Exploring Chinese Special Education Teachers' Emotion Labour Strategies and Characteristics

The teaching of students with disabilities and/or special educational needs (SEN) has always been an emotionally demanding profession, requiring intensive and toilsome emotional labour for special education teachers (SETs). Situated within SETs' emotional experiences in special schools in China, this study explored the strategies and characteristics of SETs' emotional labour. The findings revealed seven emotional labour strategies of three categories: habitual pretending and intentional restraining of surface acting, self-persuading and meaning-making of deep acting, natural releasing, deliberate outpouring and emotional isolation of genuine expression. These strategies have been influenced by two-pronged opposite and coexisting paradigms of cognition in Chinese special schooling, a charitable and caring paradigm shaped by Confucian benevolence values and a capability-defective cognitive paradigm shaped by traditional disability views and elitism values. Additionally, Chinese SETs' emotional labour displayed four obvious characteristics: long-time duration in emotional interactions, complexity in emotional performance, high uncontrollability in emotional feedback and contradictoriness in emotional states. The findings broadened a deeper understanding of SETs' emotional labour in Chinese sociocultural contexts.