“YOU MAKE YOURSELF ENTIRELY AVAILABLE”: EMOTIONAL LABOUR IN A CARING APPROACH TO ONLINE TEACHING

Abstract

This study examines the challenges experienced, and the pedagogy adopted, by university teachers as they transferred their teaching online during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thematic analysis of survey and interview data show that teachers engaged regularly in emotional support of students, and a pedagogy of care was discernible in the ways teachers described seeking out signals that the students’ needs were being met online. However, technology mediated communication made this more difficult in online teaching than face-to-face, increasing teachers’ emotional labour. Teachers’ efforts to achieve interaction with, and feedback from, students to inform their teaching approach, incurred a heavy burden of emotional labour that is insufficiently recognised or rewarded. This study has implications for the debate around the justification of equivalent fees for online teaching, since it reveals more emotional labour is involved. Universities risk burnout of experienced educators unless the emotional labour in online teaching is acknowledged and supported. Moreover, since emotional labour is often borne by the least privileged sections of the university workforce, this study uncovers uncomfortable questions about the persistence of systemic problems causing staff inequalities that cannot afford to be ignored.

Keywords

• Pandemic
• Teachers
• Higher Education
• Pedagogy
• Technology
• Educational Technology