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EMOTIONS AND ENGLISH

LANGUAGE TEACHING
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“This book brilliantly applies the important concept of ‘emotion labor’ to the
English language teaching arena. It provides important insights into the difficult
expectations and challenges teachers often face, and the ever-present role of power
in emotion-related aspects of teachers’ lives and work. The author takes a critical
approach, well grounded in theory, yet always returning to practice, as she focuses
on interviews with teachers about their own work and classrooms.”
Stephanie Vandrick, University of San Francisco, USA

“Insightful and provocative, this book explores how teachers respond to their
students’ needs, what goes on in their classroom, and the institutional policies they
face on a daily basis. It provides an important pedagogical tool to help effect the
necessary changes needed in the classroom and schools.”
Christian W. Chun, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

“One of the strongest impressions a reader takes away from this book is the
necessity not to ‘solve’ the problem of emotions or emotion labor but, rather, that
teachers should make emotions central to their teaching identities and practices.”
Paul McPherron, Hunter College, The City University of New York, USA

Taking a critical approach that considers the role of power, and resistance to power,
in teachers’ affective lives, Sarah Benesch examines the relationship between
English language teaching and emotions in postsecondary classrooms. The
exploration takes into account implicit feeling rules that may drive institutional
expectations of teacher performance and affect teachers’ responses to and decisions
about pedagogical matters. Based on interviews with postsecondary English
language teachers, the book analyzes ways in which they negotiate tension—
theorized as emotion labor—between feeling rules and teachers’ professional training
and/or experience, in particularly challenging areas of teaching: high-stakes literacy
testing; responding to student writing; plagiarism; and attendance. Discussion of
this rich interview data offers an expanded and nuanced understanding of English
language teaching, one positing teachers’ emotion labor as a framework for
theorizing emotions critically and as a tool of teacher agency and resistance.

Sarah Benesch is Professor Emerita of English, College of Staten Island, The City
University of New York.
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 EMOTIONS AND
ENGLISH LANGUAGE
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TEACHING
Exploring Teachers’ Emotion Labor

Sarah Benesch
 First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

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© 2017 Taylor & Francis

The right of Sarah Benesch to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-83213-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-83214-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-73618-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by FiSH Books Ltd, Enfield
 CONTENTS
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Preface vi
Acknowledgments viii

1 Introduction 1

2 Theorizing Emotions 14

3 Theorizing Emotion Labor 37

4 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 56

5 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 80

6 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 111

7 Attendance and Emotion Labor 148

8 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications 177

Index 191
 PREFACE
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Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’ Emotion Labor is a follow-
up to my 2012 book, Considering Emotions in Critical English Language Teaching:
Theories and Praxis. The earlier book examined ways to theorize emotions critically
and offered examples of how critical English language teaching (ELT) and
emotions can interact. It also included findings from interviews with teachers
about emotions and ELT. One finding of those interviews was that certain institu-
tional requirements, such as standardized literacy tests, were reported to attract a
range of often-conflicting emotions. This book pursues that finding by focusing on
teachers’ emotion labor, a concept that has been explored in various fields, including
sociology, organizational management, and education, and from a range of
perspectives, some more psychological and others more social.
Emotion labor is taken up in the current book as a social or cultural construct.
It is the conflict between institutional policies, their implied feeling rules, and
English language teachers’ professional training and/or other influences. To explore
tensions among those, I interviewed full- and part-time postsecondary English
language (EL) teachers from various colleges of one publicly funded university,
The City University of New York, about four topics that have been emotionally-
charged in my own teaching: high-stakes literacy testing, responding to student
writing, plagiarism, and student attendance.
It is important to underscore at the outset that emotion labor in this book is not
considered undesirable or eradicable, but, rather, the inevitable result of interaction
between different spheres of power: institutional, professional, and individual.
Therefore I don’t offer proposals to reduce or resolve tensions that arise when
teachers meet regulations and pedagogical situations that clash with their training
and/or expectations. Instead, I explore emotion labor as an integral and
unavoidable aspect of postsecondary ELT that should therefore be acknowledged
and studied rather than remain hidden. My claim is that emotion labor is a healthy
 Preface vii

response to challenging conditions, not the private struggle of individual teachers.

If emotion labor were destigmatized and discussed openly, it could become a tool
for teachers to organize for better pedagogical conditions. If better understood, it
might serve as a catalyst for reform.
However, for the political potential of emotion labor to be released, the notion
of positive and negative emotions, so prevalent in educational scholarship, must be
abandoned. This binary implies that certain emotions should be enhanced while
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others should be reduced in teaching contexts. So, for example, there’s been an
assumption in the ELT literature that anxiety interferes with language acquisition
and is therefore a bad emotion, one that is best overcome. Similarly, in the
educational literature, there’s an assumption that teachers should feel, or at least
display, so-called positive emotions, such as enthusiasm, to encourage student
learning. By contrast, in this book, the binary of static positive and negative
emotions is rejected in favor of a theory of emotions as overlapping and shifting
within and across social contexts. Furthermore, emotions are not viewed as psycho-
logical attributes of mind. Rather, the focus is on what emotions do socially, not
with what they are inside people’s minds. The social perspective taken in this book
allows for consideration of how emotions are discursively constructed through a
study of how they attach to certain pedagogical regulations and situations.
I envision Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’ Emotion
Labor as a text that will engage English language teachers across the globe, at both
the graduate and undergraduate levels, especially those with an interest in
relationships among pedagogy, emotions, critical theory, English language learning,
academic literacy, and assessment. Though intended primarily as a
scholarly/professional text, it could also be assigned in undergraduate or graduate
courses in teacher-education programs as a core or supplemental text. Doing so
would bring emotion labor to light by acknowledging its centrality in English
language teaching. Above all, I hope this book will inspire readers to investigate
and honor their emotion labor surrounding the issues highlighted in this book, and
others that have yet to be explored.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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I owe a huge debt of gratitude to The City University of New York (CUNY), my
professional home from 1985–2016. It is an institution of great promise, abundant
contradiction, tremendous frustration, deep satisfaction, and momentary joy.
Without the platform of its democratic dream to educate young members of New
York City’s working class, as well as its failure to consistently live up to that promise,
I would not have been able to write this book. Working as a CUNY faculty
member has produced constant emotion labor, due to issues I discuss in the book:
literacy tests used as gates to credit-bearing courses; budget cuts that swelled class
size, thereby diminishing opportunities to offer sufficient guidance to students;
routine tuition increases that forced students to work longer hours at low-paying
jobs, thereby reducing their study time; and poor public transportation to the
college that increased lateness and absence. Despite the obvious frustrations, I would
not have traded my faculty position at CUNY for any academic job in the world.
The College of Staten Island (CSI) was my CUNY home campus and my
intellectual home for 30 years. There I interacted with wonderful students whose
ambition and passion for learning transcended all the indignities they faced.
Despite the literacy gates, tuition increases, inferior transportation, large classes, and
crumbling infrastructure, they persisted. Though CSI students are not the focus of
this book, they have inspired me to better understand the relationship between
pedagogy and emotions. One student who has especially influenced me is Sharifa
Hampton. Sharifa enrolled in my 2011 undergraduate Sociology of Language class,
intending to amass prerequisites for an MA in English. However, instead of treating
my class as a hurdle to get to the next educational level, Sharifa became captivated
by the 1974 Students’ Right to their Own Language Resolution and 1996
Oakland Resolution, making both the focus of her ongoing research and teaching.
She completed her MA with Honors in 2015 and is now a faculty member in the
CSI English department.
 Acknowledgments ix

This book would have been unthinkable without the generous participation of
my CUNY colleagues who agreed to be interviewed. Though I cannot reveal their
names, I deeply appreciate the time they took to answer my questions in profound
and often surprising ways.
Having intelligent and caring colleagues with whom to share the emotion labor
has made my time at CUNY immensely gratifying. Whether at meetings of the
CUNY ESL Discipline Council or its predecessor, the CUNY ESL Council, I
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thank the following colleagues for their commitment to CUNY’s English language
learners: Ellen Block, Heather Bobrow Finn, Gay Brookes, Elaine Brooks, Cynthia
E. Casey, Martha Clark Cummings, Susan DiRaimo, Len Fox, Elisabeth Gareis,
Kate Garretson, Rachel Grant, Yvonne Groseil, Lubie Grujicic-Alatriste, Kimberly
Adilia Helmer, Stephen Horowitz, Maria Jerskey, Hamid Kherief, Howard
Kleinmann, Keming Liu, Janis Massa, Mary O’Riordan, Paul McPherron, Marcia
Schonzeit, Trudy Smoke, Carolyn Steinhoff, and Cynthia Wiseman. Some have
retired or left CUNY for other institutions, but all have furthered our
understanding of postsecondary ELT during these challenging times of creeping
neoliberalism.
At the College of Staten Island, I coordinated the ESL program in the English
department for 27 years and was fortunate to work with intelligent, creative, and
empathic teachers who helped shape my understanding of emotion labor. Thanks
to the following teachers and administrators for your commitment to our
students: Anita Aboulafia, Chrisanthi Anastopoulou, David Bridston, Lewis
Dimmick, Gloria Gianoulos, Dolores LaFata, Maria Meister, Barbara Murphy,
Sherrie Michos, Maria Aucuna Nasralla, Nora O’Connor, Robbie Pollack, Jodi
Pugliese, Sue Rocco, Lenka Rohls, Abeer Samhoury, Rachel Sanchez, Barry
Sheinkopf, Linda Sharib, Azadeh Shirgir, Harry Thorne, Rich Vento, Diane
Viggiano, and Celeste Wortes.
Further afield, I’m grateful to my colleagues who continue to honor and
nurture the relationship between theory and practice in English language teaching.
Thank you for your friendship and your incisive work: Christian Chun, Brian
Morgan, Suhanthie Motha, Matthew Prior, Sue Starfield, Stephanie Vandrick, and
Manka Varghese.
This is the third book I’ve written under the guidance of Naomi Silverman,
editeur extraordinaire. In ELT, Naomi is known and admired for her smart, fair, and
supportive approach. Despite her busy schedule, Naomi always responded quickly
and thoughtfully to my questions. I so appreciate her consistent support over the
years.
To my sisters, Amy and Jane, and my brother-in-law, Ray, thanks so much for
the restorative visits and phone conversations. Your encouragement has sustained
me throughout the writing process.
On the home front my deepest gratitude goes to my loving and generous
partner, Alan Ando, who has supported this project in every possible way. Alan
demonstrated genuine interest in my ideas and smoothed the way for me to work
on them. He offered a wide berth while cheering me on: not an easy path to
 x Acknowledgments

navigate. His delicious granola, hummus, and kitchari were the fuel that kept me
going. Alan’s children, Simone, Kai, and Dana, have also offered great support and
much-needed distraction. I’m very happy to have them, and Laura Lanz-Frolio, in
my life.
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 1
INTRODUCTION
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Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’ Emotion Labor examines
the relationship between English language teaching and teachers’ emotions in a
publicly-funded US university. Using the lens of emotion labor to explore emotions,
the book takes a critical approach, one that considers the role of power, and
resistance to power, in postsecondary English language teaching. Briefly, emotion
labor is the struggle between workplace feeling rules (Hochschild 1983) and
employees’ prior training and/or beliefs about appropriate workplace conduct.
Feeling rules are tacit expectations about how employees are supposed to react to
particular workplace situations. Emotion labor is produced when these implicit
rules clash with, or only partially correspond to, employees’ professional training,
ethics, and other influences. Though not explicitly stated or written down, feeling
rules can be deduced from institutional policies and guidelines, ones that imply
workplace demeanor or attitudes. That is, despite their tacitness, feeling rules can
be gleaned from explicit workplace rules and from teachers’ interpretation of the
affective expectations of those rules.
To give a brief example of feeling rules – one I explore more fully in Chapter
6: university plagiarism policies prescribe guidelines for detecting and reporting
instances of student plagiarism. Yet, additionally, these guidelines imply feeling
rules, including, for example, that teachers should remain vigilant and alert to the
possibility of plagiarism, considered a serious violation of so-called academic
integrity. When discovering unattributed copied text in student writing, teachers
are supposed to feel indignant, even violated. This indignation is expected to persist
and impel enforcement of rules pertaining to investigating and reporting what is
considered to be an infraction. Though the feeling rules related to plagiarism are
not explicitly spelled out, they can nonetheless provoke emotion labor because
they may conflict with English language (EL) teachers’ ethos of caring and
mentoring rather than punishing students. Or they might trigger a sense of
 2 Introduction

inadequacy when it comes to preventing plagiarism. They might also evoke a range
of other reactions: anger, frustration, concern, and so on. A struggle over which
emotions are suitable may therefore be present.
This type of dilemma, whereby emotion labor is produced by dissonance
between feeling rules and professional training and/or ethics, is the focus of this
book. My claim is that emotion labor is central to EL teaching, often guiding
decisions about pedagogical matters, and it therefore merits serious attention. The
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purpose of this exploration is not to prevent, avoid, or diminish emotion labor, but
instead to raise awareness of it. Acknowledging and exploring emotion labor is a
step toward its use as a tool for informed decision-making as well as possible
resistance and reform.
Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’ Emotion Labor is based
on interviews with 13 English language teachers at the City University of New
York (CUNY), a publicly-funded US university with a large immigrant
population. Two additional CUNY English language teachers answered the
interview questions through a questionnaire. Participants responded to questions
about four areas of English language postsecondary teaching that tend to be
regulated, either through institutional policies or professional guidelines: high-
stakes literacy testing, responding to student writing, plagiarism, and attendance.
Given the regulation of these aspects of English language teaching (ELT), they are
particularly “sticky” (Ahmed 2004), meaning prone to attracting emotions and
emotion labor. Discussion of this rich interview data offers an expanded and
nuanced understanding of ELT by focusing on an under-researched area of
pedagogy: emotion work that may be as demanding as the intellectual work of
teaching, if not more so.
As to the organization of the current book, in Chapters 2 and 3, I lay the
theoretical groundwork for the analysis of the interview data appearing in
Chapters 4 through 7. In Chapter 2, I describe differences between three
approaches to the study of emotions found in various scholarly literatures:
biological, cognitive, and poststructural/discursive. This discussion clarifies how the
latter approach to emotions (poststructural/discursive), the one taken in this book,
is distinct from those positing emotions as genetically-determined (biological) and
those that consider emotions to be features of the human mind (cognitive), the
dominant perspective in the literature on emotions and ELT.
Following my discussion of emotions in Chapter 2, I outline differences
between structural and poststructural approaches to emotion labor in Chapter 3.
Beginning with the work of Arlie Hochschild (1979, 1983, 2003), who first coined
the terms emotion management, emotion work, and emotional labor, I discuss research
influenced by her path-breaking studies of workplace regulation of emotions. Yet,
while acknowledging Hochschild’s pioneering contribution to understanding the
relationship between unequal power in the workplace and emotion labor, I also
explain how my poststructural analysis differs from hers. Briefly, I question the
following dichotomies present in her work: real vs. fake self, private vs. public self,
and inner vs. outer feelings.
 Introduction 3

My point in questioning those dichotomies is to challenge the notion of a

unitary authentic self whose essence is compromised when having to display
workplace emotions that violate the putative real self. In place of a fixed and
essential self, poststructural theorists propose discursively-constructed selves
“whose meaning emerges out of reflexive social interactions with others” (Tracy
and Trethewey 2005, p. 170). Along these lines, a poststructural/discursive approach
to emotion labor engages with ways in which discourses of power constitute selves
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in the “destabilized and multivocal” (p. 171) contemporary world. Furthermore, in

this book, emotion labor is not considered to be pernicious, as it was in
Hochschild’s formulation (1983), but rather, inevitably embedded in human
interaction and therefore a promising area of investigation and transformation in
ELT.
Chapters 4 to 7 are each focused on one topic about which the 15 EL teachers
answered questions: high-stakes literacy testing, responding to student writing,
plagiarism, and attendance. Each of these four chapters begins with a review of the
literature on that topic, followed by analysis of the interview data related to the
questions I posed to the respondents about that topic. The aim of the literature
reviews at the start of Chapters 4 to 7 is to include studies that have examined
emotions in the context of each of the four areas. Even in cases when the research
did not explicitly theorize emotions or emotion labor, but instead suggested the
presence of emotions, I included it to encourage further discussion of the
relationship between pedagogy and emotions. Chapter 8 concludes the book by
summarizing the findings, discussing pedagogical implications, and offering
suggestions for future emotion-labor research.
The rationale for Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’
Emotion Labor is offered next in the form of a personal history of my emotion labor.
This history aims to demonstrate my investment in exploring emotion labor as an
important area of ELT and to explain why I chose to investigate the four topics
presented in Chapters 4 through 7. As I’ll show in this history, the four issues taken
up in those chapters have been the stickiest in my teaching and therefore the ones
provoking the strongest emotion labor. The title of each subsection is a question
meant to suggest the struggle between opposing approaches that provoked my
emotion labor.

Rationale: My Emotion-Labor History

High-Stakes Literacy Testing: Standardized Assessment or

Pedagogical Reforms?
In 1985 I was hired as an assistant professor in the English department of the
College of Staten Island, one of 17 colleges of CUNY. Thrilled to land an
academic position in New York City, where I had attended graduate school, with
the prospect of teaching open-admissions students in a publicly-funded college, I
entered with little knowledge of the politics of literacy testing, an area that had not
 4 Introduction

been explored in my graduate studies in applied linguistics. Despite my lack of

prior knowledge of testing policies, it quickly became clear how fraught they were.
The reading and writing assessment tests given to entering students determined
who would be required to take English as a Second Language (ESL) or develop-
mental courses and who would be permitted direct entry to first-year composition.
Because many of the students had exited from ESL programs during their primary
or secondary education, they had not expected to be placed in ESL courses in
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college. Therefore on the first day of each semester, students displayed a range of
reactions, including dismay, anger, fear, and shame, that deserved to be taken into
account.
Hoping to educate myself further about literacy testing in CUNY, I joined the
CUNY ESL Council, established in 1971 as a forum for discussing pedagogical
issues. It was clear from the first meeting I attended that the reading and writing
tests, and their uses, were controversial. Though some members believed in the
inevitability of standardized university-wide literacy testing to flag students who
were deemed unready for college-level work, others were dubious about the tests
themselves and their uses. Instead of excluding those who failed the literacy tests
from the mainstream, these detractors proposed pedagogical solutions across the
curriculum, such as paired language and content courses, that would provide all
entering students with instruction customized to their literacy backgrounds and
needs (Benesch 1988, 1991).
The ambivalence about literacy testing was my first experience of emotion
labor in academia, though I didn’t conceptualize it as such at the time. However, I
can see in retrospect that conflicts among my training in ESL pedagogy, my support
of open admissions, and the mandated standardized tests that excluded students
from the mainstream generated emotion labor. My training as an ESL professional
led me to gravitate toward sheltering English language learners in classes where
they would receive instructional and personal attention surrounded by other non-
native speaking students, thereby offering a refuge as they acclimated to college.
On the other hand, my support for equal educational opportunity, grounded in
my public school education in Washington DC in the 1960s (Benesch 2012), led
me to question the exclusion of ESL students from first-year writing courses. Yet,
I wondered about the impact of the inferior education my students had received
in overcrowded and underfunded New York City public high schools. Immigrant
students’ attendance at these schools was marked by neglect, especially when it
came to language education. How was CUNY to compensate for the years of
inattention, except by offering the shelter of ESL instruction?
Still, I balked at CUNY’s tacit language policy that constructed literacy as a set
of skills to be remediated before students were allowed to be mainstreamed. English
departments and ESL programs were expected to prepare students not just to pass
the literacy tests, but also to master academic reading and writing so that faculty in
other departments would not have to engage with language issues. This
expectation failed to consider that language is the shared responsibility of all
postsecondary instructors, given that curricula in each discipline are imbued in
 Introduction 5

language. According to this language-across-the-curriculum (LAC) perspective,

faculty at every instructional level should tailor their courses to open-admissions
students rather than expecting students to meet a predetermined literacy standard
before being allowed to enter the mainstream. LAC posits reading and writing as
the domain of all departments, not just English departments. The struggle to
reconcile the sheltered ESL and LAC approaches is another example of what I’m
characterizing as emotion labor.1
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Though the emotion labor of high-stakes literacy testing is discussed further in

Chapter 4, I’ve introduced emotion labor through that topic in this chapter to
illustrate ways that professional training and institutional regulations may interact.
They may initially coincide as they did in my support of sheltered ESL courses. Yet,
they may also come into conflict as real politics become more apparent, leading to
increased emotion labor, as they did for me when it came to LAC issues. Another
way to put it is that emotion labor can serve to signal a problem requiring attention
and an area in need of reform. Another example of this type of conflict is discussed
next.

Responding to Student Writing: Toward Revision or Correctness?

Before being hired at the College of Staten Island (CSI), I was enrolled in the
English Education/Applied Linguistics doctoral program at New York University
(NYU) in the early 1980s. This was the heyday of the process-writing movement.
Therefore the courses emphasized what Berlin (1988) later labeled “expressionistic
rhetoric” (p. 485), based on the assumption that the writing teacher’s job is to
encourage students to develop their personal voice. Pedagogically speaking, process
writing was carried out through invention strategies, multiple drafts, and feedback
toward revision of the individual writer’s ideas. Editing was almost an afterthought,
believed to come into play only when the writing was in its final stage and ready
to go public. In fact, a text assigned in one of my doctoral courses, Writing Without
Teachers (Elbow 1973), described editing and self-editing unfavorably, as
impediments to writers’ free expression and elaboration of their ideas:

The editor is, as it were, constantly looking over the shoulder of the producer
and constantly fiddling with what he’s doing while he’s in the middle of
trying to do it. No wonder the producer gets nervous, jumpy, inhibited, and
finally can’t be coherent. It’s an unnecessary burden to try to think of words
and also worry at the same time whether they’re the right words (p. 5).

A key precept of the doctoral program, then, was for teachers to encourage
students’ voices and avoid derailing their personal intentions. Another influential
text in that regard was written by two of the NYU doctoral faculty: Brannon and
Knoblauch (1984), Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Among other
ideas, the authors urged writing teachers not to impose an Ideal Text on their
reading of student texts by imposing their own. The Ideal Text, then, became the
 6 Introduction

third rail of composition pedagogy: one to be avoided at all costs. To prevent

ourselves from supplanting student writers’ intentions with our own, we were
taught, for example, to ask students to write their intentions in the margins of their
papers. These margin notes served as guidance for our feedback, with the hope that
they would keep us from misinterpreting students’ aims and imposing our own.
We were also taught to encourage peer feedback by setting up small groups in
our writing classes and having students read and respond to each other’s writing.
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This was the dominant pedagogy of the NYU first-year writing courses taught by
doctoral students when I was a graduate student. As one of those writing
instructors, I found peer groups such a compelling way to teach that my doctoral
dissertation explored three of my students’ peer group conversations over the
course of a semester.
That is to say, I was steeped in an ideology of expressionistic rhetoric that called
for freeing student writers from intrusive feedback to allow them to explore their
intentions through talk and writing. Furthermore this was the ideology promoted
by ESL compositionists, Zamel (1976, 1982, 1983) and Raimes (1985). Their work,
and that of Britton (1970), Berthoff (1981) and others, influenced the process
pedagogy adopted in an ESL composition textbook, Academic Writing Workshop,
which two of my peers and I wrote while in graduate school (Benesch, Rakijas and
Rorschach 1987). In the “Introduction to teachers” we wrote about the “almost
overwhelming” anxiety ESL students experience about “their ability to produce
correct written English” (p. xiii). To address our claim about that anxiety, we
recommended freewriting and journal writing as invention techniques.
Despite my co-authors’ and my passionate embrace of process pedagogy, this
approach was not fully supported in the ESL composition community. Rejection
of the process approach was particularly strong among advocates of English for
academic purposes (EAP), the field that aimed to prepare students for traditional
academic assignments, such as short-answer exams and in-class essays (Horowitz
1986). EAP specialists opposed the use of expressionist rhetoric in teaching writing,
claiming that emphasizing personal voice over academic requirements was an
impediment to academic success.
Though the process/product debate has subsided in EAP, the debate of the mid-
to late-1980s about appropriate feedback on student writing endures in ELT.
Influencing the debate are the students themselves who often clamor for feedback
about their usage. Editing and correctness may have been relegated to the final
stage of composition in the process paradigm, but that ranking does not necessarily
sit well with English language learners (ELLs), as I discovered when I began
teaching at the College of Staten Island in 1985. I also found out that CSI students,
for the most part, did not want to participate in peer groups in ESL writing classes,
a finding supported by Yorio’s (1989) survey of ESL students at Lehman College,
CUNY. My students, and those surveyed by Yorio, reported that they did not want
to listen to their peers’ essays read out loud. Nor did they feel qualified to comment
on their peers’ writing, as the following quote from one of Yorio’s survey partic-
ipants illustrated:
 Introduction 7

My teachers believe that getting a class to break into groups helps them to
improve their vocabulary, spelling and grammar. How can the teacher believe
that getting students into groups can help to improve their vocabulary,
spelling and grammar when all of the students are in the same boat and there
is no land around them? Students with the same problem cannot help others,
when they are not sure themselves what the answer is. How can other
students believe what their mates are saying when they are not sure of the
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knowledge of their mates? Group consulting is a big waste of time!

