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.