The purpose of this study is to investigate the emotional experience of student teachers in teaching practicum by means of qualitative research, to construct a theoretical model of student teachers' emotional labor during educational practicum by applying grounded theory, to clarify the motivation, process, influencing factors, and main effects of student teachers' emotional labor during educational practicum, to explore the significance of emotional labor for student teachers' career choices, and to put forward suggestions to promote the professional development of student teachers.

This study responds to four main questions:

(1)   What are the motivations for student teachers’ emotional labor in teaching practicum?

(2)   What are the manifestations and strategies of student teachers’ emotional labor in teaching practicum?

(3)   What are the influencing factors of student teachers’ emotional labor in teaching practicum?

(4)   How to enhance the professional development of student teachers in their emotional ability?

Objective

This study aims to constructs a theorical model, and provides a theoretical framework of student teachers in teaching practicum.

To propose suggestions for student teachers to use emotional labor and improve their emotional regulation ability;

To explore the emotional factors of student teachers’ sense of efficacy and promote their professional development.

Perspectives or theoretical framework

Emotional labor is a “third kind of labor” that is different from mental and physical labor, which requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others. And it is defined by Hochschild as the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display. Teachers have frequent interpersonal interactions with students, colleagues, parents, etc., and need to manage their feelings in order to display emotions that are consistent with public expectations and the educational system.

In China, student teachers, as future teachers, are required to take part in a three-month teaching practicum before they can be certified as teachers. Student teachers learn how to be a teacher through teaching practicum, of which emotional labor is a significant part.

In the sociological perspective, the general mechanism of emotional labor tends to extend Hochschild's argument for emotional labor. Grandey argues that the general mechanism of emotional labor is a model that encompasses the situational cues, the emotional regulation process, and the long-term consequences, and it is one of the theoretical frameworks that is currently being widely used. This study combines Hochschild's classification of the characteristics of emotional laborers and Grandey's proposed framework of general mechanisms of emotional labor, with the overall framework consisting of three parts: motivation, process, and consequence.

In the motivation part, Grandey's proposed model of emotional labor in which the motivation of emotional labor is considered to be composed of many emotional events with various emotional rules, is the situational cues of emotional labor. This study believes that emotional adjustment is a dynamic process. According to Hochschild's classification, there are three types of teachers' emotions: the emotion of need, the emotion of feeling, and the emotion of performance. The motivation of emotional labor comes from the conflict between the three types of emotions.

This study divides the emotion regulation process into two parts: performance and strategy. In terms of the performance, Hochschild argues that there are two main ways of performing emotional labor: surface acting and deep acting. According to Grandey, the strategies were divided into antecedent-focused emotion regulation and response-focused emotion regulation according to the time of emotion occurrence.

In terms of consequence, the short-term effects were explored because the short duration of the teaching practicum made it difficult to obtain long-term consequence.

Methodology or Methods The empirical material reported on here is drawn from a study into student teachers in China, engaged 8 student teachers in formal and informal interviews and included field observation. The present article represents this empirical material, comprising interviews undertaken in a school in east China. Specifically, the interest was in emotional experience of student teachers. The interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 2 hours. The objectives of each interview were to explore the emotional labor of student teachers, whether as articulated by the student teachers themselves or as seen by another. The author, a former student teacher, has participated in the whole process of teaching practicum and conducted observation as an insider. In the teaching practicum, the student teachers’ behavior in interacting with different subjects such as teachers and students was observed. In terms of research ethics, the researcher ensured that all subjects were aware of the intention and form of the study, and that the process of carrying out and recording was carried out in which the subjects were always aware of the researcher’s working methods. Meanwhile, the lesson is an important context for the emotional labor of the student teachers, and it was difficult for them to describe in detail the behavior and body language verbally in the interviews. Therefore, this study collected lessons’ videos recorded by student teachers. Research Instruments or Sources Used Drawing on in-depth interviews, this study obtained first-hand information. Based on grounded theory, NVivo 12 was used to analyzed the empirical material in the sequence of Opening coding, Axial coding and Selective coding. Pre-interviews were first conducted with two student teachers, and the outline of the interviews was further refined in accordance with the interviews. Then, a further seven student teachers were interviewed, and at the end of coding, two more student teachers were interviewed to verify theoretical saturation. For field observation and video analysis, an observation outline was developed, which was categorized into five sections: teacher discourse, facial expressions, body languages, student feedback, and observer conjecture.

Conclusion 1 (in response to question 1): The motivation is the fluctuation caused by the imbalance of the emotion of need, feeling, and performance. The discrepancy between the emotion of feeling and need is emotional dissonance, which is caused by the gap between inside and outside; the discrepancy between the emotion of feeling and performance is emotional disguise, which is teaching strategy; and the discrepancy between the emotion of performance and need is emotional deviation, which is displaying emotions that do not meet the requirements. Conclusion 2 (in response to question 2): The performance of student teachers’ emotional labor is surface acting, deep acting, and natural behaviors. The strategies of emotional labor of student teachers were able to be consistent with the motivations. The strategies were categorized into antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategies and response-focused emotion regulation. Antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategy is a pre-judgement of the situation, and is a reflection of the accumulation of experience by the student teachers; Response-focused emotion regulation strategy is a common way of reacting promptly to emotional fluctuations. Conclusion 3 (in response to questions 3 and 4): The influencing factors of student teachers emotional labor mainly include individual, organizational, and socio-cultural factors. Fei Xiaotong believes that the micro network relationship between people is full of egoistic spirit of “self” as the center of “the differential mode of association”, like a stone dropped into the water to launch the ripples, the more you push the thinner. The Chinese context emphasizes that society is a flat network of relationships. Student teachers are learning how to deal with the “relationships” in the educational field, and how to play the “teacher's role” as defined by social norms. Student teachers’ emotional labor is shaped by their exploration of relationships, in which they exercise subjectivity to create and grasp relationships.

Hochschild A R.. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling[M]. Berkely, CA: University of California Press,1983:6-7. Grandey A A.. Emotion regulation in the workplace: a new way to conceptualize emotional labor.[J]. Journal of occupational health psychology, 2000, 5(1) : 95-110. Grandey A A. & Melloy R C.. The state of the heart: Emotional labor as emotion regulation reviewed and revised.[J]. Journal of occupational health psychology, 2017, 22(3) : 407-422. Fei Xiaotong. Native soil, The Foundations of Chinese Society [M]. Beijing: Peking University Press,2016:37-45.