(Yorio 1989, p. 39)

I recall struggling with Yorio’s findings when they were published because they
conflicted so strongly with my graduate training. I wondered if EL teachers should
be guided by students’ negative reactions to unfamiliar pedagogy, especially when
composition research had demonstrated that a premature focus on correctness
could impede the development of clear expression of ideas, the sine qua non of
process pedagogy. And yet, I could also see ELLs’ point that peer groups might
appear to be a waste of time if they saw themselves and their peers as “in the same
boat,” that is, equally unequipped to provide useful feedback about peers’ drafts.
However, though I eventually abandoned peer groups, my emotion labor about
responding to student writing has persisted. Mainly I continue to wonder whether
I should give students the corrective feedback to which they are accustomed,
especially given conflicting findings about its short- and long-term usefulness and
my political concerns about standard language ideology.
In other words, in terms of emotion labor, the debate in the scholarly literature
about the role of written corrective feedback, described in great detail in Chapter
5, plays out every time I read student papers. As committed as I was to process
pedagogy as a graduate student and a beginning assistant professor, I later sought
ways to respect students’ desire for feedback about usage at every stage of writing,
balancing feedback toward revision and correctness. Yet, I also worry that giving
feedback about usage is a betrayal of multilingual aims and a support of standard
language ideology. I wonder too if it stymies the development of my students’
writing abilities in the areas of clarity and elaboration.
Despite all my emotion labor about responding to student writing, I believe the
debate in the scholarly literature and the one I have with myself, is healthy. It
indicates that questions about the most beneficial types of feedback are ongoing,
complex, and contextual rather than resolved once and for all in every context.
They might therefore be answered in collaboration with students (see suggestions
in the concluding chapter). This is also the case with emotion labor regarding
plagiarism, discussed next.

Plagiarism: Academic Dishonesty, Inexperience, Or … ?

Emotion labor related to plagiarism revolves around the degree to which students
are consciously and deliberately engaging in acts of what university plagiarism
 8 Introduction

policies label “academic dishonesty.” Are they trying to deceive their teacher into
believing that they wrote the copied portions of their text? Are they simply
unaware of citation conventions? Is their limited academic English a contributing
factor? These questions and others can come into play when encountering
obviously copied portions in ELLs’ writing and, as shown in Chapter 6, they
contribute to emotion labor about this highly-charged topic, one that tends to be
strongly sanctioned by postsecondary institutions.
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CSI instructors, like many around the world, are required to include a portion
of the university plagiarism policy on our syllabi. The excerpt of this policy that I
reluctantly include on my syllabi is:

CSI’s Statement on Plagiarism and Cheating is as follows: “Integrity is

fundamental to the academic enterprise. It is violated by such acts as
borrowing or purchasing term papers, essays, reports, and other written
assignments; using concealed notes or crib sheets during examinations;
copying the work of others and submitting it as one’s own; and misappro-
priating the knowledge of others. The source from which one derives one’s
ideas, statements, terms, and data must be fully and specifically acknowledged
in the appropriate form; failure to do so, intentionally or unintentionally,
constitutes plagiarism. Violations of academic integrity may result in failure
in a course and in disciplinary actions with penalties such as suspension or
dismissal from the college.”

However, the inclusion of this language on my syllabus has not prevented instances
of a portion of a published text appearing in at least one student’s writing each
semester. I offer an example next to demonstrate the emotion labor such an
incident can entail for EL teachers, particularly due to our awareness of the
challenges of writing in additional languages. Furthermore, those of us who teach
in publicly-funded universities, the majority of whose students work and/or have
families, are also aware that these additional responsibilities can lead students to cut
corners in the form of pasting full sentences and/or paragraphs from the Internet
into their own texts. We might therefore struggle with how to approach students
with our suspicions of plagiarism out of concern for the challenges of their often
stressful lives. My example illustrates all of these factors and my related emotion
labor.
In preparation for the upcoming CUNY writing assessment test, my students
wrote a response to an article contrasting online chat and face-to-face conver-
sation, not a particularly inspired topic, but one that mirrors the type of reading
and writing required on the university-wide writing test. While reading their
papers, I noticed that one of the students seemed to have copied parts of her
response, using words and phrases I was pretty sure were not in her working
vocabulary, such as “facade” and “stilted conversation.” I therefore googled a
sentence from the student’s paper and found it in a dating blog, though I had to
search beyond the initial page to find it. The sentences I was looking for weren’t
 Introduction 9

in the main part of the site, but, rather, in one of the readers’ comments so they
could be found only by scrolling down a considerable length and reading through
all the comments. The added time of hunting for this comment, most of which my
student had lifted verbatim, added to my irritation. My annoyance was
compounded by wondering whether copying a harder-to-find comment was a
deliberate choice, intended to throw me off the scent.
So there I was, embarking on a four-part process: 1) noticing that sentences in
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the student’s writing were most likely not written by her; 2) searching for the same
sentences on the web; 3) printing out the portion of the website from which the
student had most likely plagiarized and; 4) informing the student about the
discovery of her plagiarism. This process was accompanied by emotion labor at
every step. When noticing the plagiarism, I felt irritation, disappointment, and
dread at having to find the source. Seeking the source produced feelings of further
irritation and indignation at having to spend time doing this detecting. In terms of
CUNY’s plagiarism policy’s feeling rules related to detection, discussed at length
in Chapter 6, I seem to have been obeying them up to that point.
However, planning when and how to inform the student that I had discovered
her plagiarism added layers of emotion labor not covered by the plagiarism policy’s
tacit feeling rules. I wanted to make clear to the student how easy it was for me to
spot her plagiarism so that she would avoid it in the future. Yet, I also strove to
avoid shaming her in the process because I knew she had two children and a part-
time job. This knowledge led me to wonder whether childcare issues had come
into play. So I wanted to ask her why she had copied. My curiosity about her
reason(s) revolved around possible differences between what her thinking might
have been and institutional understanding of plagiarism as academic dishonesty.
Despite my careful planning about what to say to this student at the end of the
next class and how lightly to tread, my plan failed. As it turned out, she was late
that day and when I asked her to stay after class, she assumed that I wanted to talk
to her about her lateness which had happened before. Therefore, when she stayed
after class to talk to me, she didn’t wait to listen to why I wanted to speak to her.
Instead, she began explaining, in a rapid-fire way, that she had been late because of
heavy traffic. When I told her that wasn’t the reason I had wanted to talk to her
and showed her the reproduced part of the blog she had copied from, she said that
she hadn’t needed to use that comment because she had understood the reading.
She also told me she had only used the copied portion as an example, seeming to
believe that this was an acceptable justification for the copying.
Rather than re-explaining citation to this student, I decided to describe the
emotion labor I had experienced when noticing her copied text, tracking down
the source, and planning how to broach it with her. That got her attention. Rather
than defending her position, she seemed to understand that she had made extra
work for me. From that day on, I’ve discussed plagiarism with my students in terms
of my emotion labor as a way to underscore the relational aspect of writing and
responding to writing. By revealing my emotion labor, I refuse the position of
enforcer of a dubious plagiarism policy, one that neglects a variety of reasons for
 10 Introduction

copying that may have nothing to do with academic dishonesty. This example, and
others like it in Chapter 6, demonstrates the intersection of a university plagiarism
policy, implicit feeling rules, teachers’ emotion labor, and the ethos in ELT of
understanding students’ challenging lives, including writing in additional
languages.

Classroom Attendance: What Does Absence Mean?

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Like plagiarism, student attendance is regulated in many postsecondary institutions,

particularly ones that, like CUNY, rely on public funds and are therefore
accountable to legislators. Faculty are charged with recording lateness and absence,
though how institutions sanction missed class time can vary, as I discuss further in
Chapter 7. Over the years, noticing and recording students’ late arrivals and no-
shows produced emotion labor and I therefore included student attendance as the
final topic of the interviews.
An interplay of annoyance and concern is what I’ve been most aware of when
it comes to lateness and absence. On the annoyance side is my initial assumption
that being late or absent indicates a casual attitude toward the extensive preparation
I put into activities and assignments. There’s an expectation of parity: I put in a
certain amount of time and you should too. I wonder how the student could blow
off the class and risk missing valuable lessons that could benefit them.
On the concern side is wondering if a problem is keeping the student away. Is
he or she sick, emotionally upset, or exhausted from working and going to school?
So, the absence or lateness signals a need to investigate further to find out if
attendance was affected by a serious impediment rather than indifference.
Furthermore, I remind myself of how students can be invisible in large urban high
schools and that one of my jobs is to let them know that their absence is noticeable
and their presence matters.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable aspect of taking attendance is awareness of
differences in students’ economic situations and how institutional sanctions don’t
factor those differences into attendance policies. Penalties are one-size-fits-all,
permitting no distinction between, say, students whose parents pay their tuition and
living expenses, even buying them a car, and students who must work, care for their
families, and rely on public transportation. The emotion labor of attendance then
consists, in part, of weighing various social factors, including class differences,
despite the uniformity of the policy.
For example, I once had a student who confided in me at the beginning of the
term that she would probably be frequently late due to a botched hip surgery that
had left it difficult and painful for her to walk. She had not been able to afford
further surgeries. Furthermore, this student worked both night and day shifts
alternatively, and had to depend on unreliable and inconvenient public
transportation to get to her job and to the college. In fact, at times she had to walk
to the bus stop in the early morning hours before the sun had risen—a threat to
her personal safety. True to the student’s warning, she was late for almost every
 Introduction 11

class. I was then faced with how to enforce the following attendance policy that
appeared on my syllabus:

Students should be in their seats when the class begins. Lateness is disruptive
to the professor and students. Three latenesses will count as one hour of
absence. Walking out of class or leaving early will count as one hour of
absence so please be prepared to stay in the classroom for the entire class
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period.

Despite this stated policy, I decided to apply it unevenly, enforcing it for the able-
bodied students and not for the student who had difficulty walking. My emotion
labor was due to wondering if that was a fair decision, but then reminding myself
that students are not on a level playing field and policies therefore have to be
applied in ways that take inequality into account. Yet, I then wondered about the
harshness of my stated policy and how it affected students who might have had
problems I was unaware of that made it difficult for them to be on time as well.
On the other hand, I knew from experience that without sanctions for lateness,
some students might take their time getting to class, disrupting activities in progress
and falling behind.
Another example of the inequality of attendance is the case of students who live
very far from campus, requiring that they take different forms of often-unreliable
transportation. In the case of CSI students, this can include some combination of
buses, subways, and a ferry: the larger the number of transfers, the greater the
chance of lateness. Therefore I collaborate with each late student to plot out the
hour they should leave home to arrive on time and which buses and subways to
take to minimize the chance of lateness. The interest shown in their attendance
seems to remind them of the importance of their presence.
Although lateness and absence appear to be mundane aspects of teaching, they
produce emotion labor in teachers because they can send powerful messages to
instructors about their worth and effectiveness. This and other issues related to the
emotion labor of attendance are the subject of Chapter 7.

A Note on Methodology
The perspective taken in Emotions and English Language Teaching: Exploring Teachers’
Emotion Labor is poststructural/discursive. This means that the focus is on the
discourses circulating in ELT around the topics of the interviews. Therefore, in the
data analysis sections of Chapters 4 through 7, rather than identifying interview
data with particular speakers, I use “R,” meaning response. That is, I have excerpted
interviewees’ responses without referring to individual speakers by pseudonym or
other indicators of their identity. The use of “R” is a way to avoid attributing
responses to speakers’ gender, race, ethnicity, and so on. Instead responses are
numbered (R1, R2, and so on) and grouped according to the discourses I
discovered when analyzing the interviews. In doing so, I focus the data analysis on
 12 Introduction

emotion-labor discourses of ELT rather than correlating them to aspects of

individual speakers’ identities.
On the other hand, when power relations seemed most obviously at play, I
revealed aspects of the speakers’ identities in two areas: job status and length of years
in the institution. As to job status, in those instances when that information seemed
relevant to feeling rules and emotion labor, I indicated whether the speaker was
full- or part-time. This is equally true for instances when number of years on the
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job seemed relevant to power and emotion labor, as in the case of respondents who
held leadership positions, such as ESL coordinators.
My final point about methodology is that by choosing to refer to interviewees’
statements as “R” and leaving out information about their identities, in the interest
of starkly revealing the discourses I uncovered, the data might appear disembodied
and impersonal. To compensate for this possible impression, I’ve revealed aspects of
my own teacher identity and offered many personal examples throughout the
book. The aim of this information is to humanize and personalize my
understanding of emotion labor.

A Final Note on Emotion Labor

My use of emotion labor in the title and throughout the book rather than emotional
labor, a more commonly used phrase, is due to the negative connotation of
emotional, a term used to suggest that someone, especially a woman, is acting in an
overwrought and socially undesirable manner. I therefore wanted to avoid that type
of association. By pairing emotion and labor I also hope to communicate that English
language teaching connects affect and intellect, body and work, passion and
rationality, and that it is intimately and intricately influenced by power relations.
I’ve tried to be consistent in bringing these often-separated aspects of ELT
together, hoping to provoke greater research and pedagogical interest in emotion
labor in years to come.

Note
1 As this book goes to press, the central CUNY administration is considering the removal
of high-stakes tests for reading and writing. At local and CUNY-wide meetings,
emotion labor is evident in expressions of support for multiple measures alongside
concerns about how the removal of placement tests might be a catalyst to eventually
phasing out ESL and developmental courses.

References
Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
Benesch, S., Rakijas, M. and Rorschach, B. (1987). Academic Writing Workshop. Belmont CA:
Wadsworth.
Benesch, S. (1988). Ending Remediation: Linking ESL and Content in Higher Education.
Washington DC: TESOL.
 Introduction 13

Benesch, S. (1991). ESL on campus: Questioning testing and tracking policies. In S. Benesch
(ed.). ESL in America: Myths and Possibilities (59–74). Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook
Heinemann.
Benesch, S. (2012). Considering Emotions in Critical English Language Teaching: Theories and
Praxis. New York: Routledge.
Berlin, J. (1988). Rhetoric and ideology in the writing class. College English 55, 477–494.
Berthoff, A.E. (1981). The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models, and Maxims for Writing
Teachers. Montclair NJ: Boynton/Cook.
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Brannon, L. and Knoblauch, C.H. (1984). Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing.
Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Britton, J.N. (1970). Language and Learning. London: Penguin Books.
Elbow, P. (1973). Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hochschild, A. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structures. Journal of Sociology
85, 551–75.
Hochschild, A. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feelings. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Hochschild, A. (2003). The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Horowitz, D. (1986). What professors actually require: Academic tasks for the ESL classroom.
TESOL Quarterly 20, 445–462.
Raimes, A. (1985). What unskilled writers do as they write: A classroom study of
composing. TESOL Quarterly 19, 229–258.
Tracy, S.J. and Trethewey, A. (2005). Fracturing the real self fake self dichotomy: Moving
toward “crystallized” organizational discourses and identities. Communication Theory 15,
168–195.
Yorio, C. (1989). The other side of the looking glass. Journal of Basic Writing 8, 32–45.
Zamel, V. (1976). Teaching composition in the ESL classroom: What we can learn from
research in the teaching of English. TESOL Quarterly 10, 67–76.
Zamel, V. (1982). Writing: The process of discovering meaning. TESOL Quarterly 16, 195–
209.
Zamel, V. (1983). The composing processes of advanced ESL writers: Six case studies.
TESOL Quarterly 17, 165–188.
 2
THEORIZING EMOTIONS
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To assume that our emotions were also the emotions of the past is to be
utterly unhistorical. Indeed, the very idea of “emotions” as a category is a
fairly recent construction. … It is important, therefore, to know what words
signified emotions for the particular emotional community you are dealing
with.
(Plamper 2010, p. 253)

Rather than treating emotion as either internal to the individual or a

somehow pervasive and intangible aspect of social interaction, we treat it as
intimately associated with social spaces such as the family, and material places
such as the home, the community and what lies beyond.
(Robinson, Hockey and Meah 2004, p. 419)

Ethnography throws up examples that contradict our expectations of how

emotions work, prompting doubts about whether they qualify as emotions,
and therefore whether there are such things—cross-culturally and
unambiguously—as emotions (as opposed to diverse combinations of
appraisals, feelings, etc.).
(Beatty 2013, p. 417)

Who is allowed to feel and express enthusiasm (or contempt) for particular
ideas or practices? Which display rules are dominant and why? To what
extent can alternative discourses of emotivity co-exist in particular socio-
historical settings? Such questions are crucial when studying emotional
interaction in multicultural societies.
(Svasek and Skrbis 2007, p. 378–9)
 Theorizing Emotions 15

The quotes that open this chapter demonstrate that scholars in fields as diverse as
history, geography, anthropology, and sociology have taken up the study of
emotions to redress the mind/body split underlying social science research for
centuries. Scholars participating in the affective turn in these fields have faced the
challenge of how to theorize emotions. This question has led to debates about
whether there might be an agreed-upon definition, including whether emotions
are bodily sensations, features of the mind, and/or social constructions. Despite the
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lack of agreement, it is instructive to attend to the sensibilities of historians,

geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists when considering emotions, as
revealed in the quotes above. They represent poststructural approaches to emotions,
the theoretical framework of this book.
The first quote, from Plamper’s (2010) interview of historians Reddy,
Rosenswein, and Stearns, challenges both biological and cognitive approaches,
discussed later in this chapter: ones that assume emotions are universal traits
unvarying across time. To challenge this universalist notion, historians taking a
poststructural approach claim that emotions have been conceptualized, referred to,
and experienced in varying ways during and across different time periods. They
believe these differences ought to be accounted for in historical research to forestall
the notion of emotions as unvarying and natural aspects of human life.
The second quote illustrates a growing interest among geographers in the
interaction between spaces and emotions. This includes the notion of emotional
geographies, a concept that acknowledges the role of emotions in investigating
relationships between people and places, such as homes, workplaces, communities,
and institutions, including schools and universities (Davidson and Milligan 2004).
The third quote, from anthropologist Beatty, grapples with the question of how
to define emotions in context, particularly given that anthropologists often
describe events and activities in cultures other than the ones in which they were
raised. According to Leavitt (1996), cross-cultural research demands that anthro-
pologists come to terms with their own cultural assumptions about emotions,
including how they categorize them. They must also, he claimed, question the
assumption that their emotion categories have “universal validity” (p. 516) and are
therefore cross-culturally relevant. That is, like poststructural historians and
geographers, anthropologists working in this paradigm view emotions as
contextual and shifting, not innate or universal.
Poststructural sociologists, too, grapple with how to theorize emotions, coining
new terms, such as “emotivity,” to signal the fluidity of emotions as they are
performed in particular social contexts. In addition, the questions posed by Svasek
and Skrbis (2007) demonstrate an interest in the relationship between emotions
and power (“Who is allowed to feel … ?”), a clear departure from biological and
cognitive approaches with their conceptualization of emotions as private feelings
originating in the brain or mind and unaffected by power relations.
Given the range of lenses that might be used to study emotions, it’s important
to situate my research within a particular paradigm. The theoretical approach I take
to emotions in this book is poststructural and discursive. This means that emotions
 16 Theorizing Emotions

are theorized as contextual, cultural, overlapping, and related to power. Equally

important are the ways in which poststructural/discursive conceptualizations of
emotions differ from biological and cognitive ones. In this regard, emotions in this
book are not innate, not internal psychological states, not universal, not measurable,
not monolithic, not static, and not unchanging across time and space. In fact, I focus
not so much on what emotions are as on what they do (Ahmed 2004). My concern
is with how emotions attach to policies and activities in postsecondary ELT
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(Benesch 2012), a concept I discuss in detail in the last section of this chapter:
Poststructural/discursive approaches.
To highlight what emotions are and what they are not, from a
poststructural/discursive perspective, this chapter begins with a discussion of two
other approaches to the study of emotions: biological and cognitive.1 Assumptions
driving the three approaches are discussed as well as examples of research from each
perspective, including some in ELT. In this way the contrast between the three
approaches will be highlighted. At the end of the chapter, I also include a
discussion of the ways in which a poststructural/discursive perspective guided my
study of emotions in the data collection and analysis I present in later chapters.

Biological Approaches: Emotions are Innate

Structuralist Assumptions of Biological Approaches to Emotions

[Darwin’s] view has been transformed into the theoretical foundation for the
modern science of emotional expression, called the ‘basic emotion’ approach
in which it is hypothesized that certain physical movements in the face and
body are evolved adaptations that are biologically basic in their form and
function.
(Barrett 2011, p. 400)

Assumptions driving biological approaches are that emotions are innate, they
originate in the brain, and they have evolved to allow humans to respond to the
challenges of managing their daily lives. By claiming that emotions are innate, those
taking a biological approach also conceptualize emotions as universally shared, not
culturally constructed. Emotions are viewed as common to all humans, regardless
of geography, history, and social identities.
Given the focus on universality and innateness, it is helpful to discuss biological
approaches to emotions as an example of structuralism. In doing so, I am setting up
a contrast to the poststructural approach I take in this book. Also, I hope that by
bringing in Saussure, as I do next, the contrast between structuralist and poststruc-
turalist approaches to emotions will be clear to my audience of English language
teachers, who may be knowledgeable about Saussurian assumptions about
language.
The intellectual origins of biological approaches to emotions can be located in
the structuralist tradition exemplified by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure
 Theorizing Emotions 17

(1857–1913). Saussure, a Swiss linguist, distinguished langue (language as a system)

and parole (acts of speaking), hypothesizing common structural features shared by
all languages, the langue side of the binary. Parole, on the other hand, is the spoken
use of language, considered less worthy of study due in part to variations and
inconsistencies in speaking. Like those taking a biological approach to emotions,
Saussure was not interested in variation, but, rather, uniformity and universality.
One of his primary goals was to “determine the forces that are permanently and
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universally at work in all languages, and to deduce the general laws to which all
specific historical phenomena can be reduced” (Saussure 2011, p. 6).
Saussure (2011) posited the following characteristics of langue: 1) it is a “a well-
defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts … outside the individual
who can never create nor modify it by himself ” (p. 14); 2) it must be isolated from
parole and all other “elements” (p. 15) in order for its study to be scientific; 3) it is
“homogeneous” while parole is “heterogeneous” (p. 15); 4) it consists of linguistic
signs, “realities that have their seat in the brain” (p. 15). This positing of an area of
study as an object composed of discrete elements that are fixed and located in the
brain has been applied to the exploration of other features of human life, such as
culture, discussed next, and emotions, especially in biological approaches. The
structural project is to break phenomena down into discrete components that are
then studied as a way of accessing reality.
Like Saussure, anthropologist Levi-Strauss (1908–2009), sought to find the
commonalities between cultures, hoping to discover “universal structures
embedded deep in the human mind” (Belsey 2002, p. 42). According to Herman
(1997), Levi-Strauss had an interest in “scientificity” whereby he “drew on
linguistic and mathematical models in an effort to establish anthropology, and the
social sciences more generally, on the same footing as the natural sciences” (n.p.).
Thus, when social fields, such as anthropology and sociology, take a structuralist
approach, they borrow natural science methods in an effort to discover natural laws
governing social processes. This positivist perspective is manifest in biological
approaches to emotion research, examples of which I offer in the next subsection.
Ideologically speaking, according to Pennycook (2001), when first proposed, the
structuralist framework had a progressive focus: to challenge elitist hierarchies that
had posited some languages as more sophisticated than others.2 By seeking
universal features, or natural laws, structuralist linguists hoped to destroy the myth
of primitive vs. sophisticated languages and demonstrate that all languages are
complex. Thus, the emphasis was on description rather than prescription. The aim
was to describe languages “in their own structural terms” (Pennycook 2001, p. 32),
a move away from research driven by judgments about deviations from elite
standard varieties, those used by more powerful members of a population. The shift
of research away from these deviations toward linguistic elements shared by all
languages, langue and later universal grammar, can be described as “structuralist
egalitarianism” (p. 32) whereby “all structures are equal” (p. 32).
However, as Pennycook (2001) explained, despite its progressive aims,
structuralist egalitarianism undermines its own political project. By insisting that all
 18 Theorizing Emotions

languages are equal rather than engaging with the real politics of linguistic
inequality, structuralists contribute to the injustices perpetrated by intolerance of
linguistic variety. Their focus on langue rather than parole immunizes them from
confronting the serious consequences for speakers of disfavored languages,
including diminished educational and employment opportunities. Additionally,
structuralists’ adoption of positivist research methodologies, including classifying
and measuring a posited set of common internal structures hides sociopolitical
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factors shaping languages, including “profound questions of social difference,

inequality, and conflict” (Pennycook 2001, p. 33).
The concern about structuralist egalitarianism can also be raised about research
taking a biological approach to emotions, discussed next. The assumption in this
approach—that emotions are innate and universal—overlooks the hierarchical
ranking of emotions in various settings with some seen as acceptable and others
inappropriate, especially when they are exhibited by disfavored groups, such as
women and minorities. The consequences of these hierarchies for English language
teachers are discussed later in this chapter in the section on poststructural/
discursive approaches.

