languages that they taught was perhaps not representative of LOTEs in American postsecondary education (see Looney & Lusin, 2019). The balance of the respondents was likely influenced by the researchers’ own professional networks, but it is noteworthy that many of the participants worked in smaller departments and in several cases were the sole educator for the language they taught at their university. This data point coupled with the frequency with which the participants described the interview experience as “therapy” or thanked the researchers for their time suggests that the call for participants may have attracted those who were most willing to talk — especially those with less of a local community. Additional research would show whether and to what extent some aspects of emotional labor, for example that related to enrollments and program health, might also impact educators working in different language areas and different institutional contexts in disparate ways. Research appearing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Li et al., 2021; MacIntyre et al., 2020) demonstrates that there is a growing attention being devoted to affect in language teaching; however, there is a danger that research promoting individual coping mechanisms misses the social and systemic issues that shape the expectations of emotion labor placed on educators in specific fields and positions. Thus, there is a need for more critical analyses of how language teachers come to identify and be identified as emotional support systems for students and the implications this has for (higher) education fields more broadly.

Implications for teacher professional support

Miller and Gkonou (2018) and Benesch (2017) have previously argued that facilitated reflection on the emotional dimension of language teaching and how they intersect with discourses on pedagogical practice and professional identity can enable teachers to navigate choices related to feeling rules and emotion labor more agentfully. In their testimonies, the participants in this study emphasized the specific need to navigate tensions and exacerbations between feeling rules they internalized as language teachers and institutional policies. Institutional mandates are often made without an awareness of the specific situations of educators in different fields and they sometimes create obstacles that language teachers have to resist in order to do appropriate emotion labor (see Benesch, 2017). For example, the need to comply with university-wide regulations about contact hours, defined as whole-class sessions, constrained Kai from meeting with his students in smaller cohorts, even though he felt that this might be the best way to support their learning and social-emotional well-being. Other interviewees also described their efforts in opposition to or as a circumvention of “bad” university policies. The importance of being able to negotiate and resist institutional policies for the sake of realizing educational feeling rules in a way that is commiserate with teachers’ professional values is perhaps heightened in the context of language teaching, because — as illustrated in the demographics of our sample — many foreign language teachers in the U.S. are in contingent and precarious positions.

The findings of this study raise questions regarding the sustainability of LOTE teachers’ emotion labor in circumstances of extended crisis — of public health, student social and emotional health, decreasing enrollments in LOTEs, and increasingly precaritized work positions for educators in this field. For the participants in our study, their work as teachers did not end with the dismissal of the class; their emotion labor encompassed staying connected and looking after students’ needs and feelings beyond the boundaries of what even might readily be identified as language learning. Several of our interviewees adopted technologies to make themselves available to students around the clock. Yet they still frequently expressed feeling guilty for not doing enough. Nedda's response to her student's frustrations were symptomatic of this burden of constant expectation of emotion labor experienced by language teachers and the toll that it can take on teachers’ own emotional well-being. If foreign language teaching is about keeping students engaged through language and acknowledging their humanity (Levine, 2020), then when does that work end? One of our participants, Regina, even explicitly stated that she felt “burnt out” from the constant work of “taking care of everybody” and yet not even confident how her extensive and intensive emotion labor would count towards promotion. Hochschild (2012[1983]) herself expressed concern that certain professions might encourage people to over-identify with the feeling rules associated with their job to the detriment of those professionals who inhabit them; however, reflexivity and even self-advocacy around emotion labor is rarely acknowledged as an essential part of sustainable professional development.

Conclusion

The COVID pandemic has been not only a public health crisis, but also a social-emotional one. At the time of writing, the COVID pandemic is still ongoing, and any assessment of its long-term effects on almost any aspect of daily life is still work in progress; however, this study points to some of the disconnects between how institutions — in this case both particular campuses and professional fields — conceptualize feeling rules and the values and pressures teachers have to navigate as they take care of their students in and outside the classroom. Additional research will need to continue to consider not only how language teaching as a field can better support teachers in this work, but also the potential losses our field and higher education more broadly might experience if we do not.