“I’ve just lived inside a tumble dryer”: a narrative of emotion labour, (de)motivation, and agency in the life of a language teacher

Abstract

Tensions between external sources of power and internal feeling rules in the workplace, i.e., emotion labour, can have a profound effect on professional dimensions. The purpose of this article is to report on a study that explored a secondary language teacher’s emotion labour and its influence on her professional (de)motivation and agency. Framed in narrative inquiry, this longitudinal study collected data through narrative interviews and drawings between February 2020 and March 2022. The participant was an EFL (English as foreign language) teacher who held teaching posts at three different state secondary schools and a private language centre in Argentina. During this period, the teacher grappled with emergency online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic and lengthy teacher strikes. Drawing on analysis of the short stories constructed from the narrative interviews, the tensions between external and internal feeling rules and their interplay with (de)motivation and agency are chronologically mapped out.