Examples of Biological Approaches to Emotion Research

A clear example of a biological approach to emotions is psychologist Ekman’s
(1993) research on basic emotions, spanning over 40 years, from the early 1970s to
the early-twenty-first century. The aim of his research was to test Darwin’s claim
of the universality of certain basic human emotions, part of his theory of evolution.
Though in his early years as a young scholar Ekman was skeptical about Darwin’s
claims about the evolutionary basis of emotions, his unsolicited receipt of a grant
to do cross-cultural studies of non-verbal behavior set him on a course that would
thereafter define the work for which he is known: seeking evidence for the
distinctness and universality of basic emotions.
The two main assumptions guiding Ekman’s research over the years have been:
1) emotions are discrete and therefore distinguishable from one another; and 2)
emotions “have evolved through adaptation” to humans’ surroundings; that is, they
are “biological mechanisms that allow us to react to fundamental life tasks—
universal human predicaments, such as losses, frustrations, successes, and joys”
(Ekman and Cardoro 2011, p. 364). The structuralist influence of these assumptions
is apparent in that they are congruent with those laid down by Saussure regarding
language. The structuralist claim is that emotions can be distinguished from one
another, that they must be studied in isolation from each other, and scientific
methods must be employed to offer physical evidence of the existence of emotions.
Ekman (1993) posited seven basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear,
surprise, disgust, and interest. Six of these corresponded to Darwin’s basic emotions,
with the addition of surprise.
Ekman’s early research involved asking participants to identify the emotions
expressed in pictures of human faces, each pre-assigned by the researcher to
 Theorizing Emotions 19

represent one of the basic emotions. These most often included anger, sadness, and
enjoyment. Ekman (1993) hypothesized that respondents would assign the same
emotions to the pre-assigned pictures thereby demonstrating that these emotions
are innate, not learned. Participants in his early studies were literate and college-
educated, from Brazil, the US, Argentina, Chile, and Japan. According to Ekman
and Friesen (1971), these participants “were found to identify the same faces with
the same emotion words” (p. 125).
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However, Ekman and Friesen (1971) sought to address the concern that their
results were tainted because their participants might have been exposed to the
same or similar media, such as television, films, and books, as those who had pre-
assigned the photographs. To address this concern, they located two groups in
New Guinea whose members had had “minimal visual contact with literate
cultures” (p. 125). They hypothesized that even though these members of
preliterate cultures had been visually isolated from literate cultures, they would
identify the same emotions as had those from literate cultures, thus proving the
universality of basic emotions.
The methodology of this study, however, differed slightly from that used in
earlier ones. Rather than initially asking New Guinea participants to identify
emotions represented in photographs, stories were read to them, each one having
been deemed to express one of the basic emotions. For example, for sadness, the
story was about the death of a child or parent. During data collection, local
translators read the stories and then showed participants three photographs, each
depicting a pre-assigned emotion. Participants were then asked which one best
illustrated the story. In summarizing the results, Ekman and Friesen (1971) claimed
that their hypothesis was upheld: “particular facial behaviors are associated with
particular emotions” (p. 128).
Later studies used a Facial Action Coding System (FACS), designed to allow
observers to record “the surface of behavior” (Cohn, Ambadar and Ekman 2007, p.
204), including specified facial movements, how long those movements lasted, and
which facial muscles were involved. The 2002 version of the FACS specified 61
facial movements of the eyebrows, eyelids, cheeks, nose, lips, eyes, chin, jaw, mouth,
and head. The FACS was used in a variety of ways, including one study that put
participants in what were viewed as embarrassing or amusing situations and
recorded their facial movements (Cohn, Ambadar and Ekman 2007). Regardless of
the methods, the goal was the same: to demonstrate the universality of distinct
emotions by pinpointing the facial movements associated with them.

Criticism of Biological Approaches to Emotions

Concerns about Ekman’s research have been raised by those whose work bridges
biological and cognitive approaches. For example Barrett (2012) critiqued Ekman’s
theoretical assumptions and his methodologies. Her criticism centered on Ekman’s
interpretation of Darwin’s discussion of basic emotions, the foundation of Ekman’s
research. Whereas Ekman interpreted Darwin’s positing of basic emotions as a
 20 Theorizing Emotions

claim about their innateness, universal recognizability, and evolutionary

adaptiveness, Barrett (2012) countered that Darwin viewed somatic emotional
expressions not as signals of underlying emotional states, but rather as vestiges of
“once-useful habitual gestures that were long ago performed willingly and
voluntarily” (p. 400). That is, the numerous facial expressions catalogued by Ekman
and claimed by him to signal particular emotions “persist despite having no
function,” according to Barrett (2012, p. 400). To put it another way, humans may
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involuntarily move facial muscles without those movements having any

relationship to, or signal function for, specific emotions.
In addition, according to Barrett (2012), Darwin did not subscribe to the notion
of emotions as discrete and monolithic, but, rather, believed in both “within-
category variability (a given emotion can be expressed in many different ways) and
between-category similarity (very different emotions can have almost identical
expressions)” (p. 401). Barrett’s (2012) reading of Darwin led her to conclude that
emotions “do not have firm boundaries in nature” (p. 401), but are, instead, highly
variable behaviorally, physiologically, experientially, and cognitively.
For the purposes of this chapter, the most interest concern raised by Barrett
(2012) is Ekman’s use of photographs of human faces to represent emotions. This
methodological choice raises questions about how to study emotions in a way that
respects their variability and avoids achieving desired research results at the expense
of complexity. Challenging this type of methodology, Barrett (2012) referred to
Ekman’s photos as “caricatures,” meaning that she doubted whether they were in
fact representative of the facial movements routinely produced by “human emoters
in everyday life” (p. 402). Countering Ekman’s claim that in his photos the pouts
depicted sadness, scowls depicted anger, and the wrinkled noses depicted disgust,
Barrett (2012) claimed that the photos are “symbols of emotions” rather than “signals
that represent the state of the emoter” (p. 402). Barrett (2012) therefore concluded
that evolutionary biologists, such as Ekman and others, who employ these types of
photographs, have failed to contribute to a science of emotions.
What Barrett (2012) demanded of a science of emotions was that it “explicitly
theorize about how to integrate physical, mental, and social levels of construction”
(p. 424). Her own research is therefore grounded in a range of disciplines: social-
psychology, psychophysiology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Given that she
works in a positivist paradigm, Barrett measured not just facial movements, vocal
acoustics, cardiovascular responses and/or brain chemistry, but also “the meaning-
making process” (Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett 2010, p. 419). Because “words
are important to the formation and function” (p. 418) of emotion categories, she
and her co-authors viewed language as one of the levels of emotion that must be
measured, alongside the other components. As we’ll see in the following section,
this conceptualization of emotions as measurable at various levels is a foundational
assumption of cognitive approaches to emotions, the most common perspective
adopted in ELT research.
 Theorizing Emotions 21

Cognitive Approaches: Emotions are Appraisals

Assumptions of Cognitive Approaches

According to cognitive approaches, emotions are important because they
relate outer events and other people to inner concerns. A principle of these
approaches is that an emotion is a judgment of value … for instance, that a
particular event is important, that it is pleasant to be with a certain person,
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or that a specific concern is urgent. So an emotion is not just physical, like a

sneeze. It is an evaluation, now called an ‘appraisal’.
(Oatley and Johnson-Laird 2014, p. 134)

The quote above from psychologists Oatley and Johnson-Laird highlights

differences between biological and cognitive approaches to emotions. Whereas the
former are concerned with cataloguing the physical manifestations of emotions, as
evidence of their innateness and universality, cognitive approaches foreground
judgments humans make about events that have an impact on them. While
acknowledging that emotions have a physical aspect, their focus is on conscious and
unconscious appraisals of events, as a way to account for the relationship between
physiological and mental processes.
According to Oatley and Johnson-Laird (2014) there are three cognitive theories
of emotion: action-readiness (also known as componential), core-affect, and
communicative. These theories differ somewhat in how they conceptualize the
results of the initial appraisal of an event, the characteristics of basic emotions, and the
role of goals and plans in emotion appraisal. However, despite these differences the
theories share overarching assumptions about emotions and how to measure them.
The main assumption shared by all three theories is that “emotions are caused
by appraising events in relation to concerns” (Oatley and Johnson-Laird 2014, p.
137). Another is that emotions can be captured by measuring various experiential,
physiological, and behavioral aspects that are hypothesized to be the components
of emotion episodes. A third shared assumption, related to the processing of
emotions, is that emotion episodes unfold over a certain time period. There is “an
initial automatic appraisal,” either conscious or not, followed by “a secondary
appraisal that often includes conscious reflection on the meaning of an emotion
and that can lead to new intentions” (p. 137). This second appraisal is followed by
a third “when emotions are verbally confided to others” (ibid).
In their overview of appraisal theories, Moors, Ellsworth, Scherer and Frijda
(2013), characterized emotions as processes, not states—an important contrast to
the biological perspective. As Oatley and Johnson-Laird (2014) explained, the
concern is not so much with emotions per se as it is with emotional episodes
which are described as events involving “changes in a number of organismic
subsystems or components” (p. 119). Given the focus on components of emotion
episodes, these theories are also referred to as componential. I will focus on these for
the remainder of this section.
 22 Theorizing Emotions

Scherer (2005) offered the followed components of emotion episodes: cognitive

(appraisal), neurophysiological, motivational (action tendencies), motor expression,
and subjective feeling (emotional experience) (p. 698). He described these
components as interacting in continuous and recursive ways rather than a lock-step
or cause-and-effect manner. The interaction between components is hypothesized
as a process of monitoring and assessing the environment “for well-being” (Moors,
Ellsworth, Scherer and Frijda 2013, p. 120), in order to facilitate desirable outcomes
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and block undesirable ones.

Appraisal is only one of several components of an emotion episode. However,
according to appraisal theories, it is the central one. It is considered the trigger
of emotional episodes, one that provokes changes in the other components,
including their intensity and duration. That is, “appraisal elicits or causes
emotions” (ibid).
Although those taking a cognitive approach share an interest in measuring
emotions, Scherer (2005) admitted that, given all the hypothesized components of
an emotion episode, it may never be possible to offer comprehensive measurement
of emotions. In place of comprehensive measurement, appraisal theorists measure
one or two individual components. An example of this type of research is offered
next.

Examples of Cognitive Approaches to Emotions in Educational Settings

In this section I offer two examples of cognitive approaches to emotions in
education. The first study focused on enjoyment in classrooms among mathematics
teachers and their students, as conveyed through teacher enthusiasm. The second
example, from second-language acquisition, demonstrates the relationship between
biological and cognitive perspectives on emotions.

Studying “Academic Emotions” to Maximize Learning

There are various assumptions guiding cognitive research in educational settings,
the most prevalent type of research investigating students’ and teachers’ emotions.
One is that emotions in educational settings, sometimes referred to as academic or
achievement emotions, should be subdivided into positive and negative categories:
those that are assumed to enhance learning and those that diminish it. In this binary
formulation, positive or “pleasant” academic emotions are assumed to correlate
positively with “learning-related motivation, self-regulatory efforts, activation of
cognitive resources, and performance” (Frenzel, Goetz, Luktke, Pekrun and Sutton
2009, p. 705). Therefore, a goal of this research is to promote “pleasant” emotions
(ibid.).
Questions guiding cognitive approaches to research on emotions in education
vary, but a representative sample can be found in the work of Pekrun, Goetz, Titz,
and Perry (2002, p. 92):
 Theorizing Emotions 23

1. Which emotions do students experience in academic settings when

attending class, studying, and taking tests and exams? Furthermore, what
are the elements of these emotional experiences and how are they
structured?
2. How can we measure students’ academic emotions?
3. How do these emotions affect learning, academic achievement, and
students’ health?
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4. What are the origins of these emotions within students’ personality and
in their environment?
5. What can we do to foster positive academic emotions and to help
students avoid negative emotions, or to cope with negative emotions in
flexible ways once they emerge?

The first question makes clear that when it comes to social context, cognitive
educational research focuses on the immediate environment of the classroom and
activities related to coursework, such as studying. The wider context of students’
lives, including gender, class, race, ethnicity and so on is not considered. So, for
example, the emotional impact of social class whereby working class students might
have to juggle the demands of a job and high school or college courses would not
be taken into account in the way that they are in more socially-focused research.
It’s also clear from the first question that these researchers take a componential
approach to emotions. Their interest in “elements of … emotional experiences”
(Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, and Perry 2002, p. 92) signals an interest in capturing various
components of emotion episodes, including physiological, cognitive, and affective
ones, and the relationships among them.
The second question demonstrates a strong interest in quantifying emotions as
a way to situate the research within academic communities that value
measurement: “Whereas qualitative methods may be ideally suited to explore new
fields, quantitative measures are needed for more rigorous tests of hypotheses”
(Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, and Perry 2002, p. 94).
The third and fifth questions indicate an orientation toward emotions as instru-
mental: do they promote or stymie learning? The overarching goal of this research
is to identify and encourage emotions that enhance learning while reducing or
managing those that impede achievement.
The fourth question shows that though this approach acknowledges the role of
the classroom environment, the focus is on students’ individual personalities as a
way to account for their affective reactions to educational stimuli. It is also
interesting to note, in light of biological approaches, that Pekrun (2006) posited the
existence of “universal, species-specific characteristics of our mind” underlying
“general functional mechanisms of human emotions” (p. 329). That is, while
acknowledging that emotions, including the values assigned to them and the
intensity with which they are experienced “may be specific to different cultures,
genders, and individuals,” there is nonetheless a belief in universality of “basic
structures and causal mechanisms of emotions” (p. 329).
 24 Theorizing Emotions

An example of research guided by these assumptions is Frenzel, Goetz, Ludke,

Pekrun and Sutton (2009), a study of teacher enthusiasm, based on the hypothesis
that there is a correlation between teachers’ enjoyment and students’ enjoyment in
classrooms and that enthusiasm mediates the transmission of enjoyment from
teachers to students. To test this hypothesis, the authors carried out a longitudinal
study of 71 eighth-grade mathematics teachers and 1,763 students from the
seventh to eighth grades in Germany. The measures included a teacher enjoyment
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scale consisting of statements, such as “I look forward to lessons in this class”

(Frenzel et al., p. 708) to which the teachers were to respond to using a five-point
Likert scale. To assess students’ enjoyment, they were given the Achievement
Emotions Questionnaire, also based on a five-point Likert scale, which included
statements such as “I enjoy my mathematics class” (p. 708). The students were also
given a survey to assess their perception of teacher enthusiasm.
Using mathematical modeling to correlate the responses, the authors found that
teacher enjoyment was “positively linked” (Frenzel et al., p. 711) to students’
enjoyment of math classes. They also found that teachers’ self-reported enthusiasm
was positively associated with students’ perception of teacher enthusiasm and that
teacher enthusiasm was also positively linked to students’ enjoyment. These results
were “substantial and statistically significant” (ibid).
According to the authors, then, teachers should adopt an enthusiastic attitude
when teaching, to promote enjoyment in their students, even if this requires them
to feign enthusiasm. However, the authors also mentioned concerns about teachers
feigning emotions, similar to concerns raised by emotion-labor researchers, such as
Hochschild (1983) whose work is discussed extensively in the next chapter. That
is, they acknowledged that the recommendation to display emotions that mask or
belie underlying feelings could be stressful, as Hochschild claimed. Nonetheless,
they claimed that the gains for students outweigh the risks of emotion labor and
that teachers should therefore exhibit enthusiasm as a way to promote student
enjoyment in classrooms.

Studying the Relationship Between Appraisals and the Brain

Based on the appraisal that the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex make of
the stimulus situation, a state is created in the body proper via the autonomic
nervous system, the endocrine system, and the musculoskeletal system. This
bodily state is an emotion which is communicated back to the brain as a
feeling that helps the individual decide which mental or motor action to take
with regard to the stimulus.
(Schumann 1999, p. 42)

Another example of appraisal research, this one from second-language acquisition,

is Schumann’s (1999, 2001) joining of biological and cognitive approaches as a way
to explain learning. His work linking neurobiology and psychology explores the
relationship between the brain, appraisals, and language learning. Drawing on brain
 Theorizing Emotions 25

imaging techniques as well as Scherer’s taxonomy of appraisals, Schumann studied

“dimensions along which stimulus appraisals are made” (Schumann 1999, p. 29),
including novelty and familiarity, pleasantness, goal or need significance, coping
potential and self, and social image.
Schumann (1999) noted that the dimensions proposed by Scherer correspond
to items on questionnaires developed by motivation researchers in SLA, such as
Clement, Dörnyei and Noels (1994). These correspondences led Schumann to
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wonder about the extent to which appraisal dimensions/features of motivation are

subserved by the neural system. To answer that question, Schumann relied on
images of biochemical activity in brains and his interpretation of diaries and
autobiographies of language learners. He brought these disparate areas of research
together in studies of second-language acquisition.
To describe how he believes language learning takes place, Schumann (2001)
developed models, such as “The Neural Mechanism for Stimulus Appraisal” (p. 29),
a flow chart postulating the trajectory of an appraisal. According to this model, the
amygdala and the orbifrontal cortex, parts of the brain connected to the autonomic
nervous system, endocrine system, and musculoskeletal system, receive stimuli from
the environment, including learning situations. The perception of stimuli by these
areas of the brain, “generates a bodily state … that is communicated back to the
brain as a feeling” (Schumann 2001, p. 27). The feeling, according to Schumann,
arises due to perception of the current situation and images from past experiences.
The feeling, then, is an appraisal “of the emotional and motivational relevance of
the stimulus” (p. 27). If the appraisal is positive, engagement follows; if it is negative,
the situation is avoided.
To illustrate how positive or negative appraisals along Scherer’s dimensions
might work, Schumann (1999) offered the example of Eva Hoffman’s (1989)
often-cited language learning memoir, Lost in Translation. According to
Schumann’s (1999) analysis, after emigrating to Canada, Hoffman reacted very
negatively to Canadian people and culture. Thus, on the dimension of
pleasantness, her appraisal was negative. On the other hand, “her positive appraisals
were dominant along the goal and self and social image dimensions” (p. 36). So,
though Hoffman experienced events in Canada as unpleasant, she was able to
succeed in learning English because these events correlated positively with her
long-term goals.
Applying his hypotheses regarding stimulus appraisals to language teaching,
Schumann (1999) concluded that, given each language learner’s and language
teacher’s unique brains, teachers should “negotiate their appraisals of the language
learning situation with those of the students” (p. 38) in order to maximize learning.
While acknowledging that this recommendation represents a daunting challenge,
given the number of students in each classroom, Schumann, nonetheless summed
up his neurobiological perspective by claiming that language teaching must
“resonate with the learner’s neural system that subserve appraisal and learning”,
otherwise it will “frustrate achievement and … demotivate (p. 40)”.
 26 Theorizing Emotions

Criticism of Cognitive Approaches

Harding and Pribram (2009) offered a critique of cognitive theories of emotions
along the following dimensions: knowledge production, mind/body relationship,
individual/collective relationship, and authentic vs. fake self. I will describe each of
these next.
As to knowledge production, the editors challenged the rationalist cognitive
project with its attempt to capture the essential reality of emotions. Categorizing
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this project as essentialist, Harding and Pribram (2009) claimed that far from
discovering reality, the positivist approach used by cognitivists instead “creates the
phenomena it describes” (p. 5). This is especially concerning given evidence that
throughout history, emotions have been described in varying ways, none of which
could be characterized as more natural or real than others. Despite this evidence,
essentialist approaches are driven by the conviction that discovering and describing
the “invariable and fixed properties” (p. 6) of emotions will reveal their true nature.
Left out of the essentialist equation are emotions as cultural practices, changing
across time and space, a notion I explore more fully in the section on
poststructural/discursive approaches.
As to Harding and Pribram’s (2009) discussion of the mind/body relationship,
in cognitive approaches the mind dominates, as a partner of reason, while the
body is less central to the appraisal part of the emotion episode (though it could
be argued that Schumann (1999) is equally concerned about the mind and brain).
What characterizes emotions in cognitive approaches, then, is that they are
directed by the emoter toward an object in a rational manner involving ethical
decision making. Harding and Pribram (2009) contended that in this formulation,
the body is claimed to subserve a rational appraisal process naturally. They
countered that bodies are meditated, not natural “products”, and that, further,
“experiences of embodiment are always in the process of being constructed
through and meditated by sociocultural circumstances and the historical contexts
in which we live” (p. 7). That is, an emotion episode is socially constructed, not
natural and rational.
In addition, Harding and Pribram (2009) claimed, the relationship between
bodily sensations and emotions is more complex than a one-to-one
correspondence between them. Not all bodily sensations are “articulated as
emotions” (p. 8) and not all emotions correspond to particular bodily sensations.
Furthermore, the process of assigning emotion names to bodily sensations is
learned and therefore “bound up with socio-cultural meanings and social
relationships” (p. 8). This is a point Jaggar (1988) made in her landmark article on
emotion in feminist epistemology in which she offered the following example as
evidence that emotions are social constructions: “… children are taught
deliberately what their culture defines as appropriate responses to certain
situations.” In other words, emotional experiences are reflections of “prevailing
forms of social life” (p. 157).
When it comes to individual/collective relationships, in cognitive approaches
 Theorizing Emotions 27

the individual is taken to be the unit of measure while “the collective recedes”
(Harding and Pribram, p. 9). Focusing on the individual is a way to unify the
psychological assumptions driving this research, offering a “central unit of analysis”
(p. 10). Ideologically speaking, maintaining the individual as the focus of analysis,
rather than discourse, for example, is a way to validate a cognitive approach to
emotions, one that ignores the social context and locates affective life within a
private and self-contained body/psyche that reacts to outside stimuli intraper-
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sonally.
Finally, in terms of authentic vs. fake self, this is a characteristic of not just
cognitive approaches, but also, surprisingly, some social constructionist ones, such
as Hochschild’s (1983) emotion-labor research, discussed extensively in Chapter 3.
In these approaches there are authentic selves and authentic emotions which may
be violated by, for example, carrying out jobs that mandate particular demeanors
belying so-called real feelings. According to this way of thinking, emotions are
possessions we own that can be compromised when we are forced to fake them.
Harding and Pribram (2009) counter that rather than being things we have,
emotions are the “social and cultural formations … configurations of unequal
power relations” and “contextualized and historicised ways to produce boundaries
that shape and position individuals and collectives simultaneously” (p. 12).
Therefore, there is no such thing as a real self or a fake self or tension between
them.
As to the critique of cognitive approaches in second-language acquisition,
Pavlenko (2012) praised the work of Schumann and other appraisal theorists for
moving the field beyond emotions as added-on affective factors within the psycho-
logical paradigm of individual differences. However, while acknowledging
Schumann’s attempts to work more holistically by taking bodies into account,
Pavlenko (2012) faulted his approach for ignoring social differences that may affect
SLA significantly. The example she offered is immigrants who lack access to
linguistic resources, including opportunities to interact with native speakers that
might enhance SLA, as revealed in Norton Pierce’s (1995) research.
In his critique of cognitive approaches to emotions, Imai (2010) pointed to a
lack of engagement with interpersonal relating among cognitive theorists. Basing
his research on the assumption that emotions are intersubjective, he carried out
case studies of groups of Japanese university students meeting out of class to
prepare oral group presentations in English. His data consisted of videotapes of
those meetings, emotion logs in which his participants described the emotional
content of the meetings, and interviews. An interesting finding was that the
students seemed to draw on emotions as they worked through course material,
leading them to “exercise their agency as readers” (p. 288), including collaboratively
setting unanticipated goals. Imai (2010) concluded that emotions are “socially and
discursively constructed acts of communication that mediate learning” (p. 288).
This type of approach is the subject of the next section.
 28 Theorizing Emotions

