Towards epistemological pluralism and methodological openness in language teacher emotion research

Abstract

In recent years the notion of emotional labor or emotion labor has gained prominence as an analytically robust concept to explore language teacher emotions in both western and non-western educational settings. The first aim of this article is to examine the applicability of a western concept of emotion labor to the study of language teacher emotions in the Global South/s. Through a comparative case study, we examine how Ecuadorian English-language and Kichwa-language teachers managed emotions while undertaking virtual teaching at the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic. While emotion labor was useful for explaining the former's reported experiences, for the latter, it was only through the Indigenous concept of corazonar rooted in Andean philosophy and cosmology that we could capture their drastically differing accounts. From the perspective of Epistemologies of the South, we argue for a locally sensitive way of theorizing language teacher emotions. We also aim to illustrate the significance of casing and recasing (i.e., a recursive process of linking developing ideas and the evidence that researchers gather) in language teacher emotion research through the investigation of our own analytical processes.