Teaching Empathy by Naming Emotion Labor
Robert C. Cunningham, Jr. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Honolulu, USA.
We all want more teachers in our classrooms who can respond empathetically to students’ needs. But for teacher education programs to foster that kind of empathy, they must also prepare teachers to understand their own emotional responses to institutional demands—what Benesch (2017) describes as emotion labor.¹ When emotion labor is recognized and supported, it can become a source of agency, resistance, and activism (Miller & Gkonou, 2018; Nazari et al., 2025). When it is ignored or unsupported, however, it can lead to exhaustion, burnout, and attrition (Nazari & Molana, 2023; Zhang & Zhang, 2024). Teachers who are not given language or support for making sense of these tensions may struggle to interpret the gap between their own professional values and those of their institutions, making empathy harder to sustain over time.
In my own research, I interviewed six teachers (three local and three expatriate) at a for-profit language center in Cambodia. Using narrative analysis, I examined how they described disengagement and resignation in relation to their work. Across the interviews, a recurring pattern emerged: when teachers felt misaligned with the institution’s business aims—especially its emphasis on profit over pedagogy and professional development—the emotional labor of remaining invested in the job intensified. Five of the six teachers offered clear narratives of disengagement, and in some cases this was closely connected to their ultimate resignation.
For these teachers, misalignment with the profit-driven expectations of their employer resulted in more than stress or frustration. To continue functioning within a system that conflicted with their professional values, they had to expend emotional energy in ways that steadily eroded their professional engagement. For one participant, this meant withdrawing from collaborative material-sharing out of resentment. For those in management, it meant believing that good teachers would burn out and quit regardless of any action they took. For two others, the strain became an explicit reason for leaving their positions altogether. The pattern is clear: when teachers do not have enough energy left to stay engaged in their work, sustained empathy for students becomes far more difficult to sustain.
It is perhaps unsurprising that none of the teachers in my study had received training that explicitly addressed emotion labor. Although the field’s recent emotional turn toward greater focus on empathy in teaching might be a signal that teacher training is shifting; however, teacher education still gives too little direct attention to the emotional consequences of institutional life. If we want more empathetic teachers, teacher education cannot continue to treat emotion as private or incidental. Future teachers need support in recognizing that difficult emotions often reflect structural tensions, not personal failure. Framing emotion labor this way is itself an empathetic act: it helps teachers understand their experiences with greater clarity and less shame. Addressing emotion labor directly in teacher education will not eliminate these tensions, but it can better equip future language teachers to navigate them without losing their professional engagement or their capacity for empathy.
At present, I am teaching a course for undergraduate language professionals who are nearing the end of their degree programs and preparing to enter the workforce. In that course, I have begun experimenting with ways of incorporating emotion labor into the syllabus more directly. This work is still in its early stages, and the examples below are far from exhaustive. Rather, they are a few practices I have explored so far that have been useful in helping teacher trainees notice, name, and reflect on the emotional dimensions of professional life.
One step has been to introduce emotion labor early in the semester. Giving students this concept at the beginning creates more time for them to revisit it and connect it to other ideas over the course of the term. It also means that when emotional reactions arise organically in class discussions, students already have some language for exploring those moments more thoughtfully.
I have also found it helpful to create safe, low-stakes opportunities for trainees to identify emotion labor at a distance. In teacher education, students complete activities that show how well they can identify emotion labor. One activity I have used involves persona cards, such as assigning students the role of a veteran teacher who believes standardized tests should not be the primary measure of language learning success. Students then work through scenarios in which that persona might experience tension between personal values and institutional expectations. After discussions, the feedback should not imply that anyone’s response is simply “wrong.”
Another strategy has been to encourage emotion journals. Teacher trainees need opportunities to identify and name their own emotions if they are going to become more attuned to them. I invited my students to keep a simple record of emotions they noticed in teaching and learning situations. For this activity, I think it is important that journaling remain optional and private. The goal is not confession, but noticing patterns and naming tensions.
Finally, I have tried to treat emotional reactions in class as openings for value clarification. For example, while students in my course were preparing their philosophy of teaching statements, I showed them a video advertisement from a chain of for-profit English language centers and asked them to freewrite about their emotional responses to it. The ideas that emerged then became a starting point for identifying the professional values they wanted to foreground in their teaching philosophy statements.
Empathy in teacher education should not end with caring for and about students, but it should also include helping teachers recognize, interpret, and respond to emotion labor before it hardens into disengagement. When teacher education gives future educators language for understanding these tensions, it becomes easier to see difficult emotions not as personal weakness, but as meaningful responses to professional conditions. Naming emotion labor does not solve every problem, but it can make teacher education a more honest, reflective, and caring space for the teachers we hope to prepare.
¹ Following Benesch (2017), I used the term emotion labor rather than emotional labor to emphasize the tensions teachers experience and labor they perform in relation to feeling rules, power, and professional values and expectations.
Robert C. Cunningham, Jr. is a PhD student and graduate assistant in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research interests include teacher education, teacher research, action research, and second language writing.
References
Benesch, S. (2017). Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’ Emotion
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Miller, E. R., & Gkonou, C. (2018). Language teacher agency, emotion labor and emotional
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.03.002
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Nazari, M., & Molana, K. (2023). “Predators of emotions”: The role of school assessment
policies in english language teachers’ emotion labor. TESOL Quarterly, 57(4),
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Zhang, Y., & Zhang, L. J. (2024). “Good for me to leave it for good”: a longitudinal study on how
emotion labor in teaching contributes to a beginning EFL teacher’s resignation. TESOL
Quarterly, 58(4), 1460–1492. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3289