Poststructural/Discursive Approaches3: Emotions are Culturally

Constructed

Assumptions of Poststructural/Discursive Approaches

… if we cannot gain unmediated access to the real world, let us focus instead
on the modes of representation (discourse) through which the world is
constructed.
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(Makoni and Pennycook 2007, p. 97)

Focusing on emotions as mediated rather than immediate reminds us that

knowledge cannot be separated from the bodily world of feeling and
sensation; knowledge is bound up with what makes us sweat, tremble, all
those feelings that are crucially felt on the bodily surface, the skin surface
where we touch and are touched by the world.
(Ahmed 2004, p. 171)

My approach to emotions in this book is represented by the quotes that open this
section. The poststructural perspective I take does not subdivide emotions into
components nor does it describe the interaction of these parts in an attempt to
capture an essential reality. Instead, I am interested in how emotions are represented
in English language teachers’ talk. That is, my concern is not with what emotions
are, biologically or cognitively, but with how they are constructed discursively. I
share Makoni and Pennycook’s (2007) assumption that it is impossible to gain
unmediated access to reality, however that might be defined. I therefore focus on
ways in which emotions are constructed in the English language teaching literature
and in teachers’ discussion of situations that might be characterized as provocative
or emotionally-charged, such as plagiarism and high-stakes literacy testing. These
areas of pedagogical challenge involve power relations in that they authorize
teachers and/or institutions to judge student performance. They may therefore
produce serious personal and professional consequences for teachers and students
alike. So they are worthy of exploration through an emotion lens.
My choice of the interview topics discussed in Chapters 4 through 7 is
informed by another assumption, this one from Sara Ahmed. Taking a cultural-
politics approach to emotions, informed by feminism and cultural studies, Ahmed
(2004) is interested in what emotions do, that is: to which ideas and objects they
adhere, giving those ideas and objects intensity and charge. In other words,
emotions are “intentional in the sense that they are ‘about’ something” (Ahmed
2004, p. 7). There is a reciprocal relationship between emotions and objects:
“[e]motions … shape, and are also shaped by contact with objects” (p. 7).
Unlike biological and psychological conceptions that locate emotions within
individuals, a cultural-politics approach theorizes emotions not as internal things or
states possessed by humans, but, rather, the effect of an encounter with objects,
including ideas, memories, people, events, activities, places, and so on. These
 Theorizing Emotions 29

encounters are associated with bodily sensations which, Ahmed (2004) believes,
cannot be distinguished from emotions because physical feelings and emotions are
not experienced as distinct. Bodily feelings cannot be parsed as separate from
emotions, as if the former were of the body and the latter of the mind, as cognitive
theories postulate. Therefore, rather than viewing emotions as a process of first
experiencing an internal feeling and then appraising that feeling, as cognitive
approaches do, Ahmed (2004) theorized emotions as “crucial to the very consti-
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tution of the psychic and the social as objects” (p. 10). To put this another way,
emotions “allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects”
(p. 10).
The political dimension of a cultural-politics approach revolves around
stickiness: when emotions adhere to ideas, activities, policies, and so on, they
become sticky with affect. This helps explain, for example, why social norms are
so intractable and why social transformation is so difficult to achieve, even during
times of great resistance and upheaval. Paying tribute to Judith Butler’s work,
Ahmed (2004) explained that it is through repetition that social norms become
saturated with affect and therefore entrenched. Stickiness, then, demonstrates that
“emotions ‘matter’ for politics; emotions show us how power shapes the very
surface of bodies as well as worlds” (p. 12).
From Ahmed’s (2004) perspective, the reason for focusing on emotions is to
explore “how subjects become invested in particular structures” (p. 12) so much so
that they cannot imagine living without these structures and therefore cling to
them tenaciously. Equally important, from a political perspective, is that a reckoning
with stickiness is a means toward greater social justice. Coming to terms with
which objects and signs are emotionally saturated can start the process toward
transformation, or “a reorientation of one’s bodily relations” (p. 171) away from
sticky norms.
However, there is a price to pay for reorientation away from social norms just
as there are benefits for remaining oriented toward them. Those who embrace
mainstream expectations are rewarded for holding sanctioned sticky objects close
to them, while those who turn their bodies away may find themselves shunned,
punished, or ridiculed. To illustrate these different possibilities, Ahmed (2010)
offered examples of social norms to which happiness sticks, ones held out as objects
of promise and fulfillment, including heterosexuality, marriage, and procreation.
Those who turn their bodies away from these objects of promised happiness run
the risk of being perceived as troublemakers because of their refusal to join others
in embracing sanctioned happy objects.
Ahmed (2010) offered the “feminist killjoy” (p. 50) as a figure who turns away
from conventionally happy objects. The feminist killjoy may refuse to marry and
have children to avoid compromising her autonomy and well-being, seeking less
conventional arrangements. In doing so, however, she “‘spoils the happiness of
others; she is a spoilsport because she refuses to convene, to assemble, or to meet
up over happiness” (p. 65). By not only refusing to “participate in certain forms of
solidarity” (p. 65), but also broadcasting her refusal, she is seen as humorless. The
 30 Theorizing Emotions

unhappiness she invokes sticks not to the objects she refuses, but to her. This is
particularly true for women, who are expected to make family the central focus of
their lives. When they refuse this path, one already mapped out for them, they may
provoke not just disappointment, but also indignation because their happiness is
expected to be bound up with others’, in caring for them.
To avoid this type of reaction, women may remain in unhappy situations “out
of fear of losing sympathy, of becoming unsympathetic” (Ahmed 2010, p. 78). They
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“take the shape of what is given (which depends on being able to take this shape)”
and in doing so “experience the comfort of being given the right shape” (p. 79).
On the other hand, there are potential rewards, for the feminist killjoy who, in
refusing happiness, becomes “alive to possibility” (p. 78). Yet, this is not a simple
path of new possibilities and openings but, rather, a challenging one because they
must mourn the loss of the comfortable, well-formed shape of happiness of the
objects they refuse.
Another figure Ahmed invoked is the melancholic migrant, one who shows
insufficient gratitude for being accepted into the immigrant-receiving country.
Rather than displaying appreciation through grateful smiles, melancholic migrants
appear alienated and therefore pointed in the wrong direction. Their displays of
unhappiness violate the expectation that they ought to demonstrate delight, no
matter how inhospitable their reception in the new home. Their sour dispositions
are read as a refusal of “empire as the gift of happiness” (Ahmed 2010, p. 131), one
they should accept even if it means shrugging off hostility, including racist
incidents. Clinging to unpleasant or harmful incidents leads to self-imposed
melancholia, an embrace of the sad past rather than the promise of a happy future.
Immigrants’ unhappiness may also be read as a refusal to sever connections to the
world they came from, signaled by speaking other languages, wearing identifiably
“foreign” clothes, and interacting with compatriots. If they are melancholy, they
have only themselves to blame for “failing to let go of what has been lost” (p. 141)
from their culture of origin. From the receiving society’s perspective, melancholic
migrants are pointed in the wrong direction; they must be “redirected, or turned
around” (p. 141).
Ahmed’s (2004, 2010) interest in the relationship between objects and emotions
offers a promising avenue for research on emotions in English language teaching
because it invites analysis of connections among language, emotions, objects, and
bodies. Having examined two ELT sticky objects in an earlier work, dictionaries
and cellphones, (Benesch 2012), I turn to others in later chapters of this book.

Example of a Poststructural/Discursive Approach to Emotions

Taking a poststructural/discursive approach, Zembylas (2011) explored the
emotional geographies of exclusion in a Greek medium school in southern Cyprus
with a majority of Greek Cypriot students and a minority of Turkish-speaking
students. The teachers were all Greek Cypriot. Zembylas (2011) sought to examine
how racialization and ethnicization are “materialised through emotional practices
 Theorizing Emotions 31

and discourses” thereby creating emotional geographies “that legitimate certain

inclusions/exclusions,” (p. 152). To this end, he collected a variety of data:
interviews with teachers, students, and administrators as well as classroom and
playground observations and school documents. These data were explored through
a cultural-politics lens, influenced by Ahmed (2004), focusing on how bodies and
emotional practices stick together in that setting, enacting and perpetuating
inclusion and exclusion.
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Zembylas’s (2011) underlying assumption was that emotions are contextual at

both the micro and macro levels. That is, they are “constituted in specific socio-
spatial terrains yet in relation to larger political forces” (p. 154). The macro-political
context was the division of Cyprus into the Turkish-dominated north and the
Greek Cypriot-dominated south, along with displacement of members of both
populations to their respective areas. The micro-political context was that though
the research setting was considered a multicultural school, teachers had received no
preparation in welcoming or integrating Turkish-speaking students, who were not
even offered Greek classes. These students also migrated periodically to the north,
thus experiencing interrupted schooling.
The political divisions between the two groups contributed to a racialized
climate in the school. Zembylas (2011) sought to examine the ways that emotions
were constituted within this racialized/ethnicized space and how emotions were
manifested discursively by students and teachers. Therefore, interview questions
included ones focused specifically on emotions. For example teachers were asked:
“How do Greek Cypriot students express their emotions about their Turkish-
speaking classmates?” (p. 156). Observations focused on students’ and teachers’
embodied expression of emotions as revealed through their voices and bodily
dispositions inside and outside of classrooms.
Zembylas’s (2011) findings included what he calls “the socio-spatial dynamics of
disgust” (p. 156), based on observed incidents in which Greek Cypriot students
socialized exclusively with each other and thwarted attempts by Turkish-speaking
students to join them. Bodily alignments within school spaces not only “limited the
movement” (ibid) of Turkish-speaking students, but were also reinforced by verbal
and non-verbal expressions of disgust toward and about them. Sadly, teachers and
administrators did nothing to mitigate disgust and shunning and, in fact, helped
perpetuate it through their words and inaction.
Zembylas’s (2011) research is an important example of the discursive construction
of emotions within an educational space during a particular historical moment. It
thus honors the poststructural sensibility of the quotes with which I opened this
chapter. Emotions in this paradigm are contingent and shifting, not universal or
inherent, offering a clear contrast to biological and cognitive approaches.

Criticism of Discursive Approaches to Emotions

The main criticism of poststructural/discursive approaches to emotions is that they
are not sufficiently comprehensive. By attending to how emotions are represented
 32 Theorizing Emotions

rather than documenting how they are experienced within individual bodies and
minds, they are seen as too limited. Those who participate in this type of criticism
wish for a reckoning with what emotions are intrapersonally and therefore
disapprove of approaches that focus exclusively on what they do socially. They call
for bridging the individual physical experience of emotions and the discursive.
For example, Barrett (2012), who described her own approach as an amalgam
of social-psychology, psychophysiology, cognition, and neuroscience, argued that
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“meaning-making has physical correlates” (p. 422). Because her assumption is that
bodily feelings and meaning-making are orchestrated by the same brain regions,
she believes that the relationship between biological and social aspects of emotions
is foundational and therefore must be considered: “… the science of emotion …
should explicitly theorize about how to integrate physical, mental, and social levels
of construction” (Barrett 2012, p. 424).
Unlike Barrett, Wetherell (2012), whose social-psychological approach is
focused on embodied meaning-making and the trajectories of emotional responses
to everyday activities, is not concerned about the physical correlates of meaning-
making. Yet, she nonetheless raised concerns about what she perceives as a lack of
attention to the body in Ahmed’s (2004) cultural-politics approach. Her book-
length critique of various approaches to emotion (Wetherell 2012), including
psychobiological, psychosocial, affect,4 and cultural politics, found them all lacking
in different ways. As to a cultural-politics approach, Wetherell claimed that Ahmed
(2004) did not take into account the “particularity of embodiment, the ways in
which affective practice mobilises, recruits and stabilises brain/body states …” (p.
159). By affective practice, Wetherell meant “a moment of recruitment and often
synchronous assembling of multimodal resources, including most crucially body
states” (p. 159). Absent this synthesis, Wetherell found Ahmed’s discussion of
emotions too abstract, not sufficiently embodied.
My reading of Wetherell’s (2012) critique is that it overlooks the centrality of
embodiment in Ahmed’s work. As can be seen in my discussion of Zembylas’s
(2011) research, the focus of a cultural-politics approach is the ways in which,
guided by power relations, bodies stick together, becoming infused with affect,
through repeated contact, or move apart. Though Ahmed does not subscribe to a
notion of emotions residing inside individual bodies, her discursive approach is
intimately embodied, seeking to describe the emotional effects of bodies engaged
and disengaged.
A different critique of poststructural/discursive approaches to emotions is
offered by Pavlenko (2012) whose research centered on whether multilinguals’
emotional experiences differ across languages and what their emotion lexicons are
in different languages. Pavlenko’s (2012) major concern is that those taking a
critical approach to emotions “implicitly adopt a universalist approach to emotions
and thus miss out on … the recognition of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural
variation” (p. 23). Given the lack of interest on the part of those taking a cultural-
politics approach to the varying ways in which emotions are referred to across
languages, Pavlenko felt that they have missed out on “the key issue” requiring the
 Theorizing Emotions 33

scholarly attention of SLA researchers: “the fact that our students come from - and
bring with them - distinct emotional worlds that cannot always be understood in
terms of academic English” (p. 23).
Because Pavlenko’s (2012) lens is language and not discourse, her concerns are
understandable. She studied emotions through and across languages, not, as
discursive theorists do, through power. Therefore the concerns are quite different.
Using the lens of power rather than language, the cultural-politics perspective
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attends to the ways in which bodies and objects circulate in particular contexts,
taking into account both the macro and micro politics of that context. They are
concerned with which bodies and objects stick together and which remain
separate and the emotional effects of adherence and distance. The particular words
used in a setting, therefore, are less important than those effects and their discursive,
not lexical, manifestations.
My approach, then, is not multicultural, though some teachers I interviewed are
multilingual and some are non-native speakers of English. Still, my focus is not on
emotion words or the different meanings attributed to emotions across languages,
but rather, sticky objects (a cultural-politics approach) and feeling rules (an
emotion-labor approach). And my perspective is critical: how does power work in
ELT, such that teachers obey or resist feeling rules around certain sticky objects?
How do teachers characterize their relationship to these objects? What are the
rewards of obeying the feeling rules? What are the consequence of disobeying
them?

Conclusion
My goal in this chapter was to outline the assumptions and aims of three
approaches to studying emotions and to justify my choice of a poststructural/
discursive approach in this book. In the case of biological approaches, they seek
evidence for the universality of emotions, that is, the common emotional
inheritance shared by humans. The structuralist origins of these approaches ground
them in assumptions about the biological fixity of emotions, regardless of race, class,
ethnicity, gender and so on.
Cognitive approaches, on the other hand, aim to capture the workings of individ-
ual minds as they appraise the possible impact of external stimuli on their well-being.
When applied to workplace or educational settings, these approaches seek ways for
individuals to gain control of their emotions so as to improve their functioning. This
will be seen particularly in the literature on emotional literacy—discussed in Chapter
7—grounded in cognitive theory, where the goal is to avoid being in the thrall of
strong emotions, such as anger, considered impediments to learning.
Poststructural/discursive approaches, by contrast, are concerned with the
political project of greater social equality and justice. Rather than calling for
individuals to tame their emotions in the interest of better workplace functioning,
or self-functioning, there is an interest in exploring a range of emotions, including
“ugly” (Ngai 2005) ones, as an entrée to challenging unfavorable social conditions.
 34 Theorizing Emotions

Based on the assumption that emotions are constructed discursively, research turns
to talk, texts, and other media to discover how power and emotions shape bodies
and ideas, including English language teaching, the subject of this book.

Notes
1 This three-part presentation of emotion theories (biological, cognitive, and
poststructural/discursive) is only one of many ways to organize them. For example,
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Prinz (2004) offered two perspectives: evolutionary psychology and social construction.
Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett (2010), on the other hand, offered eight: interdisci-
plinary foundations; biological and neurophysiological approaches; developmental
changes; social perspectives; personality issues; cognitive factors; health and emotions;
select emotions. And in her overview of “new directions in the study of L2 learning
and affect” (p. 9), Pavlenko (2012) organized emotions along the following lines:
linguistic dimensions; psychological dimensions; social dimensions.
2 Though Pennycook’s observations focused on structural linguists, the same points could
be made about structural anthropologists, who aimed to challenge the notion of
primitive cultures and demonstrate that all cultures are complex.
3 Poststructural approaches are sometimes referred to as cultural approaches or cultural
politics approaches. However they are referred to, they share the assumption that whereas
biological and cognitive approaches posit a preexisting individual as the unit of analysis,
poststructural approaches posit a “subject constructed in culture, through a process in
which the subject and culture are mutually constituting” (Pribram 2011, p. 9).
4 Though I discuss affect theories in my earlier book on emotions (Benesch 2012), I have
left these out of this chapter because they are not relevant to emotion labor. Very
briefly, in affect theories emotions are seen as secondary to affect. Emotions are viewed
as the conscious naming of experience, the “sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of
experience which is from that point onward defined as personal (Massumi 2002).
Affect, on the other hand, is the intensification or diminution of “a body’s capacity to
act, to engage, and to connect” (Clough 2007 p. 2).

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 3
THEORIZING EMOTION LABOR
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When rules about how to feel and how to express feelings are set by
management, when workers have weaker rights to courtesy than customers
do, when deep and surface acting are forms of labor to be sold, and when
private capacities for empathy and warmth are put to corporate use, what
happens to the way a person relates to her feelings or to her face?
(Hochschild 1983, p. 89)

… emotion labor is intricately intertwined with the layered patterns, contra-

dictions, structures, everyday practices, and discourses of power that surround
and discipline employees.
(Tracy 2005, p. 280)

This chapter takes up the literature on emotion labor, from its coining in the early
1980s to the research it has spawned over the last several decades in a variety of
fields, including education. The purpose of this literature review is to contextualize
my own use of emotion labor as a central concept of this book. Therefore, the bulk
of the chapter describes the origins of the term, and related terms that pre-dated
it, as well as some of the studies that have explored it. This chapter also contrasts
structural and poststructural understandings of emotion labor, represented respec-
tively by the quotes that open this chapter. By offering this contrast, I aim to flesh
out the assumptions that guided my data collection and analysis. This includes ways
that my assumptions are similar to and different from those guiding others’
emotion-labor research.
The juxtaposition of “emotion” and “labor” signals a critical approach to the
study of emotions, one that considers the role of power relations in workplaces. A
departure from a psychological perspective on emotions as exclusively internal
states, “emotion labor” acknowledges that humans actively negotiate the
 38 Theorizing Emotion Labor

relationship between how they feel in particular work situations and how they are
supposed to feel, according to social expectations. Of course the question of “how
they feel” is a vexed one because it can be understood in various ways, some more
psychological and others more social, as outlined in Chapter 2. At the end of this
chapter, I make clear how I reconciled varying definitions of emotion labor as I did
with different ways of theorizing emotions in the previous chapter.
Originally coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, emotion labor has been
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taken up by scholars in a range of fields: business, communications, criminology,

geography, political science, education, economics, and so on. The breadth of this
research is a tribute to emotion labor’s conceptual flexibility and its enduring
usefulness as a tool for examining emotions from a social perspective. By proposing
a number of related terms—emotion management, feeling rules, surface acting,
deep acting, and, later, emotion labor—Hochschild (1979, 1983, 2012) aimed to
merge sociological and psychological concepts circulating during the mid-
twentieth century, especially drawing on the work of Erving Goffman and
Sigmund Freud. That is, she posited both display rules (sociology) and an inner self
(psychology) that works consciously on emotions to bring them in line with those
rules. Her main contribution was to explore the implications for workers when
their emotions are commodified to maximize their workplace performance.
To account for the processes by which individuals experience, monitor, assess,
transform and/or maintain their emotions in response to social situations and
norms, Hochschild (1979) first proposed emotion management. This term is discussed
next, followed by discussion of related ones: feeling rules, surface acting, deep
acting, and, then, emotion labor, the term Hochschild proposed after the others.
Later in the chapter I take up modifications to and critiques of Hochschild’s
concepts, highlighting ones concerned with workplace identities as multiple and
contested rather than fixed, that is, a poststructural approach to emotion labor. My
reason for going into detail about Hochschild’s research at the start of this chapter
is that though she posited a unitary internal self and I do not, she considered the
role of power centrally in its relationship to emotions, as I do.

Hochschild’s Emotion Management

Hochschild (1979) was influenced by Goffman’s notion of humans as social actors
who behave in accordance with “social patterns in emotive experience” (p. 555),
especially the focus on humans’ moment-by-moment responses to social norms in
ritualized settings. However, Hochschild departed from Goffman’s situationism,
finding the concept too deterministic because it posited passive adherence to the
conventions mandated by particular social contexts. Her concern was that
situationism overlooked how humans might struggle with their feelings in a variety
of settings: “Goffman’s actors actively manage outer impressions, but they do not
actively manage inner feelings” (p. 557).
In response to what she found missing in Goffman’s and other sociologists’ work
Hochschild proposed emotion management. This term captured the processes by
 Theorizing Emotion Labor 39

which people actively work on their emotions to bring them in line with social
rules rather than passively adhering to those rules. Her focus on the conscious
processing of emotions was guided by the following question: “How does a person
act on feeling—or stop acting on it, or even stop feeling?” (Hochschild 2012, p.
xviii).1 Not only did Hochschild’s emotion-work concept depart from sociologists’
prevailing assumption at that time that humans passively conform to social rules, it
also departed from psychological approaches that theorized emotions as
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unconscious. So, for example, while paying tribute to Freud “for the general notion
of what resources individuals of different sorts possess for accomplishing the task
of emotion work” (Hochschild 1979, p. 559), she explored the intentional effort of
that work rather than unconscious processes.
Hochschild proposed three techniques of emotion management: cognitive,
bodily, and expressive. Cognitive emotion work is “the attempt to change images,
ideas, or thoughts in the service of changing the feelings associated with them”
(1979, p. 562). Bodily emotion work is “the attempt to change somatic or other
physical symptoms of emotion” (ibid), such as trying to breathe more slowly.
Finally expressive emotion work is “trying to change expressive gestures in the
service of changing inner feeling” (ibid), such as smiling.

Hochschild’s Feeling Rules

Though Hochschild proposed a more active role in negotiating emotions than
Goffman, she retained his “dramaturgical perspective” (Grandey 2000, p. 96):
humans as actors whose behavior is guided by feeling rules. According to
Hochschild (1983), feeling rules are the conventions by which people judge
whether their feelings are appropriate in particular situations or not. Although
feeling rules, or “emotional conventions” (p. 57) are implicit, they are revealed at
those moments when there is a “pinch between ‘what I do feel’ and ‘what I ought
to feel’” (ibid.).
A widely-cited example Hochschild offered of emotion work guided by feeling
rules is a bride’s reaction to her wedding day.2 One of the feeling rules of that
highly ritualized event, at least in the white middle-class North American context
Hochschild described, is that the bride should feel happy. After all, this is the
happiest day of her life, according to social convention. Not only are her actions
and clothing circumscribed, but also her emotions. She should feel happy and
display that happiness openly in a way that looks genuine, not forced. If, however,
she finds her emotions inconsistent with those feeling rules, she may manage her
emotions to bring them in line with social expectations. This does not necessarily
mean that she is conscious of the existence or role of feeling rules, but, rather, that
she “sens[es] a gap between the ideal feeling and the actual feeling” and manages
her emotions to chase away the discomfort, by “prompt[ing] herself to ‘be happy’”
(Hochschild 2012, p. 61).
 40 Theorizing Emotion Labor

Hochschild’s Surface Acting and Deep Acting

Hochschild posited two types of acting in which humans engage when it comes
to their emotions: surface and deep. Although feeling rules may be implicit, both
surface and deep acting are theorized as conscious processes. Hochschild was
particularly interested in ways that workers struggle with their feelings in full
awareness of the conflict. That is, though “deep” acting might suggest a Freudian-
type approach, Hochschild was not concerned with emotions that are outside of
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awareness, as discussed earlier.

Surface acting involves changing one’s demeanor so as to appear to have feelings
that comport with the feeling rules of a particular context. According to Hochshild
(1983), people routinely pretend to share the mandated emotions of a context by
displaying them outwardly while inwardly experiencing divergent ones. One
illustration she offered of surface acting was from her research on college students’
descriptions of situations in which they experienced emotions, including any
changes they made to fit their emotions to the situation. The example is of a young
woman who described that she was less excited about graduating from college than
her family members so she “tried to act real emotional” without feeling “inside”
(Hochschild 1983, p. 82) what she was expressing outwardly.
What makes this an example of surface rather than deep acting is that the young
woman feigned certain emotions in an attempt to convince others that her feelings
were appropriate to the situation. The pretense, or surface acting, was successful
because, at least according to the participant’s account, the lack of congruence
between her internal feelings and demeanor was undetectable to those around her.
A contrasting example, of deep acting, can be found in Hochschild’s (1983)
continued discussion of the unhappy bride. Here it is not simply the demeanor that
changes, but also the feelings themselves. In this situation, a number of unantic-
ipated events led to the bride’s unhappiness so that she was initially unable to
conjure socially mandated happiness. However, she managed her feelings in a deep
way, thereby transforming them and ultimately feeling what she was expected to
feel on that day.
These two examples, the first of surface acting and the second of deep acting,
illustrate a central tenet of Hochschild’s work: a dichotomy between real and
manufactured feelings as well as a split between internal feelings and external
expression of them. This binary, in turn, depends on a notion of an authentic self
that may be in conflict with a false self. The false self must either pretend to have
certain emotions (surface acting) or transform real ones into socially-acceptable
ones (deep acting) to resolve the conflict between true and false selves. Awareness
of this conflict triggers emotion work: “… the individual is conscious of a moment
of ‘pinch’ or discrepancy between what one does feel and what one wants to feel
(which in turn is affected by what one thinks one ought to feel in such a situation)”
(Hochschild 1979, p. 562). Later I will discuss poststructural/discursive research that
challenges the fake vs. real-self dichotomy.
 Theorizing Emotion Labor 41

Hochschild’s Emotion Labor

Hochschild’s distinction between emotion management and emotion labor hinges
on the different realms in which they are enacted. The first is carried out in the
private realm and the second in the public world of work. The first is a “gesture in
a social exchange” (Hochschild 1979, p. 568) between people who engage with
each other in daily life outside of workplaces. It is a necessary aspect of human
interaction, allowing interlocutors to save their own and others’ faces. It is a process
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of either surface or deep acting the purpose of which is to bring emotions in line
with, or in opposition to, feeling rules.
Emotion labor, on the other hand, is the commodification of emotion
management. It requires workers to apply the skills they routinely use in private
acts of emotional exchange to the public realm of the workplace. In the move from
the private arena to public ones, emotion work becomes an aspect of a paid job.
Hochschild’s (1983) term for the enactment of private exchanges in workplace
settings is “transmutation” (p. 19). She claimed that whereas emotion management
and feeling rules have existed throughout human history, transmutation of the
emotional system is an outcome of increased corporate control.
However, though emotion labor is a central feature of many jobs, and
increasingly so according to Hochschild, with the growth of the service sector, it
is not usually acknowledged as such and therefore not explicitly compensated. It is
this hidden aspect of emotion labor that concerned Hochschild, who wondered
about the repercussions of emotion management becoming “part of a day’s work,
a part of what we sell to an employer in return for a day’s wage?” (Hochschild 2012,
p. 54). It’s important to add that Hochschild was particularly interested in ways in
which women’s emotions are commodified in workplaces, a central concern of her
research.
To explore the concept of emotion management in the workplace,3 especially
among women, Hochschild studied the training and work of Delta Airlines flight
attendants in the early 1980s in the southern United States. She chose Delta
because at the time of her data collection, deregulation of the airline industry had
led to fierce competition and Delta distinguished itself from its competitors by
emphasizing service. Therefore its training programs and service were considered
to be among the best. However, as non-unionized workers, Delta’s flight attendants
had little recourse when it came to demanding better working conditions, leaving
the company free to wrest as much work as possible from them. This power
imbalance ramped up workplace demands on the mainly female workforce and,
from the researcher’s perspective, cast their emotions in sharp relief.
Hochschild’s (1983) data consisted of notes taken while observing initial and
recurrent training sessions. In addition, she interviewed Delta officials at all levels
of management and studied 30 years’ worth of company advertising, offering her a
view of past and current company ideologies and images. However, the focus of
her attention was the flight attendants because these are the workers who perform
visible, face-to-face service with the public. By studying this largely female
 42 Theorizing Emotion Labor

workforce, Hochschild (1983) hoped to gain understanding of the emotional

system of the airline.
One of the most revealing findings was that during their training, flight
attendants were taught to display empathy and kindness to passengers even when
the latter’s behavior was disrespectful, aggressive, or sexually harassing. Explicit
feeling rules were taught as well as emotion management techniques for enacting
those rules, including both surface and deep acting. For example, there were
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constant reminders about the importance of smiling, including these slogans

offered during training: “Really work on your smiles” and “Your smile is your
biggest asset—use it.” And, when dealing with difficult passengers, they were told,
“Relax and smile” (Hochschild 1983, pp. 104–5).
Perhaps the greatest emotion-labor challenge was that flight attendants were
taught to treat airplane cabins as if they were their homes and the passengers as if
they were guests or family members. Pushing that analogy even further, flight
attendants were explicitly taught to handle rudeness and/or aggression with the
type of compassionate concern they might offer to a relative or close friend. In the
case of extremely difficult passengers, known as irates, they were told to treat them
like children whose needs come first and who therefore should be handled with
great deference and sensitivity.
Passengers, on the other hand, were not required to reciprocate, putting the
entire emotion-labor burden on the flight attendants. Delta’s stance regarding
passengers was that they could not be blamed or castigated. To apply this
philosophy, initial training focused on passengers’ feelings while recurrent training
focused on flight attendants’, particularly techniques for mitigating anger. Missing
from this formulation was any acknowledgment of passengers’ responsibility for
their own deviant behavior or of the difficulty of the working conditions, such as
long hours, routine sexism, medical issues, and so on: “These were treated as
unalterable facts of life. The only question to be seriously discussed was, ‘How do
you rid yourself of anger?’” (1983, p. 113).
Hochschild (1983) raised several concerns about the emotion labor she
uncovered in interviews and training sessions. One of the main ones was that
transmutation of private feelings in the public domain distorts the most important
aspect of emotions: their signal function. This notion, borrowed from Freud, is that
emotions reveal one’s inner perspective, that is, the “‘me’ I put into seeing ‘you’” or
“the often unconscious perspective we apply when we go about seeing” (p. 30).
According to Hochshild (1983), when emotions are mandated, the signal function
is disrupted; therefore the worker can no longer distinguish genuine and
manufactured feelings: “[I]s this me or the company talking?” (p. 34). Workers
become alienated from their own feelings and cannot access them properly as a way
to gauge how to react in a non-work situation.
It is interesting to note, however, that despite Hochschild’s concern about
workers’ estrangement from their feelings and the disruption of the signal function
of emotions, she offered examples of flight attendants consciously defying feeling
rules, especially during periods when work was speeded up. For example, some
 Theorizing Emotion Labor 43

flight attendants reported smiling less than was mandated, challenging passengers
who asked why they weren’t smiling, and talking back when receiving
unreasonable requests or rude feedback.
This is not to say that these cases invalidate Hochschild’s basic points about the
commodification of emotions in workplaces, but rather to point out that workers
are not necessarily fragile dupes who unquestioningly and mindlessly adhere to
feeling rules and then find themselves incapable of responding to insults in public
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or intimacy in private. Instead, the important lesson to retain from her research is
that emotion labor, whether conceptualized as an internal battle or as a social
process, exists and should be studied further.
In addition to the importance of investigating emotion labor is its relationship to
power and here Hochschild was very clear. She pointed to a power imbalance between
upper management, who established the feeling rules, and the non-union workers,
who were expected to enact the rules. Furthermore, Hochschild discussed the power
of passengers in regulating the behavior of flight attendants, including their use of an
instrument of power: questionnaires distributed at the end of flights in which they
assessed flight attendants’ performance. Hochschild also underscored problems that
arise when non-unionized workers have no platform from which to push back against
management’s regulation. These types of power imbalances, as well as more subtle ones,
are examined in later chapters of this book in relation to English language teaching.
In the next section I take up modifications to Hochschild’s emotion-labor
concept, including the critique of her dichotomizing real and fake selves and inner
and outer feelings.

Modifications to/Critique of Hochschild’s Emotion Labor

Research that either modifies or critiques Hochschild’s emotion-labor concept falls
into two camps: 1) structural research that breaks emotion labor into multiple
components that are measured and correlated with other features; 2) poststructural
research that considers the relationship between emotion labor and unequal power,
not just within the workplace itself, but also in the wider social context. I begin
with the first group.4

Structural Approaches to Emotion Labor

Some scholars have started to deconstruct the concept of positive display into
its discrete components. For instance, Barger and Grandey (2006) reported a
link between employee smiling and customer satisfaction in the context of
coffee shop patrons. The findings indicate that the extent of employee smiling
influenced customers’ service quality appraisals … which consequently
impacted overall customer satisfaction. However, given the unclear causal
structure of service quality and satisfaction judgments … a reverse order of
cause and effect could not be ruled out.
(Groth, Henning-Thurau and Wang 2013, p. 127)
 44 Theorizing Emotion Labor

As can be seen in the quote above, emotion labor has attracted those looking to
explain workplace dynamics through positivist techniques. In this research, which
I’m calling structural, emotion labor is divided into measurable features, ones that
are correlated with other aspects of work, such as burnout. This research quantifies
aspects of emotion labor mainly in the interest of improved worker productivity
and/or job satisfaction. This type of research is reported in such journals as,
Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management, Journal of Occupational Health
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Psychology, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Journal of

Organizational Behavior, and Journal of Applied Psychology. However, some
educational researchers have also adopted a structural approach to emotion labor,
taking a page from organizational psychology and behavior, as I’ll show in my
examples of this type of research next.
First, though, to outline the theoretical assumptions of structural emotion
labor research, I turn to Grandey (2000), an industrial/organizational
psychologist. Her research is concerned with the “operationalization” (p. 107) of
emotion labor as a way to better study and apply it. The goal of is to discover
what types of worker training might be most effective, who to hire for particular
jobs, and how to make the work environment more conducive to optimal
performance. Clearly, this is a departure from Hochschild’s research. As a
sociologist, Hochschild was interested in uncovering the role of emotions in the
workplace, especially among those most susceptible to corporate power, not in
discovering ways to make workers more productive. Grandey’s (2000) research,
on the other hand, focuses on “how emotions are managed by employees to
improve work outcomes” (p. 95).
In her literature review of research on emotion labor, Wharton (2009) charac-
terized quantitative emotion labor studies as “emotion-focused approaches,”
contrasting these with “qualitative case studies of interactive work” with their
concern for “the dynamics of power, status, and gender,” including “broader work
structures and processes” (p. 150). The former group is primarily concerned with
workers’ “intrapsychic processes” (Wharton 2013, p. 301), focusing on the responses
of individual workers to emotion-labor demands. Data is collected through
observation of emotional displays and/or questionnaires in which workers report
having or not having particular emotions on specified occasions. The categories of
emotional display or self-report of feelings are determined before data is collected.
Taking a positivist approach, these studies are based on hypotheses that are tested
and either upheld or not. Often the researchers correlate particular behaviors, such
as smiling, with certain outcomes, such as customer satisfaction, though the causal
link between behavior and outcome cannot necessarily be made, as expressed in
the quote that opens this section.
In education, studies taking a structural and quantitative approach tend to be
focused on the relationship between teachers’ emotion labor and job performance
or satisfaction. Typically, questionnaires are given to participating teachers and
correlations are made between various components to determine that relationship.
Two examples are offered next.
 Theorizing Emotion Labor 45

Zhang and Zhu (2008) studied the relationship between Chinese college
instructors’ emotion labor, teacher burnout, and job satisfaction. Grounded in the
notion of an authentic self, they were concerned about negative repercussions of
emotion labor given that it entails “the display of largely fake or inauthentic
emotions” (p. 108). The authors also relied on Hochschild’s concepts of surface and
deep acting as well as the additional concept of authenticity which they defined as
the “expression of spontaneous and genuine emotion” (p. 108).
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The authors tested the following hypotheses: 1) Chinese teachers are more
engaged in deep acting than surface acting; 2) surface acting is related positively to
burnout; deep acting and authenticity are related negatively to burnout. The
related research question to test these hypotheses was: “For Chinese college
teachers, what dimension of emotional labor (surface acting, deep acting, and
authenticity) best predicts burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and
reduced accomplishment?)” (p. 111). Additionally, they hypothesized that surface
acting is related negatively to job satisfaction while deep acting and authenticity are
related positively to job satisfaction.
To test these hypotheses, Zhang and Zhu (2008) used three questionnaires. The
first was a 14-item survey of “emotional labor strategies” (p. 112) that included such
statement as “I fake a good mood when interacting with students” and “The
emotions I show students come naturally” (p. 113). The second instrument was the
Maslach Burnout Inventory with 22 items testing three aspects of burnout:
emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment. Items
included “I feel emotionally drained from teaching” and “I feel burned out from
teaching.” The third instrument was the Teacher Satisfaction Scale with six items
intended to measure satisfaction with students and satisfaction with teaching.
Zhang and Zhu (2008)’s respondents reported that they engaged most in deep
acting, least in surface acting, with authenticity in between. Furthermore, the
authors found that surface acting was associated positively with emotional
exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced accomplishment while deep acting was
associated negatively with all three. Authenticity was related negatively to
depersonalization and reduced accomplishment; its correlation to emotional
exhaustion was insignificant.
Given these findings, Zhang and Zhu (2008) claimed that emotion labor is
harmful to teachers who carry out surface acting because it triggers “emotional
dissonance, causing burnout, and lowering job satisfaction” (p. 117). They therefore
recommended that teachers in China receive formal training in “effective
emotional management” (p. 118) to carry out deep acting and thereby “mitigate
burnout and increase satisfaction” (ibid.).
Like Zhang and Zhu (2008), Keller et al. (2014) studied teachers’ burnout,
though they focused exclusively on emotional exhaustion (EE), declaring it the
“core component” of burnout. Based on earlier findings, such as Zhang and Zhu’s
(2008), that surface acting leads to increased EE, they sought to examine
relationships among teachers’ emotions, emotion labor, and EE through empirical
research. The instruments they used were designed to study both self-reported or
 46 Theorizing Emotion Labor

trait EE and “actual” (p. 2) or state-reported EE, captured during lessons. These
included the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the Frankfurt Emotion Work Scale (with
items such as, “How often do you have to show feelings in class that you do not
really feel?”) (p. 4), and questions about particular emotions teachers were to
answer at intervals during their lessons, through an electronic device. These
included, “At the moment, how strongly do you experience enjoyment/anger/
anxiety?” (ibid.) to be rated on a five-point scale.
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Keller et al. (2014) had three hypotheses: 1. EE is negatively related to positive

emotions, such as enjoyment, and negatively related to negative emotions, such as
anxiety and anger; 2. Enjoyment is negatively related to emotion labor; anxiety and
anger are positively related to emotion labor; 3. EE, trait emotion labor, and
negative emotions are positively related to state emotion labor; positive emotions
are negatively related to state emotion labor. Thirty-nine German secondary
teachers participated in the study.
Among the numerous findings, Keller et al. (2014) reported that EE related
negatively to teachers’ enjoyment and positively to their anger. Anxiety did not
have a significant effect. Furthermore, they found that enjoyment was negatively
related to emotion labor and anger and anxiety positively related. They
furthermore found that while teachers are in class “EE is indeed reflected in their
emotional experiences” (p. 6). That is, “the more exhausted the teachers indicated
they were, the less experiences of enjoyment, and the more experiences of anger”
(p. 6).
Keller et al. (2014) concluded that teachers’ experiences of anger lead them to
engage in emotion labor, a situation they believe should be avoided. They therefore
recommended training in anger reduction, speculating that this type of
intervention could lead to reduced emotion labor and possibly less EE. They also
suggested an increase in teachers’ positive emotions, such as enjoyment, “as a buffer
for teacher burnout” (p. 8).

Critique of Structural Emotion Labor Research

Wharton (2013), while not overtly critical of quantitative emotion-labor research,
nonetheless raised some red flags. Praising this research for offering an
understanding of the “mechanics of emotion labor” (p. 301) as well as
consequences for workers’ well-being, she critiqued mainstream emotion-labor
studies along two lines. The first criticism revolved around the neglect in this
research of “interactive dynamics involved in emotional labor” (p. 301) given that
attention is focused almost exclusively on individual workers’ emotion labor.
Wharton’s (2013) second criticism was that this research disconnects the worker
from the larger social context, that is, “the jobs, workplaces, and organizational
settings that help define its particular characteristics and expression” (p. 301). As
we’ll see next in the discussion of poststructural emotion-labor research, context
can be widened even further than what Wharton (2013) proposed, to take into
account discourses of power shaping work life.
 Theorizing Emotion Labor 47

Unlike Wharton (2013), Fineman (2004) is an unapologetically harsh critic of

structural research on emotions. Arguing that emotions are fluid, shifting, and
“micro-contextual” (p. 725), he dismissed scholarship that tries to circumscribe
emotions as “a variable in some feature of work behavior” (p. 720). Given ongoing
debates about how to conceptualize emotions, he wondered what could possibly
be learned when they are simplified and codified so reductively. Fineman (2004)
was particularly critical of sociologists and psychologists who borrow methods
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from physical scientists and apply them to the measurement of emotions “to make
the inchoate tangible through quantification” (p. 721). In place of quantitative
studies, he suggested alternative approaches to capturing emotions, such as
ethnographies, free-form diaries, drawings, and letters.
While agreeing with Fineman (2004) about the philosophical and method-
ological problems associated with structural research on emotions and emotion
labor, I would add political concerns to his list. Most striking to me about these
studies is that issues of unequal power are largely absent. There is little or no
discussion of the relationship between poor working conditions and emotion labor,
something that Hochschild (1979, 1983) underscored throughout her reports of
her research on flight attendants. What about the impact on emotion labor of low
salaries, physical demands, punishing hours, understaffing, poor supervision,
discrimination, and other possibly unfavorable aspects of a job? When it comes to
teachers, what about the impact of standardized tests, teacher evaluations, and other
regulatory mechanisms on emotion labor? How might these and other issues ramp
up emotion labor, as they did for Hochschild’s participants? In other words, how
might power be highlighted in the emotion-labor conversation? Possible ways to
answer these questions are offered in the next section on poststructural approaches,
ones that honor Hochschild’s pioneering work while critiquing some of her basic
assumptions.

Poststructural Approaches to Emotion Labor

which to explore the real-self ←→ fake-self dichotomy because, although it

The scholarly literature on emotion labor serves as an interesting site in

argues for a socially-constructed and mutlilayered identity, often unwittingly

reproduces the belief that we have real and fake selves.
(Tracy and Trethewey 2005, p. 174)

Poststructural approaches to emotion labor differ from structural ones in obvious

ways. First they do not divide emotion labor into constituents which they then test
to arrive at statistical analyses. Nor do they make correlations between those
constituents and other aspects of work, such as burnout. Instead they take a
qualitative approach involving interviews, ethnographies, auto-ethnographies, and
so on to achieve a description of emotion labor that takes wider social contexts
into account. The goal of this research is to examine how “larger discourses of
power and everyday social interactions” affect emotion labor (Tracy 2005, p. 264).
 48 Theorizing Emotion Labor

However, taking a poststructural approach to emotion labor also requires

questioning some of Hochschild’s fundamental assumptions about employees’
relationship to work and about emotions themselves. Though credit is given to
Hochschild for pioneering the study of emotions in workplaces, her modernist
assumptions are challenged, as a way to both retain the emotion-labor concept and
bring it into the postmodern world. These modernist assumptions revolve around
a series of interrelated dichotomies upon which her work was based: real vs. fake
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selves; private vs. public self and inner vs. outer feelings. These are taken up next.

Challenging Hochschild’s Dichotomies

When the self is taken as real, it requires little further analysis.
(Tracy and Trethewey 2005, p. 191)

Hochschild’s assumption of a unitary authentic self whose essence remains

unchanged across contexts has been questioned by emotion-labor theorists
working in a poststructural paradigm (Tracy 2000, 2005;Tracy and Trethewey 2005;
Zembylas 2005, 2011). In place of a fixed and essential self, Tracy and Trethewey
(2005) offered a definition of the self as contextual, a self whose “whose meaning
emerges out of reflexive social interactions with others” (p. 170). Adopting a
discursive approach to emotion labor in the “destabilized and multivocal” contem-
porary world, the authors posited a “discursively constituted self, a self subjected to
and by discourses of power” (p. 171).
While proposing contextualized and negotiated selves, Tracy and Trethewey
(2005) nonetheless acknowledged that the authentic self is a widely circulating
trope, perpetuated not only by the self-help industry, but also by managerial and
entrepreneurial discourses, including mainstream contemporary emotion-labor
research, such as the structural research described earlier. The authors explained why
these discourses perpetuate the notion of an authentic self in two different contexts:
blue-collar work and white-collar work in North America. They explained how the
mythology of a unitary real self is vital to employers’ interests in both of those
sectors, to the possible detriment of employees’ well-being, as I discuss next.
When it comes to blue-collar work, stigmatized as less overtly prestigious,
employees are encouraged to maintain a distinction between their jobs and their
private lives in order to sequester the disfavored and/or distasteful aspects of their
work. Thus, these workers are urged to “craft a fake self at work, often under the
guise of protecting a real private self ” (p. 182). However, according to Tracy and
Trethewey (2005), the emotion work required to construct and maintain this split
may be unproductive, even deleterious, especially in cases where issues arising at
work spill over into non-working hours. When this happens, blue-collar employees
may reproach themselves for failing to keep their fake (work) and real (private life)
selves separate.
As to white-collar jobs, the split between real and fake selves operates differently.
Here, rather than maintaining a distinct private self outside of work, employees are
 Theorizing Emotion Labor 49

encouraged to actively improve themselves, with the goal of achieving a truer self,
one aligned with the values of the companies they work for. Thus, white-collar
workers must navigate managerial/entrepreneurial discourses focused on
individual self-improvement.5 According to Tracy and Trethewey (2005), by
promoting the notion that “some selves are more real, more valued, more
esteemed,” managerial/entrepreneurial discourses “reinscribe the dichotomy
between the real and the fake self ” (p. 177). In this paradigm, the ideal white-collar
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self is one who adopts employers’ values of hard work for financial rewards. The
result is “an organizationally defined self that comes to be understood as real and
of one’s own choosing” (p. 176).
When white-collar workers engage in self-improvement toward a truer or
idealized self aligned with workplace values, there is a shift in the locus of control
from management to the employees themselves. Of most concern to Tracey and
Trethewey (2005) is that this shift discourages white-collar workers from
organizing with each other for improved working conditions because their
attention is focused intensely on their own self-management. That is, by turning
the “panoptic gaze on their own performances and identities” (p. 180), they are
distracted from opportunities for “more participatory identity negotiation” (p. 185),
ones that might produce more favorable work environments for themselves and
their colleagues. At the same time, workplaces may lose out on opportunities to tap
into employees’ creative ideas, ones they might arrive at through dialogue and
collaboration.
In place of real vs. fake selves, Tracy and Trethewey (2005) proposed two terms:
preferred self and crystallized self. The replacement of authentic or true self with
preferred self is a way to reference the discursive construction of identity by
highlighting how discourses of power influence emotion work. Preferred in this
context is the organizationally-delineated identity that employees are expected to
adopt; it is neither real nor fake. In addition, the preferred self is not necessarily
imposed. Instead, the worker may participate actively in adopting it for strategic
reasons.
As to crystallized self, this term offers a politicized and layered understanding of
identities as multidimensional and even, surprisingly, aesthetically-pleasing: “the
more facets, the more beautiful and complex” (Tracy and Trethewey 2005, p. 186).
It invites an appreciation of how discourses shape selves in often unpredictable
ways: “crystallized selves have different shapes depending on the various discourses
through which they are constructed and constrained” (p. 186).
The authors’ primary goal in offering these terms was to urge alternatives to
mainstream emotion-labor research. Above all, they encouraged research that
avoids perpetuating the real- vs. fake-self split and proposed the following
recommendations for future studies: 1) “incorporate multilayered notions of the self
in research methodologies”; 2) do not sort identities along authenticity lines:
“backstage selves should not be considered more real than frontstage selves”; 3)
attend to ways in which employees “embody, enact or resist notions of the real and
fake” (p. 185).
 50 Theorizing Emotion Labor

An Example of Poststructural Emotion-Labor Research

An example of the type of research Tracy and Trethewey (2005) promoted is Tracy’s
(2005) study of corrections officers’ work. Wanting to examine emotion labor
while decoupling it from the idea of an essential private self, Tracy used a
poststructural framework in her investigation of corrections officers’ multiple,
shifting, and contingent identities in the western United States. The relationship
between complex discursive identities and emotion labor is laid out in her
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description of this research as a study of “the ways that discourses of power and
organizational processes enable and constrain certain constructions of identity and
how these issues, in turn, impact the difficulty of emotion work” (p. 264).
Tracy’s (2005) data included participant observation field notes, organizational
training documents, and transcribed interviews. She observed 68 different
corrections officers interacting with inmates during four-hour time periods and
was a participant observer in training sessions, an interesting parallel to
Hochschild’s (1979) research. In addition, she interviewed officers, supervisors,
wardens, captains, and sheriffs. The questions to officers pertained to whether they
were conscious of managing their emotions and which aspects of the job were
most stressful. One subset of these questions aimed at uncovering the acting or
roleplaying aspects of the job. For example, she asked interviewees to imagine she
was an actor preparing to play their part: “Describe to me how I would have to act
and feel in order to portray you accurately” (p. 271).
Tracy (2005) uncovered a “complex web of emotion labor expectations” (p.
267) that required corrections officers to juggle contradictory identities. Most
interesting is the ways in which Tracy connected these varying types of emotion
labor to wider discourses of power and the contradictions among them. For
example, she found that corrections officers were expected to act as nurturing
therapists who displayed empathy, grounded in an ideology of rehabilitation that
had replaced an earlier ideology of prison time as punishment. On the other hand,
this empathic stance conflicted with the simultaneous mandate to remain alert to
possible physical attacks that might arise at any moment.
Tracy (2005) explained how these contradictory emotion-labor demands were
driven by differing discourses. Nurturing and empathy derived from a discourse of
caring most often attributed to women. In contrast, the requirement to remain
suspicious and wary of physical threats was driven by a masculinist discourse of
street smartness and toughness. Complicating emotion labor even further, empathic
caring was associated with servitude: those of lower social status generally serve
those of higher social status, such as when the wealthy hire housekeepers, nannies,
drivers and so on, thereby outsourcing their household labor to subordinates.
When it comes to corrections officers, the script is flipped: they are charged with
serving prisoners, who are members of a disfavored population, one that is locked
up and hidden from view of the wider society.
Therefore, for the male corrections officers Tracey (2005) studied, caring for
prisoners was multiply subordinating. First they had to display empathy, signaling
 Theorizing Emotion Labor 51

femininity and weakness. In addition, they had to signal readiness to defend

themselves physically. And finally they found themselves in an inferior position
within the law enforcement hierarchy of being mandated to serve their
subordinates.
As Tracy’s (2005) discursive analysis showed, applying a real- vs. fake-self
dichotomy to corrections officers’ work would fail to capture the complex
discursive contradictions driving emotion labor in that context. Her research
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demonstrated that the push and pull her participants experienced was not a
struggle between an authentic private self and a fake work self. Rather it was a
challenging process of managing contradictory demands driven by macro
discourses of power. As we’ll see in the next section, contradictory discourses have
also been revealed in emotion-labor poststructural research in teacher education.

Poststructural Research on Teachers’ Emotion Labor

When we begin to understand emotional experience as discursively
constituted, the teacher-self becomes more complex … Foucauldian theory
allows us to see emotional labor and its relation to emotion rules as an
interplay of knowledge, power, and discursive practices.
(Zembylas 2005, p. 59)

Like Tracy (2005), Zembylas’s (2005) research was grounded in poststructural

understandings of emotions and emotion labor as discursively constructed. Using
a Foucauldian framework in his ethnography of a K-1 science teacher’s emotion
labor, Zembylas (2005) described how the emotion rules of the school in which
she taught were historically contingent and therefore malleable. In other words, he
assumed that the rules were subject to contestation rather than strict obedience.
The aim of the study, therefore, was to explore the “social and political character
of teacher emotion” (p. 58) in hopes of discovering possible areas of transformation
of unfavorable conditions.
Offering a corrective to Hochschild’s positing of emotion labor as uni-
directional imposition of emotion rules on compliant workers, Zembylas (2005)
conceptualized emotion labor as dynamic, multi-dimensional, and multi-
directional, “continually constructed and reproduced through interactions of
domination and resistance” (p. 59). To discover the emotion rules of the context in
which he carried out the ethnography, Zembylas (2005) interviewed his
participant, Catherine, observed her teaching, and asked her to keep an emotion
diary in which she noted emotions she experienced while teaching as well as the
events taking place when she experienced them.
Data were organized around genealogies of Catherine’s emotions. Using a
three-level conceptual framework (intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup),
Zembylas (2005) traced the history of particular emotions in his participant’s
teaching life over three years. For example, following the trajectory of a single
emotion (excitement), he showed how it worked at each level of Catherine’s
 52 Theorizing Emotion Labor

teaching. At the intrapersonal level, there was reciprocity between excitement and
her desire to explore knowledge with her students. In addition, excitement
increased confidence in her goal of engaging children in hands-on experiments,
despite a context that mandated testing of facts rather than exploration.
At the interpersonal level. Zembylas (2005) described how Catherine allowed
her emotions and those she read on students’ bodies to guide her decision-making
as lessons were unfolding. For example, if she read boredom, rather than
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excitement, she might experience disappointment over students’ withdrawal. The

lack of excitement prompted her to change directions and try a different activity.
According to Zembylas (2005), then, emotions, such as excitement, were
communicative and contagious. They drove Catherine’s moment-by-moment
classroom decisions as she and her students tuned into each other’s emotions and
either intensified or blocked particular ones. Catherine’s emotion labor at this level
consisted of attending to her emotions as well as students’ and changing direction
in response to boredom and frustration, for example. Zembylas’s (2005) analysis, in
this regard, conceptualizes emotion labor not as a negative experience that should
be avoided, as it is in structural studies discussed earlier, but, instead, as a healthy
response to unavoidable conflict. This is the approach I take in my data analysis as
well, discussed in the next four chapters.
As to the intergroup level, Zembylas (2005) found that Catherine’s emotion
labor was shaped in part by the emotion rules promulgated by the school and
wider science-teaching discourses, ones that influenced which pedagogies were
favored and which were disfavored. Catherine repeatedly ran up against a
masculinist discourse promulgating science as objective, science teaching as fact-
and test-driven, and a lack of interest on the part of colleagues in discussing
affective dimensions of teaching or pedagogies that did not directly support
standardized testing. In addition, Catherine was frequently dismissed or ridiculed
when she tried to discuss her excitement or other emotions with her colleagues.
However, rather than complying with the prevailing emotion rules, Catherine
eventually resisted them, even sharing excerpts of her emotion diary with her
students. In this way, she generated greater excitement about learning and greater
professional satisfaction.
The lesson Zembylas (2005) drew from his poststructural exploration of
Catherine’s emotion labor was that research on emotions, emotion rules, and
emotion labor can allow teachers and students to challenge unfavorable conditions
in schools. Seeing emotions as political, he viewed them as a potential source of
resistance and reform. That is, emotions are both “a productive starting point for
collective action” and “a dynamic process” for subverting dysfunctional emotion
rules and generating more useful ones (p. 111).
Loh and Liew (2016), too, took a discursive approach in their analysis of the
emotion labor of secondary English language teachers in Singapore. Embedding
their data analysis in a rich description of the social context, the authors discussed
the government’s demand for English language literacy as a way to promote
economic competitiveness. Furthermore, given the multilingual population of
 Theorizing Emotion Labor 53

Singapore, English is viewed as an international lingua franca, propped up by the

Speak Good English Movement and the education ministry’s demands for the use
of so-called standard English, despite the fact that 50 percent of secondary students
come from non-English speaking homes.
Given these conditions, Loh and Liew (2016) found emotion labor in several
areas. The first was a conflict between the mandate to teach English as if it were a
neutral medium of economic gain and the teachers’ desire to prepare students to
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think critically about language and the world. The second emotion-labor theme
was the culture of testing that evaluated teachers according to scores their students
received. The third theme was the burden of grading writing. Here the emotion
labor was twofold. First was just the sheer exhaustion of having to read so many
papers. Second was the mandate to give grades despite the subjectivity of
evaluating writing. Furthermore, when students wrote about personal topics,
teachers were reluctant to grade their writing though they were required to do so.
Finally, teachers reported conflict between their training in culturally-responsive
teaching and the schools’ demand for one-size-fits-all pedagogy grounded in
standardized testing.
Loh and Liew (2016) called for attention in English language teacher education
to the affective dimension of teaching so that teachers might collaborate rather
than experiencing their emotion labor as personal and private. These issues are
taken up in Chapters 4 through 7.

Emotion Labor in Emotions and English Language Teaching

Having reviewed various definitions of emotion labor, from Hochschild’s original
proposal to more recent poststructural understandings, I now lay out what I take
from this literature review. As far as Hochschild’s (1979, 1983, 2012) research goes,
I’ve retained the general notion of tacit workplace feeling rules. These rules,
embedded in institutional policies, imply which emotions are deemed appropriate
and inappropriate for English language teachers to display. In my data analysis I
focus on how EL teachers perceive those rules when responding to challenging
pedagogical situations and whether they resist them or comply with them.
I’ve also retained Hochschild’s attention to the relationship between emotion
labor and unequal power. This includes imbalances between part-time and full-
time English language teachers and between instructional staff and administrators,
critical issues in the current era of neoliberal reforms in which contingent labor
often makes up the majority of the English language teaching workforce yet is not
usually included in decision-making. The impact of these imbalances is another
aspect of emotion labor I take up.
On the other hand, I do not conceptualize unequal power as fixed, but, rather,
susceptible to resistance and contestation. This type of push back was apparent in
examples offered by Hochschild even though her presentation of power relations
might seem intractably unequal. I too offer examples I found in the data of both
compliance and resistance by full- and part-time teachers.
 54 Theorizing Emotion Labor

As to the poststructural direction of my research, I draw upon Tracy’s (2005)

attention to “larger discourses of power and everyday social interactions” that affect
emotion labor (p. 264). In addition, I attend to Tracy and Trethewey’s (2005) notion
of a multilayered self rather than a fixed and unitary self.
So, to sum up my conceptualization of emotion labor in the data-analysis
chapters, it is based on the following assumptions:
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1. a notion of tacit yet negotiable feeling rules in postsecondary institutions and

the field of ELT;
2. acknowledgment of teachers’ self-monitoring to achieve “appropriate”
emotions guided by institutional policies and professional guidelines;
3. attention to the impact on EL instructors of unequal power within postsec-
ondary institutions and the field of ELT, including compliance and resistance
to tacit feeling rules;
4. discourses of emotion labor in ELT.

Notes
1 Unlike some theorists who distinguish between “feelings” and “emotions,” the first
being physical sensations and the second being the naming of those sensations,
Hochschild used them interchangeably. So, for example, emotion management was
described as “the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling”
(Hochschild 1979, p. 561).
2 In this example from the 1983 edition of The Managed Heart, Hochschild did not
acknowledge that feeling rules are cultural and that the emotional conventions of
weddings are not uniform across cultures. It is only in the preface to the 2012 edition
that she made the correction: “Cultures carry different feeling rules” (p. xi).
3 Hochschild approached this research with the notion of emotion work; only while
collecting data did “emotion labor” occur to her. Thereafter, she used emotion labor to
refer to emotion management in the workplace.
4 Some education scholars, such as Kimura (2010) and Oplatka (2009), focused not on
teachers’ emotion labor, but on teachers’ emotion management. Subscribing to the
notions of teachers’ fake vs. real selves and positive vs. negative emotions, they described
emotion management as an intrapersonal phenomenon carried out by teachers and
affected mainly by moral and ethical considerations. Because their work does not take
up power relations, I mention it here, but do not include it in the literature review.
5 What Tracy and Trethewey (2005) call “entrepreneurial” discourse is labeled
“neoliberal” discourse by others, such as Chun (2009). He described the “neoliberal
discourse of self-actualization” in the following way: “Being an entrepreneur of oneself
involves the active pursuit of skills designed to make a person a more attractive, and
hence, marketable commodity” (p. 112).

References
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Chun, C. W. (2009). Contesting neoliberal discourses in EAP: Critical praxis in an IEP
classroom. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 8, 111–120.
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Fineman, S. (2004). Getting the measure of emotion—and the cautionary tale of intelligence.
Human Relations 57, 719–740.
Grandey, A.A. (2000). Emotion regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize
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Groth, M. Henning-Thurau, T. and Wang, K. (2013). The customer experience of emotional
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Hochschild, A.R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal
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with a New Preface. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Keller, M.M., Chang, M.L., Becker, E.S., Goetz, T. and Frenzel, A.C. (2014). Teachers’
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 4
HIGH-STAKES LITERACY TESTING
AND EMOTION LABOR
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… it is important to hear from front-line workers - educators in schools,

especially those who are working in challenging circumstances - about what
mandated testing actually does to everyday practices.
(Cormack and Comber 2013, p. 78–9)

… a test score is a sign open to various readings, and hence to dispute; tests
are often sites of competition or struggle over values.
(McNamara 2012, p. 572)

The literature on the impact on teachers of high-stakes testing in various settings

has contributed to greater understanding of conflicts among pedagogy, curricula,
and the cognitive and emotional demands of the tests. It also sheds light on the
politics of testing and possible ways to resist the proliferation and misuse of tests.
This literature includes studies of the effects of high-stakes tests on individual
teachers (Assaf 2008; Sutton 2004; Loh and Liew 2016) and on educational
institutions (Kostogriz and Doecke 2013; Cormack and Comber 2013).
In addition, there are publications theorizing the relationship between high-stakes
tests and power more explicitly, not just in classrooms and schools, but also at the level
of the testing industry and governmental policies (Hamp-Lyons 2007; McNamara
and Shohamy 2006; McNamara 2012; Shohamy 2006, 2007, 2013). This research
specifically addresses English language testing and therefore has direct relevance to
this book. However, equally important is the attention to power relations in high-
stakes literacy testing in all the works mentioned above and so, though not all are
directly related to English language testing per se, they are also relevant.
Some of the studies I review in this chapter mention or briefly discuss the
emotional impact on teachers of high-stakes testing without explicitly theorizing
emotions. They therefore offer a useful yet incomplete backdrop for the last
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 57

sections of this chapter where I present a discursive analysis of English language

teachers’ responses to interview questions about their emotions regarding CUNY’s
high-stakes literacy testing. Following the literature review, I will discuss the
findings from those interviews, focusing on emotion labor, and conclude with
implications for further research and pedagogy.

Related Literature
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Overall, the findings about the impact of high-stakes testing on teachers and
schools in the US context are fairly consistent. Au’s (2007) qualitative metasyn-
thesis of 49 studies of the effects on curricula (content, knowledge, and pedagogy)
of state-mandated high-stakes tests in K-12 US classrooms over 20 years yielded
the following findings: narrowing of curricula to include only the subjects covered
by the tests; increased fragmentation of knowledge into testable units; increase in
teacher-centered pedagogy; and greater external control of curricula. The
literature I discuss next demonstrates how these factors played out in different
socioeconomic contexts and classroom settings in the US, Singapore, and Australia.

Effects of High-Stakes Testing on Individual Teachers

Assaf (2008) carried out a case study of a well-regarded reading specialist, Marsha,
with over 37 years of teaching experience, who worked in an urban elementary
school in Texas. Her job at the time of the study was teaching reading in a pull-out
program to struggling and reluctant readers, all of whom were second-generation
Mexican Americans with Spanish as their home language. The aim of the research
was to investigate how Marsha’s “professional identity” was affected by the “testing
pressures” in her school (p. 240). Marsha’s students were required to take the Texas
Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), given to students in grades 3 through
11 in reading, writing, math, social science, and science. The consequences of
students not passing the tests were significant. For example, third-grade students
were given three chances to pass the reading test and could not continue on to the
fourth grade if they did not. Furthermore, schools such as Marsha’s, whose students
failed to achieve passing scores, were at risk of being reorganized or undergoing
curricular and staffing changes. Due to a significant drop in scores, her school was
required to increase test preparation and undergo greater surveillance of the
teachers, including observation by outside evaluators and weekly meetings in
which test-taking strategies were taught.
Using the lens of identity theory, Assaf (2008) explored Marsha’s beliefs,
knowledge, educational theories, workplace relationships, and behavior by
observing her teaching and interviewing the participant, her colleagues, and her
students. The themes that emerged were: nurturing real readers, testing tensions
and competing commitments, shifting practices, and the changing role and respon-
sibilities of the reading specialist. Each of these is taken up next, particularly in
relation to how they intersect with high-stakes literacy testing and emotion labor.
 58 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

As to Marsha’s philosophy of nurturing “real readers” (Assaf 2008, p. 245), her

overarching goal was for her students to become lifelong readers who read for
pleasure. Developing a passion for reading, she believed, would pay off in other ways,
including improved school work in all subject areas. She therefore offered students
a wide variety of developmentally-appropriate books, encouraged discussion of titles
and authors, and taught students how to navigate the local public library.
However, Marsha’s aspiration to nurture real readers was “overshadowed by the
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testing and accountability aims set by her school and state” (p. 245). She struggled
to reconcile the demands of high-stakes testing with her philosophy of cultivating
lifelong reading in her students. This is where emotion labor manifested itself,
though Assaf (2008) doesn’t label it as such. When asked about the conflict she
experienced between her professional identity as a reading teacher and the demand
to prepare students for the reading portion of the state exam, Marsha answered that
she felt “anxious and frustrated” as well as “so torn between what these students
need to do in order to succeed as real readers and what they need to do to pass the
test” (p. 246).
The irony, as Marsha saw it, was that in order to help students pass the reading
portion of the test, she had to offer less reading instruction and less time for in-
class reading. Thus, while taking seriously her responsibility to help them pass the
test, she “feared that focusing on testing would only limit how students viewed
school and learning to read” (p. 246). This fear was realized when her students
reported that once the state testing period had passed, they felt their schoolwork
was over. Marsha’s emotion labor, therefore, consisted of “wrestl[ing] with how to
best fight against a system that jeopardized students’ academic future, the school’s
accountability rating, and her own instructional goals” (p. 146).
Viewed through the lenses of power and emotion labor, Marsha’s dilemma can
be seen as a struggle among her professional knowledge, her desire to help her
students pass, and her fear of retribution in the form of diminished autonomy and
greater control by the testing authorities. These types of struggle will be discussed
further in the data analysis section of this chapter, particularly in the section in
which I discuss responses grouped under: Ambivalence: Discourse of Inevitability
and Discourse of Unfairness.
Though Sutton (2004) taught in an entirely different context than Assaf ’s
participant, the findings of her self-study were similar to Assaf ’s (2008), especially
when it came to what she described as dilemmas, that might also be described as
contradictions producing emotion labor. A professor of education at an open-
admissions urban US university, similar to my research site, Sutton (2004) had
taught educational psychology for 20 years at that institution, preceded by 5 years
teaching math in New Zealand, her native country. Sutton’s (2004) dilemmas
revolved around the extent to which she should modify her assessment,
curriculum, and pedagogy in response to a standardized achievement test that was
newly-required for teacher certification, PRAXIS II: Principles of Teaching and
Learning. The test consisted of both multiple-choice and short-answer questions
mainly related to case studies.
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 59

Having accepted her administration’s offer to pay for her to take Praxis II,
Sutton (2004) was well aware of the challenges it posed, not just for her open-
admissions students whose failure rate on the test was nearly double the state
average, but also for herself as a test-taker. She had found the test to be long and
choosing the intended correct answers difficult because “the research evidence
associated with some questions was ambiguous so there was no clear right answer”
(p. 466).
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To address these challenges, Sutton (2004) made several changes to her assessment
procedures, course content, and pedagogy. For example, she reduced the amount of
in-class and out-of-class writing and added more quizzes. This led to assessing
students not on the strength of their supporting arguments and revision, but, rather,
on whether they correctly answered multiple-choice and short-answer questions.
One rationale Sutton (2004) offered for this change was her awareness of assessment
as “a cultural genre” (p. 467). Having grown up outside the US, she was sensitive to
the difficulty of high-stakes, multiple-choice tests for those unaccustomed to them
and wanted to offer her students ample opportunity to practice this genre, one that
had not been not required for their admission to the college.
Sutton’s (2004) modifications were driven not just by the test itself, but also the
high failure rate of students at her university when they took the test the first time.
If this poor performance continued, the hope of increased hiring of teachers of
color in local urban school districts would go unrealized. Sutton (2004) considered
it her responsibility to facilitate that promise, especially given the difficult circum-
stances her students faced: working long hours while in school, caring for family
members, commuting long distances, and taking off semesters to earn money for
university fees and pay off debts. Awareness of these conditions trumped Sutton’s
(2004) doubts about modifying her teaching in response to Praxis II, though she
seems to have expended a great deal of emotion labor reconciling the various
dilemmas she outlined.
The parallels between Sutton’s students and CUNY ELLs will be seen in the
data analysis section of this chapter where teachers reported struggling with the
amount of test preparation to offer as opposed to teaching reading and writing,
given the disadvantages their students had faced as urban working-class immigrants
and would continue to face if they failed CUNY’s high-stakes literacy tests.
For their part, Loh and Liew (2016) explicitly studied the emotion labor of ten
Singapore secondary school English teachers, four beginning and six experienced,
and discussed findings related to high-stakes literacy testing, among other topics.
Using a methodology similar to mine—semi-structured interviews in which
participants were invited to discuss the emotions of their teaching—they posed
questions such as: What emotions and feelings do you often experience in your
work as an English teacher? Can you recount as vividly as you can one or two
memorable emotional moments/episodes in your career as a teacher? Loh and
Liew (2016) sought examples in the data of “tensions or conflict that resulted in
emotional labour” (p. 272) and found that participants reported conflicts between
their public lives as employees and their professional training as English teachers.
 60 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

The theme most relevant to this chapter in the authors’ data analysis was conflict
between an instrumentalist view of English, promulgated by official government
and school policies, and participants’ professional training in literature and critical
thinking. This conflict was particularly pronounced when it came to high-stakes
literacy testing. Teachers’ professional knowledge and ideological commitment to
socially-responsive teaching clashed with Singapore’s “culture of performativity” (p.
272), played out in national exams.
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For example, one of Loh and Liew’s (2016) participants, Daniel, articulated his
complex emotion labor around standardized testing as a struggle to reconcile
current pedagogies he had learned in teacher education courses with adminis-
trators’ and parents’ expectations that he would prepare students to pass the
national high-stakes examinations. Daniel was expected to use drills and other
teacher-centered activities that clashed with his newly learned pedagogies. This
struggle was accompanied by “a sense of incompetence” (ibid.) when he taught to
the standardized tests as well as when his students failed them, a finding similar to
one I discuss later in the chapter under the heading, Discourse of Shame.
Additionally, and like some of my respondents, Daniel and other interviewees
lamented the time and academic-freedom drain of test preparation and resented
the expectation that they were solely responsible for English literacy teaching,
among the teaching staff. Furthermore this responsibility was high-stakes because
passing the English language portion of the national examination was required for
students to progress to the next grade level.
Though Loh and Liew (2016) were impressed by respondents’ emotional
investment in their teaching, they were also concerned about the toll of
“performance culture” (p. 276) on their well-being and longevity in the profession.
Like the EL teachers I interviewed, those in their Singapore study were expected
to reconcile the local teacher-recruitment discourse of “self-sacrificing teacher-as-
caregiver” (p. 268) with the demands of high-stakes literacy tests, the contradictions
of which produced emotion labor.
To sum up the three studies of the impact of high-stakes tests on individual
teachers, the findings point to emotion labor grounded in the struggle between
short-term gains of high test scores and longer-term goals, such as lifelong literacy
and critical thinking. Testing regimes were found to shift the role of teachers from
facilitators of students’ literacy development to test-prep coaches leading to
deprofessionalization and diminished enthusiasm for their work. Another
significant aspect of emotion labor was that the high-stakes aspect of literacy testing
set participants up for inordinate responsibility with serious consequences,
including students being held back or excluded from their studies altogether. How
these kinds of findings showed up in my data will be discussed later in the chapter.

Effects of High-Stakes Testing on Educational Institutions

The literature on the impact of high-stakes tests at the school level uses a wider
lens than the one focused on individual teachers. This research attends to the
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 61

relationship between the socioeconomic profile of the schools’ populations and the
impact of high-stakes tests on teachers and administrators. These studies also
uncovered varying degrees of resistance and accommodation to testing regimes
among administrators and teachers, in some cases referring to emotion labor
explicitly.
Kostogriz and Doecke (2013) examined the impact of high-stakes tests on
schools in Australia with differing student populations. The National Assessment
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Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) introduced in 2008, was charac-

terized by the authors as “a test-based system of accountability” the purpose of
which was to make teachers responsible for the literacy outcomes of all students
“regardless of their social and cultural advantages and disadvantages” (p. 91).
Ideologically speaking, the authors considered the test to be a bi-product of
neoliberal policies driving increased monitoring of teachers, including compliance
with test demands. That is, according to neoliberal ideology, teachers are the most
important “variable” (p. 92) in education and therefore subject to the greatest
amount of surveillance.
To investigate the workings of this ideology, Kostogriz and Doecke (2013)
examined the everyday experience of teachers managing the NAPLAN to discover
any contradictions between accountability (scores on standardized tests), and
responsibility (a situated notion of teachers’ responsiveness to students as part of
their professional ethics).
The study focused on approaches to the NAPLAN taken in two schools: a large
secondary school in a middle-class suburb of Melbourne and a multicultural
primary school in suburban Melbourne with a large migrant population, the
mission of which was social justice. These two schools responded to the mandated
test according to their respective school cultures. So, for example, the secondary
school had already been on a course of diagnostic testing to “inform and enhance
teaching practices,” (Kostogriz and Doecke 2013, p. 93), especially in literacy. The
school principal therefore welcomed the NAPLAN as another useful instrument
in “the context of a school assessment culture” (p. 93).
The primary school, on the other hand, was focused on nurturing students and
maintaining the diversity of the school and local community. Therefore, the
principal and teachers viewed the NAPLAN as an intrusion that could potentially
disrupt community by corporatizing the school through its accountability
measures. Furthermore, teachers objected to the fact that test results were reported
at the end of the year and therefore offered no diagnostic assistance. They were not
opposed to testing per se, but rather to high-stakes literacy tests the purpose of
which was to hold teachers accountable without offering any assistance that might
enhance teaching and learning, particularly with immigrant children.
Kostogriz and Doecke (2013) analyzed the relationship between accountability
and responsibility through the lens of ethics. As to the secondary school, they
described the reaction to the NAPLAN as “a detached approach to professional
ethics that involves generalisation, abstraction, and impartiality” (p. 94). They
characterized the secondary school’s welcoming NAPLAN as ethically
 62 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

questionable given that test scores rather than teacher knowledge informed
assessment of students’ learning.
By contrast, the authors characterized the primary school’s response to the
NAPLAN and to literacy teaching as grounded in an “ethic of care” (Kostogriz and
Doecke 2013, p. 94), declaring that literacy teaching in that context was driven by
“a deep sense of professional and social responsibility that involves an attitude of
care and attentiveness to students” (p. 94). In addition, they found that teachers in
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the primary school resisted accountability by “reclaim[ing] the space and time for
responsive practice,” perhaps a precursor to more widespread “forms of resistance”
(p. 96).
It is interesting to note that in an earlier article, about the primary school,
Kostogriz (2012) associated an ethics of care with “affective labour” (p. 397), based
on a Deleuzian concept of affect as unencumbered energy beyond the reach of
pernicious structures, such as high-stakes testing, and therefore an area of possible
resistance to those structures. More specifically, Kostogriz (2012) used “affective
labour” to describe the tensions teachers experience among statistical data used to
judge their teaching, relationships with students and families, and teachers’ “profes-
sional community and autonomy in decision-making” (p. 404), akin to my
conceptualization of emotion labor.
Cormack and Comber (2013), too, focused on the impact of the NAPLAN, in
their case, on one primary school in a poverty-stricken rural area of Australia
following a drop in scores on that test. Data included interviews with the principal
and teachers with the aim of examining “the complexity of work and emotions
associated with high-stakes literacy testing” (p. 78). Using institutional ethnography
and critical policy analysis, they sought to illuminate “emotional, everyday, and
pragmatic” work (p. 78) that is usually hidden or ignored.
Claiming that high-stakes literacy testing is grounded in a “discourse of data” (p.
79) whereby a school’s value is determined by numbers, Cormack and Comber
(2013) challenged two assumptions of this discourse: 1) schools operate on a level
playing field, regardless of the students’ SES and; 2) teachers are the key to student
achievement, regardless of students’ race, class, linguistic background, and other
social factors. Therefore, according to the discourse of data, “the only solution for
change within schools is teaching” (p. 79). This critique mirrors Kostogriz and
Doecke’s (2013) concern about ways in which neoliberal ideology targets teachers
as the key variable in student literacy development, regardless of the socioeconomic
context.
In the rural context of their study, Cormack and Comber’s (2013) findings
regarding the school principal are especially instructive. They found that, given his
isolation as the sole administrator in a remotely-located school, he was eager for
outside support; the school’s low NAPLAN scores triggered help. Outside
evaluators were assigned to observe teachers in his school and provide feedback
toward higher scores. Alongside this assistance, the principal was invited to join the
Principals as Literacy Leaders Project, an offer he described using “spatial
metaphors,” explaining that the project would stretch the narrow world of his rural
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 63

school by bringing him into a “nation-wide” program with its “opening doors”
and “outside influence” (p. 82).
In contrast to the principal’s use of expansive spatial metaphors in reference to
his widening professional affiliation, he used metaphors of spatial narrowing when
discussing the curricular changes resulting from outside support: focusing, zeroing
in, digging, and drilling. Ultimately, Cormack and Comber (2013) found that the
discourse of data was associated with a challenging emotional landscape, charac-
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terized by a growing schism between the principal and the teachers due to his
greater trust in data than in teachers’ abilities and judgments. Complicating the
emotional landscape further was that despite his reliance on data, the principal
expressed a lack of confidence in his ability to interpret them, leading to increased
reliance on outside help.
For their part, the teachers experienced none of the excitement of being
connected to a broader professional world outside the school. Instead, the test data
made them feel judged, anxious, stigmatized, and intruded upon. They were
simultaneously nervous about humiliation when test results were publicized and
cynical about standardized tests as yet another external judgment interrupting their
teaching and demanding their attention.
Despite their cynicism, however, teachers modified their curricula according to
test demands within a discourse of deficits, having no other discursive resources at
their disposal. That is, “they acted pragmatically on the findings in a somewhat
compliant fashion” (Cormack and Comber 2013, p. 86), despite their concern that
the tests ignored many of their students’ important achievements. Yet, while
grappling with these contradictions, the teachers ended up blaming the students
and their parents for what the discourses of data and deficits constructed as their
literacy gaps and lacks. Showing no signs of taking into account the “material
realities of poverty,” (p. 88) the teachers pointed to parents and the community as
the source of failure rather than structural inequality.
According to Cormack and Comber (2013), then, the NAPLAN and its
discourse of data covered up “the materiality of poverty and place” (p. 87) and its
possible impact on the results, a finding congruent with those of Kostogriz and
Doecke (2013). These issues related to power, inequality, and testing are more
explicitly taken up next.

High-Stakes Literacy Tests and Power

… tests are powerful tools that play a central role in creating social classes,
determining knowledge, affecting distribution of wealth, shaping language
policies, and transforming teaching and learning.
(Shohamy 2013, p. 226)

Some of the studies discussed earlier examined the relationship between results on
high-stakes tests and students’ social class and language backgrounds, among other
issues. However, none explicitly theorized power in ways that the research I will
 64 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

discuss in this section did. Shohamy’s work, for example, is notable for its attention
to power and testing at various social levels. Taking a comprehensive “use-oriented
approach” to testing, her research has focused on test-takers, teachers, knowledge
sanctioned by tests, administrators, politicians and testing companies. Additionally,
the use-oriented approach is concerned with the short- and long-term
consequences of testing, including social exclusion and inclusion.
Perhaps Shohamy’s most important contribution has been to conceptualize how
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language testing creates de facto language policy by prescribing the languages in

which the tests are written, the content of those tests, cut-off scores, and so on.
According to Shohamy (2006), those making these decisions are conscious of the
potential of high-stakes literacy tests to impose language policies and in doing so
provoke behavioral changes in test-takers and their teachers in response to test
demands.
As to English language testing, for example, Shohamy (2007) made a strong
claim about the power of these tests is to effectuate “a reduction, in the status of
teachers, from authoritative and responsible professionals to servants of the system”
(p. 521). In addition, she claimed that, given the demands of preparing students for
high-stakes English tests, teachers “often experience fear and anxiety” (p. 528)
knowing they will be judged by the scores their students receive on the tests. They
therefore “change their behavior and start teaching for the test or teaching the test
itself ” (ibid), a claim supported by studies discussed earlier in this chapter. On the
other hand, consent to high-stakes tests is not necessarily lock-step or mindless, as
some of those studies, and the data I will present later in this chapter, also
demonstrate, through examples of teachers’ resistance.
Linking the power of testing with the power of English, Shohamy (2006)
discussed high-stakes literacy tests of English as instruments of power that
determine who is excluded and who is included thereby perpetuating the
dominance of English in those institutions and countries where it is tested. English
language teachers, in this equation, “become the agents” (p. 529) who enact tacit
language policies.
However, though Shohamy (2006) seemed to be painting a deterministic
portrait of English language teachers as powerless conduits of testing/language
policies, she offered techniques of resistance to the power of English language
tests. One recommendation was for teachers to demand diversity in testing,
including a wider range of correctness criteria and a greater variety of texts to be
included on literacy tests. Above all, she exhorted language teachers to become
more involved in the uses of language tests not only to increase their influence,
but also to ensure greater equity. In the data analysis section of this chapter, I
discuss an attempt by CUNY reading faculty to develop a reading test that met
the criteria outlined by Shohamy, one eventually stymied by the university’s upper
administration.
Hamp-Lyons (2007), too, called for greater participation of English language
teachers in testing policy and practice as a way to strengthen the bonds among
assessment, teaching, and learning. Achieving greater teacher input requires
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 65

acknowledging the difference between “exam culture” and “learning culture” (p.
488). Exam culture, according to Hamp-Lyons (2007), is preparation for large-scale
externally-imposed assessment that functions to sort, label, and categorize language
learners. Though a supporter of high-stakes testing, she cautioned that it lays too
much responsibility and pressure on teachers and learners regardless of “real world
variables” (p. 491) that influence scores, as others whose work I reviewed earlier
pointed out.
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Hamp-Lyons’s (2007) raised concerns about ways in which exam culture has
become the “dominant ideology in the discourse of educational economics and
politics” (p. 488), thereby shutting out teachers’ voices and innovation. Learning
culture, on the other hand, takes the relationship between teaching and learning
into account. Rather than offering a single score, it provides continuous feedback
to teachers and learners in the interest of appropriate intervention and support. In
a learning culture, tests are developed and given by those whose fingers are on the
pulse of actual learners in real classrooms: “The learner is seen as more important
than the language” (p. 489).
Hamp-Lyons’s (2007) recommendations for enhancing learning culture in
assessment are focused on teacher education at the pre- and in-service levels. This
would include cultivating teachers’ identities as assessors rather than agents of pre-
existing testing/language policies. It would also encourage teachers to think
critically about assessment and “find ways to contribute to positive change” (p. 492).
Whereas Hamp-Lyons (2007) contrasted exam and learning cultures,
McNamara (2012) made exam culture and high-stakes literacy testing his sole
focus. In his poststructural examination of the role of language tests in contem-
porary societies, McNamara drew upon Derrida’s concept of language as
shibboleth, that is, an instrument of surveillance that serves to sort those who are
included and those who are excluded. Using shibboleth as a metaphor for “the
social and political function of tests” (p. 565), McNamara proposed a distinction
between fairness and justice when it comes to tests.
Fairness refers to “the technical quality of the assessment procedure” (p. 577)
through attempts to ensure that tests will yield accurate and consistent results.
Justice, on the other hand, refers to the values implicit in the use of tests and
consequences for test-takers of passing or failing. So, for example, when discussing
the Australian Citizenship Test, McNamara and Ryan (2011) categorized its
psychometric and linguistic properties as fairness issues while labeling the question
of why applicants for citizenship should be tested on English in the first place as a
justice issue.
Above all, McNamara (2012) was concerned about the social consequences of
using language tests, due to the human rights implications, including exclusion
from educational institutions and countries. Given potentially unjust consequences,
“the ethical dilemmas and responsibilities of language testers” (p. 578) should be
central to assessment research, according to McNamara. These issues and others are
taken up next, in the analysis of participants’ answers to my questions about high-
stakes literacy testing.
 66 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

High-Stakes Testing and Emotion Labor: A Discursive Analysis

Data Collection
The data consisted of interviews with 13 instructors and two questionnaires using
the same questions. Those who were interviewed, or filled out the questionnaire,
had responded to an online call requesting participation in my study. All were
currently or had been instructors in the City University of New York. The
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interviews, conducted between April and December 2014, focused on four

separate topics, including high-stakes literacy testing. The interviewees and
respondents were nine full-timers and four part-timers teaching in academic ESL
programs and two teaching full-time in intensive programs housed in continuing
education. All of the full-time faculty were veteran teachers with over ten years
teaching experience, as were two of the part-timers. Six of the full-timers had been,
or were at the time of the interview, ESL coordinators at their colleges. I mention
these aspects of their identities to show that I sought a range of responses as a way
to capture the prevailing discourses and emotion labor around testing, and the
other three topics, across the university.
The interview questions related to high-stakes literacy testing were: 1) Do your
students have to pass any tests in order to qualify for further coursework? If so, how
do you feel about those tests? 2) Do you feel that their role is for the most part
positive or negative? 3) How, if at all, do they affect your teaching? 4) What
changes, if any, would you like to see in the tests themselves or how they are
administered and used? 5) How do you think students feel about the tests?
My goal in conducting the interviews was to uncover these postsecondary
teachers’ discursive construction of high-stakes literacy testing, especially in relation
to emotion labor. I therefore coded the interview data, during repeated readings,
for references to: 1) emotions; 2) expression of contradictory feelings and; 3)
allusions to feeling rules, power, and/or resistance to power. Using these three
lenses, I was able to discern certain themes during multiple readings of the
interview and questionnaire data. These themes are labeled according to the
discourses that the data revealed: discourse of inevitability, discourse of unfairness,
discourse of gratitude, and discourse of shame.
Though I discuss each discourse individually, they often overlapped. This is
especially true of the discourses of inevitability and unfairness, a point I make in
my presentation of those data. As I will explain when introducing each discourse
and representative examples from the data, I was particularly alert to expressions of
ways that the teachers manage contradictory demands driven by macro discourses
of power.

Socio-Spatial Terrain
The socio-spatial terrain of my research was the City University of New York
(CUNY) where I had taught at the time of the data collection for 29 years, and
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 67

served as ESL coordinator in an English department for 27 years. As discussed in

Chapter 1, from the moment I arrived at CUNY as an assistant professor of English
in 1985, the reading and writing tests used to determine students’ readiness for
first-year composition were a source of intense concern, scrutiny, and contestation
as they had been since the advent of open admissions in 1970 when literacy tests
were first instituted. At that time, the gates to the university were opened to
previously-excluded students, so-called open admissions or non-traditional
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students. However, literacy tests were erected thereby closing those gates
temporarily for those who initially failed them, but who eventually passed them,
and permanently for those who did not manage to pass them after a designated
period of time.
Meetings of the CUNY ESL Council, and in more recent years the CUNY
ESL Discipline Council, the group of ESL coordinators I belonged to, often
focused on the mandated literacy tests, with topics ranging from test
selection/formulation, norming, scoring, preparation, instruction, placement, and
exit. Though administrators at the top of the university hierarchy oversee the in-
house development of literacy tests or purchase of commercially-produced ones
and determine passing scores, faculty are sometimes consulted about these choices,
provoking discussion and often heated disagreement at our coordinator meetings.
As to the tests themselves, the writing test used at the time of the interviews
(the CUNY Assessment Test in Writing, or CATW) had replaced the previous test,
four years before. This in-house writing test had been developed by a group of
faculty selected by the central administration. Though the opaque and top-down
process by which faculty were selected was a point of contention for some, the test
was generally regarded as an improvement over the previous one, with reservations,
an observation supported by the data discussed next.
The CUNY reading test used for exit from developmental and ESL courses, a
commercially-produced electronic multiple-choice reading comprehension test
consisting of passages on different topics, was in the process of being replaced at
the time of the interviews. Both the Reading Discipline Council, to which I also
belonged, and the ESL Discipline Council were consulted about the new test and,
in fact, a sub-group of the Reading Council, hand-picked by the central office,
developed the learning objectives for the new test, the format, and sample passages
and questions.
Meetings of the Reading Discipline Council were highly charged, with
disagreements ranging from what type of passages should be used to test reading
to whether teacher input should be factored into determining students’ exit from
developmental and ESL reading classes and, if so, what the ratio of test score to
teacher input should be. The emotion labor of participating in the discussions at
both councils heightened my sensitivity to the issues. Yet, despite the work that
went into developing and field testing the new reading exam, one that was seen as
a vast improvement over the previous one, CUNY’s upper administration decided
to scrap it and instead purchase a commercial test.
 68 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

Findings
Overall, what stands out in the data is emotion labor driven by intense ambivalence
about high-stakes literacy testing. Ambivalence was expressed about the tests, their
uses, the ways in which they drove instruction, and the impact on students’ lives
and teachers’ academic freedom. Though there was consensus among my
respondents about the need for some type of large-scale testing, what I am calling
a discourse of inevitability, reservations were expressed about the particular tests in
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place, testing conditions and the uses of the tests. This ambivalence seemed to
generate emotion labor on a consistent basis as part of my interviewees’ daily
teaching lives.
To give a sense of the ambivalence expressed in my data, I first discuss the
conflict I found between the discourse of inevitability and the discourse of unfairness, at
times within the same response. The discourse of unfairness borrows from
McNamara’s (2012) notion of unfairness in testing, discussed earlier. Unfairness is
his term for concerns about technical aspects of high-stakes tests, such as their
linguistic and rhetorical demands as well as testing conditions.
Also borrowed is McNamara’s (2012) notion of injustice, a label for the social
consequences for test-takers of failing a test, including linguistic discrimination and
exclusion. Thus I use discourse of injustice as a label for participants’ discussion of the
use of the CUNY assessment tests to exclude non-native speakers from pursuing
degrees in a timely manner. On the other hand, as I later discuss, some of my partic-
ipants expressed relief, what I’m calling a discourse of gratitude, that the writing test,
in particular, offered a useful set of instructional guidelines to help plan courses. This
was especially the case among contingent teachers who are not paid for preparation
time. They therefore seemed to appreciate the structure of a standardized test in
establishing pedagogical parameters they could rely on when developing syllabi.
Finally, there was a discourse of shame about teaching to the test, a conflict
between professional knowledge and a desire to help students pass the tests as
quickly as possible, one that seemed to generate considerable emotion labor, a
finding discussed by Loh and Liew (2016). Each of these discourses is described
next, with examples from the data.

Ambivalence: Discourse of Inevitability and Discourse of Unfairness

In response to the first and second questions (How do you feel about those tests?
Do you feel that their role is for the most part positive or negative?), several
interviewees used terms such as “conflicted” and ”mixed feelings,” further
explaining that though they believed tests to be useful for steering students toward
the literacy instruction they might benefit from, the CUNY instruments were
flawed, putting instructors in the uncomfortable position of dubious gatekeepers.
Even those who did not use terms that expressed ambivalence directly
communicated both a sense of the inevitability of standardized tests and concern
about unfairness regarding technical aspects of the tests and testing conditions.
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 69

Shuttling between a discourse of inevitability (acceptance of or resignation to

high-stake tests) and a discourse of unfairness seemed to produce emotion labor
due to the irreconcilability between belief in the necessity of high-stakes literacy
tests and trepidation about the ones in place. On the inevitability side was approval
of the tests to flag students, who would be required to enroll in classes where they
would receive what was viewed as needed literacy instruction. Some responses
further indicated that the particular tests in use were valid indicators of students
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who needed academic literacy instruction (R1). However, in the same response,
unfairness is expressed through concern that the testing instruments in place were
not reliable when it came to scoring (R1). In addition, the following issues were
raised in relation to possible unfairness: problems with the prompts on the writing
test (R1 and R2), including cultural bias or simply lack of familiarity; forbidding
dictionary use on the reading test (R3); unfavorable testing conditions (R4),
including poor proctoring; undesirability of a single measure (R5) used for
placement and exit. (R = response):

R1: The role of the test as it is now … I think the CATW, which is a writing
from reading task, more closely simulates what we expect students to do in
the academic environment. For that reason I think I’m happier with it. I
think there are still problems with the prompts, selecting prompts that are
comparable, avoiding prompts that present cultural bias and I mean although
I have the highest respect for people who are doing the scoring at this point,
there’s still a great deal of variation in the scoring practices across CUNY,
which introduces problems.

R2: The writing test is difficult for an ESL student because depending on
the topic they have no clue. I remember several of my students coming to
me after the test and saying to me, “I spent so much time trying to
understand the passage, I didn’t really have enough time to write.” The
previous test, the ACT test where you pick one of these topics and take a
position, I didn’t like that one either. So how do you solve it? I don’t know.
To be honest, I think the topics are a problem.

R3: You know what I’d really like is if they could use their dictionaries on
the reading test. I said that in a meeting and got practically laughed out of
the room. Because is it a vocabulary test in English or is it a reading test?
Because if they don’t know 50 percent of the vocabulary in the reading, they
don’t have a chance of doing all the … they can’t pass the test. I don’t know
how else to say it.

R4: I think that the proctor can really affect the students’ performance. I’ve
heard this for years now. Sometimes the proctor is very abrupt, very
impatient, rude. And that can really … they come in very nervous. While
other proctors are much more supportive. And I think it would be best if
 70 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

people within CUNY could proctor someone else’s exam rather than these
proctors. Because I remember students saying the proctor was rude or
incompetent. They get mixed up with the time. That really can affect their
performance. I think it should be a CUNY English professor adjunct.
Someone who knows the test, you know. I would be more than willing to
proctor a test if I knew that my students were going to get the same thing.
Who’s gonna come in in a warm way, a very supportive way and have
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patience.

R5: Theoretically tests do have a purpose. It would be silly to say they don’t.
There has to be in a large university with a quarter of a million students,
you’ve got to have some kind of practicality. And I think that tests could
gauge readiness at some level and they could give us important information.
And I’m not fully against that. We need instruments that will allow us to
diagnose … you know diagnostics … that’s what that test is. I’m certainly
not agreeing with placement and exit as the same thing, same topic. I think
that’s bizarre. I also think that once students are in college there might be a
better way of gauging student readiness. Once they’re here we know what
their readiness is. I would definitely like multiple measures, particularly with
ESL students and that’s what our program tries to do. We do try to give them
a basic language test. Sometimes I interview students. I want to see who they
are, where they come from, I feel I need to know a bit of their history, their
background, to understand the whole person. Because things are not that
neatly put into boxes. It’s very very complicated.

R5 is particularly interesting for the ways that it illustrates conflicts between the
discourse of inevitability of high-stakes literacy testing and the discourse of
unfairness about the actual effects it produces. Using “theoretically” and “could
gauge readiness” and “could give us important information” signals that though tests
hypothetically serve an important function, the particular ones in use leave much
to be desired. Given the inability of the current tests to fulfill their promise, this
teacher must supplement those instruments with an in-house language test and
one-on-one interviews, making for more labor and emotion labor.
Another illustration of emotion labor grounded in conflict between a discourse
of inevitability and a discourse of unfairness can be seen in the response of an
instructor (R6) who worked in an intensive non-academic ESL program for a
short time. This respondent discussed initially reacting to literacy testing as an
inevitable and desirable mechanism for teaching certain skills. Yet, later there was
a growing sense that those who had been teaching in the program longer were
disenchanted with the tests. As seen in R6, this respondent discussed a change in
attitude when attending to colleagues’ opinions about the writing test, particularly
when it came to possible problems with cultural bias. R6 demonstrates how a
prevailing counterdiscourse, in this case a discourse of unfairness, can affect
individual instructors’ understanding of pedagogical situations, prompting
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 71

awareness of issues that might be covered up by a prevailing discourse, such as the

inevitability of testing:

R6: I think I lack a certain context. I sort of just accepted the tests because
it was part of the program that I came into and I learned all about it. So it
was part of the whole package. I didn’t think the tests were terrible, but since
then, in talking with various people, and hearing various conversations and
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comments I realized there was a lot of animosity toward the CATW, but I
thought it was helpful from the students’ perspective to have something to
aim towards. Especially since one of the sub-issues of [name of his program]
is teaching basic study skills and being organized. So having something to
aim for and something to work around. I always thought that was pretty
useful … when the CATW would come up people would kind of laugh
knowingly about what a pain it was or what an annoying test or what a poor
test. Maybe that it’s so … part of it I guess is that it’s just one specific form.
And I think the other criticisms I’ve heard is that it’s just sort of culturally-
biased because there’s articles from the New York Times requiring a certain
amount of context or knowledge.

To sum up the findings of the discourses of inevitability and unfairness, the data
revealed not opposition to high-stakes literacy testing per se, but rather to linguistic
and operational aspects of the particular tests in use. I now turn to responses
focused more on injustice.

Discourse of Injustice
Responses that I characterize as examples of a discourse of injustice correspond
to McNamara’s (2012) discussion of the social implications of using high-stakes
tests. Among my respondents, this discourse could be characterized as awareness
of the social consequences of using language tests to exclude non-native speaking
high school graduates from college-level courses. In this regard, participants
revealed concern about unequal power in the university and the unlevel field on
which non-native English speakers are asked to play vis-à-vis their native
counterparts. Emotion labor was expressed as a sense of powerlessness, both the
students’ and the teachers’, and frustration about the injustice of using high-stakes
literacy testing as gates to postsecondary institutions and/or as a method of
instructional control.
As seen next, the responses indicating a discourse of injustice were focused on
observations about: using the same tests with native and non-native speaking
students (R7); deserving students being barred from classes due to test scores (R8);
tests as a means of top-down control that interferes with academic freedom (R9);
and awareness of the competing demands on immigrant students’ lives outside of
college (R10):
 72 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

R7: It’s really unfair to have non-native speakers of English taking the same
test as native speakers are taking when there’s a really good chance that one
of the topics will be something they’ve never heard of.

R8: I actually spoke with a friend who’s a lawyer, this is pretty extreme, but
I was so furious that this student and others were blocked from even starting
at the lowest level because my belief was that he passed two out of three
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exams. If we’re denying him a chance to take a math class just based on his
writing and we’re denying him a chance to improve his writing through the
lowest level of ESL, we are not an open-admissions university at all. And it’s
a real injustice. We’re not recognizing that students’ English gets better over
time in college and it’s a slap in the face to him. Our students may have shaky
self-confidence anyway because they know that their English isn’t great
because they’re placed in [name of program] and when they’re done with
[name of program] they’re told they’re not good enough.

R9: I guess what more affects my teaching is this corporatization and

standardization of our teaching environment of the university and I think the
assessment piece is part of it, but only one part of it though. There are
expectations handed down by the system that come to us through the
department. In any bureaucracy the philosophies of the people above you
impact what you do.

R10: We want everyone to pass and jump levels and go right into freshman
English and live all kinds of impossible dreams that we’re trying to fulfill …
I mean even if they didn’t have part or full-time jobs after school, even if they
didn’t have parents who don’t speak English so they have to take care of …
Even if they didn’t have the rent to pay and go shopping and do the laundry
and take care of their baby sister…I don’t think anyone could make progress
quite that fast.

The expression of injustice in the previous responses indicated that instructors

admired their students, crediting them for persevering in the face of unjust gates,
family and work responsibilities, and lost time languishing in overcrowded public
schools before they entered college, only to be barred from credit-bearing courses.
There is also evidence in the data, that the requirement of passing high-stakes
literacy tests altered classroom relationships, constructing teachers as test-prep
coaches rather than their preferred position of reading and/or writing teachers, a
finding consistent with those of studies I reviewed in the beginning of the chapter.
The impact of tests on teacher/student relationships is an aspect of injustice I
discuss next (R11–R13).
As seen in R11, R12, and R13, the discourse of injustice extended to ways the
tests contributed to deprofessionalization and demoralization, at times indicating
cynicism and even despair about the future of ESL instruction, given increased
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 73

funding for programs in the university focused exclusively on test preparation

(R11). In these responses, injustice is expressed as a sense that the literacy tests
create wedges, narrowing not just the curriculum, but also interactions with
teachers who are seen by students as purveyors of the winning formula for passing
the tests or irrelevant impediments to the mainstream (R11 and R13). Thus, a
social consequence of testing is that the test-takers have absorbed the message that
ESL courses function exclusively as test preparation, rather than a means of
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improving their literacy skills (R11, R12, and R13). In addition, as indicated in
R12, the squeeze is not just from students, but also from administrators who place
their faith in test scores as indicators of language proficiency:

R11: That’s all they want. They just want to pass the test. So give people
what they want. That’s customer service, right? … And they’re looking for
any way around it. They go to that worker’s center. They’re finding through
the grapevine numerous ways of getting the opportunity to take the test and
pass it. And the best resources that are available to pass it without spending
money. Students would tell me I’m not going to take this. I’m not registering
for [course #] here because I’m going to do it in January or the summer
here. Because they don’t want to spend the time, the money … Fulfill in any
way they can that requirement. It has nothing to do with learning to write.

R12: I think I feel a lot of pressure. The pressure is dual. It comes from the
students and their expectations because they want to pass. They’re very very
concerned about this. That dominates their thinking and their work. And on
the other hand, the pressure is by the department, on the side of the dean,
and the provost because they look a lot at the bottom line. They look at the
numbers.

R13: The test. The test. It’s all about the test … They say: “Why aren’t we
practicing for the test?” It’s very straightforward. “When are we gonna start
practicing for the test? We wanna pass the tests. Show us some websites
where we can practice for the test.” They want it to be over with. They
resent it. They want to take courses in their majors. They want to be
finished. I think more than anything my students want to be finished. They
don’t want to be in college. They want to have graduated from college. They
don’t want to learn. They want to have a degree. So they resent it bitterly. I
mean a lot of them have been in ESL classes for years in high school. And
they were really hoping they would get beyond that and they haven’t. So
they’re mad. And they know that I’m their gatekeeper. They don’t like it. I
wouldn’t either.

In sum, the emotion labor revealed in the discourse of injustice responses was due to
tensions about indignation toward the tests, admiration for students’ tenacity, and
cynicism about the opportunity to teach literacy to students. The changing
 74 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

relationship between teachers and students, given the pressure of passing the
reading and writing test increasingly quickly, was also a source of emotion labor,
associated with dehumanization due to the restricted role of teacher as holder of
the surefire formula for passing the tests.

Discourse of Gratitude
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Despite the prevalence of the discourse of indignation, there was also some
evidence in the data of a wholehearted embrace of the writing test (though not
the outgoing reading test) as a good measure of writing proficiency and a useful
engine driving instruction. These are expressions of what I’m calling a discourse
of gratitude. Though the discourse of gratitude was not as pervasive in my data as
the others I discussed, it is worth exploring, particularly since it was noticeable
mainly in the interviews with part-time instructors. These contingent teachers
(R14 and R15), seemed to appreciate the writing test as a helpful set of guidelines
for both students and instructors offering positive washback:

R14: I really like the CATW. I think it really prepares students for the college
career. It asks them to know how to read which many of them really don’t.
They read the words, but they don’t think about them, much less reflect, but
you have to. It forces them to think and reflect … And I think the writing
aspect of the CATW also forces students to articulate their thoughts through
the written word which they normally don’t do. What I find they do is they
cut and paste and you can’t cut and paste. Or they come in with some kind
of formula that doesn’t really work and they say, That’s what my teacher told
me. And I say, well obviously it didn’t help you because you failed the test.
So maybe we should change our … and they probably brought the bare
minimum from whatever teacher they had anyway, but they got some little
formula and it’s not math. So again it makes them sort of push beyond what
they already think they know. It really challenges them … So I think it’s a
really good test … It’s made me a better teacher. It forces me to give them
real hands-on techniques to be thinkers, better readers and better writers.

R15: I guess this is discourse analysis, but I didn’t understand it at the time.
Another teacher and I started writing our own versions of the essays with the
students and the next class the exercise would be going through our essays and
looking for transitions words and things they knew they were supposed to do
and we told them to steal things from there so they could vary their phrasing
so they could see how we did it. And I think … so that was a very positive
impact I think on our … on my teaching in thinking about the test.

Again, most notable about these data is that they were offered by part-time
instructors who expressed gratitude for the structure and parameters of the writing
test as a positive contribution to both teaching and learning.
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 75

Discourse of Shame
In opposition to the discourse of gratitude was a discourse of shame related to
teaching to the tests. This discourse was manifest in some responses to the question,
“How, if at all, do they affect your teaching?” These responses indicated emotion
labor surrounding the extent to which the tests should drive instruction. Shame
emerged most starkly in a pair of responses offered by one instructor, the first
(R16) at the time of the actual interview and the second (R17) in an unsolicited
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email the same respondent sent to me by email a day later. During the interview
(R16) there was an adamant claim that the tests had no impact on this instructor’s
teaching. However, R17, from the same instructor’s follow-up email, reverses that
claim by admitting to offering practice tests at the end of the semester for the sake
of the students’ self-confidence when retaking the test:

R16: They don’t affect my teaching because as I mentioned, I don’t think

those tests are fair representations of the students’ capability. So when I come
into the classroom, I may have eyeballed the test just for jollies, but I know
that I’m going to do a bit of quote unquote testing myself to find out on my
own terms the capabilities of my students in that particular class and that
impacts how I approach the course. I do a small writing diagnostic at the
beginning of the semester, nothing spectacular or difficult. I just want to see
the writing skill … I actually have a chart that I end up creating. So for
example, if the class seems to understand structural things, then I need to
concentrate on a specific aspect of structural things or if I need to
concentrate on specific grammar things. Then I have created a chart that
pretty much tells me the statistics of the class overall. So where I have the
biggest problems, that’s what I start trying to concentrate on.

R17: You asked if the test impacts my teaching (that was the gist—sorry for
not being verbatim). I have always been so adamant that teaching to the test
is not the best approach. I always begin the semester by saying that if a
student has the fundamental skills to do well as a college student, then he or
she should be able to pass the test. Then, I would embark upon a journey of
teaching critical reading and writing skills—somewhat mirroring Freshman
Comp, but on a more fundamental level. However, by the end of the
semester, the reality is that I have my students taking practice tests. Hence,
my adamant denial appears to be a farce, I am sad to say. :-\ The reality is that
no matter how much I believe that I am not “teaching to the test,” I MUST
on some level for the sake of my students’ confidence when students take the
actual test.

Shame was apparent too in a response indicating that not only this respondent
(R18), but perhaps others too, feel a need to conceal the fact that they teach to the
test:
 76 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

R18: And people will say they don’t want to do that or they don’t do that.
But I don’t think I’m alone in making it a test-prep course. Not only in
response to the expectation of the system, but it’s also in response to
expectations of the students.

Shame mixed with guilt and jealously can also be seen in the next response, one
that signals emotion labor connected to how much direct teaching to the test
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should be carried out, particularly when students bring in materials from other
classes where that type of teaching is done. In an expression of complex emotion
labor, R19 describes an amalgam of resentment toward the intrusive tests,
submission to pressure from the students to address them, desire to prepare
students as completely as colleagues, and shame when students don’t do as well as
hoped:

R19: I always feel like jealous when they show each other materials from
another class: Like “What’s wrong with you? My class isn’t good enough for
you?” I don’t say that, but it always makes me feel like I’m not doing the right
thing. But really I’m happy that they’re using multiple sources. Of course
that’s what they should do. When I see that kind of thing I’m like, “OK, suck
it up. Give them CATW practice.”

Sometimes I regret when students don’t do as well on the reading test as I

expect. I regret not giving them practice with the trick questions like which
of the following is not true. They’re not really trick, but students have to
know how to read the question. And I always feel guilty that I’m not doing
enough reading. I’m always torn between providing questions myself to give
them experience with different question types and making them question
the text because they have to question what they read.

The emotion labor that includes shame points to an important political question
the interviewees seemed to face: Which is a more progressive solution to the unjust
aspects of high-stakes literacy testing: teaching a well-rounded program of
academic literacy or teaching exclusively to the tests? This question is one I have
struggled with myself and it does in part seem to be an either/or question because
of the short amount of time each semester offers to enhance literacy and for each
student to pass the tests. Given those constraints, would it perhaps be best to simply
help them pass the test so they can continue their education? Or should we instead
try to compensate for the lack of attention to literacy in our students’ urban US
high schools within the framework of a semester or two of ESL reading and
writing classes at the start of their college careers?
These questions are further complicated if there are sheltered ESL sections of
the required two-semester first-year composition course, as there are at the College
of Staten Island and other CUNY colleges. These credit-bearing courses offer
reading and writing instruction without the burden of having to pass high-stakes
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 77

literacy tests. Given the existence of these sheltered courses, what is the incentive
for continuing to advocate for non-credit academic ESL programs in colleges? In
what sense are the coordinators of these programs, myself included, contributing to
the maintenance of unjust gates through which non-native English students must
pass? Should we rethink our gatekeeping role at the risk of losing our programs or
the jobs of the adjuncts we supervise?
The emotion labor I and other ESL coordinators and teachers expend on these
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questions has not led to easy answers, as the following and final response of this
chapter indicates. R20 points to a changing political landscape in which ESL
instruction is increasingly less welcome in academic departments of CUNY
colleges and pushed instead into continuing education programs where test
preparation is paramount. The upshot seems to be that sheltered ESL first-year
writing courses are the best solution, perhaps accompanied by supplemental
instruction and ESL tutoring for courses across the curriculum:

R20: I mean we know what’s coming. We know that ESL is gonna get
kicked out of the community colleges too. Yeah, for sure. ESL is on its way
out. And so is developmental. They don’t want those students in the college,
not even in the community colleges. They’re already signing up ESL students
in [name of non-academic program] and they’re gonna grab them more and
more. And we’re not going to have the program anymore. SB: How long do
you think that’s gonna be? A couple of years. Don’t you think so too? They’re
not discriminating between native and non-native speakers and they offer all
three tests. That’s the big draw. And quickly … So they get them through
the tests. But then what’s going to happen to freshman comp? It’s going to
be an ESL course.

Conclusion
The findings of my analysis of the interviews about high-stakes literacy testing
were congruent with those of the studies I reviewed earlier in this chapter. Like
Marsha, the subject of Assaf ’s (2008) study, the teachers I interviewed reported
struggling to reconcile their professional training, their desire to help their students
pass, and implications of not achieving a high pass rate in their classes. Like Sutton
(2004), they expressed concern about impeding their students’ progress in college
and therefore engaged in test preparation, despite misgivings about its narrow aims
and, in some cases, shame about teaching to the test.
As to emotion labor, I found an overall sense of ambivalence towards the current
reading and writing tests, their uses and the effects they produce, including on
instruction and teacher/student relationships. Emotion labor was grounded in five
overlapping discourses that emerged from the data: discourse of inevitability,
discourse of unfairness, discourse of injustice, discourse of gratitude, and discourse
of shame.
The discourse of inevitability signaled the extent to which high-stakes literacy
 78 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor

testing has been naturalized as the most practical way of determining if students
need instruction in academic reading and writing. Yet, alongside expressions of
inevitability was discussion about the unfairness of various technical and linguistic
aspects of the tests, such as possible cultural bias of the prompts and poor testing
conditions, signaling that teachers struggled with concerns about the particular
tests in place and how they are administered.
Alongside unfairness, some responses were couched in a discourse of injustice.
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Here inequities were highlighted, including questions about testing natives and
non-natives with the same instruments, using failing scores to exclude and dismiss
students, controlling pedagogy through the use of top-down standardized tests, and
disregarding the socioeconomic status of students in determining their
preparedness and their ability to pass through gates quickly.
In terms of the socioeconomic status of students, it is useful to return to
Cormack and Comber (2013). In particular I would like to take up their interro-
gation of the assumption that teachers are the key to improving student
performance on high-stakes literacy tests, regardless of students’ race, class, linguistic
background, and other social factors. In sidestepping issues of inequality, this
assumption places the entire burden on teachers. Rather than addressing the social
inequities their open-admissions students face, CUNY, and other open-admissions
institutions, erect literacy gates, in the form of high-stakes tests, and expect students
to have been linguistically remediated once they pass through them. Their literacy
teachers, then, are assigned sole responsibility for getting students through the gates
as quickly as possible with the expectation that their literacy skills will then be
adequate for academic study with little or no further support.
Overall then, the emotion labor of the ESL teachers I interviewed, seems to
hinge primarily on a single issue: the unrealistic expectation that they should
assume the entire burden of preparing open-admissions students linguistically for
their future courses, regardless of those students’ socioeconomic status, educational
background, and literacy training. This finding is best summed up by reiterating a
statement of one of my respondents: “We want everyone to pass and jump levels
and go right into freshman English and live all kinds of impossible dreams that
we’re trying to fulfill. So there’s pressure.” This is the crux of the emotion labor my
interviewees communicated. Their responses to my questions about CUNY’s
reading and writing assessment tests contribute to greater understanding of the role
of high-stakes literacy testing in the lives of non-native speaking students who
hope to get a college degree and their English language teachers who share that
aspiration, against all odds.
A final observation about emotion labor and high-stakes literacy testing in my
research context is that as this book went to press, CUNY’s upper administration
had mandated the use of multiple measures rather than single scores on the reading
and writing test as determinants of entry to first-year writing courses. While at first
glance this news might be welcome, the proposal was not accompanied by any
guidance to individual colleges about how to establish or manage this monumental
change. Nor was any financial support offered to help purchase supplemental tests
 High-Stakes Literacy Testing and Emotion Labor 79

or fund the scoring of time-consuming assessments, such as portfolios. The lack of

support is a signal to many that CUNY is disengaging from literacy issues at the
highest levels, leaving it up to local administrators and faculty to come up with and
fund their own assessment procedures. This is an uncharted area of emotion labor
that I hope will be explored in the future.

References
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Assaf, L.C. (2008). Professional identity of a reading teacher: Responding to high-stakes

testing pressures. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 14, 239–252.
Au, W. (2007). High-stakes testing and curricular control: A qualitative metasynthesis.
Educational Researcher 36, 258–267.
Cormack, P. and Comber, B. (2013). High-stakes literacy tests and local effects in a rural
school. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 36, 78–89.
Hamp-Lyons, L. (2007). The impact of teaching practices on teaching: Ideologies and
alternatives. In J. Cummins and C. Davison (eds). The International Handbook of English
Language Teaching (pp. 487–504). New York: Springer.
Kostogriz, A. (2012). Accountability and the affective labour of teachers: A Marxist-
Vygotskian perspective. Australian Educational Researcher 39, 397–412.
Kostogriz, A. and Doecke, B. (2013). The ethical practice of teaching literacy:
Accountability or responsibility. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 36, 90–97.
Loh, C.E. and Liew, M. (2016). Voices from the ground: The emotional labour of English
teachers’ work. Teaching and Teacher Education 55, 267–278.
McNamara, T. and Ryan, K. (2011). Fairness versus justice in language testing: The place of
English literacy in the Australian Citizenship test, Language Assessment Quarterly 8,
161–178.
McNamara, T. (2012). Language assessments as shibboleths: A poststructural perspective.
Applied Linguistics 33, 564–581.
McNamara, T. and Shohamy, E. (2006). Language tests and human rights. International Journal
of Applied Linguistics 18, 89–95.
Shohamy, E. (2006). Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches. London: Routledge.
Shohamy, E. (2007). The power of language tests, the power of the English language, and the
role of ELT. In Cummins, J. and Davison, C. (eds). The International Handbook of English
Language Teaching (pp. 521–531). New York: Springer.
Shohamy, E. (2013). The discourse of language testing as a tool for shaping national, global,
and transnational identities. Language and Intercultural Communication 13, 225–236.
Sutton, R. (2004). Teaching under high-stakes testing: Dilemmas and decisions of a teacher
educator. Journal of Teacher Education 55, 463–475.
 5
RESPONDING TO STUDENT WRITING
AND EMOTION LABOR
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Responding to students’ writing is one of the most controversial topics in

second- and foreign-language (SL and FL) instruction and theory. Do
students benefit from teachers’ corrections and written comments on their
writing? If so, what types of feedback are effective?
(Diab 2005, p. 28)

Writing instructors often have strong feelings about response to student

writing and wonder about the efficacy and value of their own response
mechanisms. Largely because of the time and energy that feedback can
consume and the frustration felt by many teachers…researchers in
composition settings have for several decades investigated various questions
surrounding response to student writing.
(Ferris et al. 2011, pp. 207–8)

Essentially, teachers have to weigh their choice of comments to accomplish

informational, pedagogic, and interpersonal goals simultaneously.
(Hyland and Hyland 2006, p. 210)

The first quote that opens this chapter introduces two enduring questions in the
L2 (second language) composition literature: whether teachers’ written
comments on student writing are beneficial and, if so, what types of feedback
might be most effective in the short and long run. The second quote echoes the
first regarding the debate about the benefits of feedback. However it also
acknowledges that emotions, such as frustration, may come into play when
responding to student writing given uncertainty about its “value and efficacy”
(Ferris et al. 2011, p. 207) and the vast amount of time and energy it requires.
The third quote asserts that writing comments on student papers calls upon not
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 81

just teachers’ knowledge and skills, but also their relationship to their students,
thereby implying emotions.
My goal in interviewing teachers about responding to student writing was to
discover any emotion labor and feeling rules surrounding this time-consuming
process, one that may not yield results commensurate with the time involved.
Doubts about the effects of my comments on students’ writing over the years led
me to wonder what my CUNY colleagues thought and felt about commenting on
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student writing, especially given the labor involved.

To explore those issues, my interview questions revolved around the process of
responding to writing and any feelings associated with it. The findings, briefly
summarized, were that teachers reported emotion labor in four areas of
commenting on student writing: 1) conflict between ESL as a service and teachers’
pedagogical philosophies; 2) the time demands of commenting; 3) uncertainty
about which types of comments to offer and/or the most appropriate role to adopt
when commenting; and 4) relational aspects of commenting. These findings are
discussed in detail later in the chapter.
To situate the interview data in a historical context, I next give a short overview
of the writing-as-process literature of the 1970s and 1980s. My aim in starting this
way is to contextualize ongoing debates about responding to student writing. The
product vs. process debate of that era was focused on why, when, and how to
respond to student writing. These persistent questions are the backdrop for the
data presented later in the chapter.
After my short discussion of process writing, I will present current L2 literature
on responding to student writing, subdivided into three sections: 1) the debate
about written corrective feedback; 2) teachers’ attitudes toward responding to L2
writing; and 3) interpersonal dimensions of responding to student writing. Overall,
my intention in the literature review is to highlight enduring debates about how
to respond to L2 student writing and to suggest that given the lack of definitive
answers and clear guidelines resulting from research of the last 50 years, it is not
surprising that teachers continue to struggle with questions about how to
comment on student writing.

Historical Background: Process vs. Product

L1 Process-Writing Research of the 1970s and 1980s

The extensive literature on responding to student writing can be said to have its
origins in the research on writing processes of the 1970s.1 During that decade,
large-scale studies (Britton et al. 1975) and case studies (Emig 1971, Graves 1975,
Perl 1979, Sommers 1980) examined L1 (first language) professional writers’ and
students’ writing processes. These studies shed light on complex overlapping
strategies used by writers of varying proficiencies when composing, including
generating ideas, writing, reading, revising, and editing, shown to be carried out in
a recursive manner.
 82 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

Given the findings, this research challenged the notion of students’ texts as one-
shot products. Instead, writing was conceptualized as a fluid process that could
deepen writers’ understanding of their ideas (Berthoff 1981; Calkins 1983; Elbow
1973, 1981; Fulwiler 1987; Mayher, Lester, and Pradl 1983). When it came to
teacher feedback, these authors recommended encouraging revision toward greater
clarity of thinking and expression.
To discover what types of comments postsecondary teachers might actually be
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offering, Sommers (1982) studied the written comments of instructors who taught
first-year writing at publicly-funded US universities. Participants were asked to
comment on first and second drafts of three student essays. On the whole,
Sommers (1982) attributed “hostility and mean-spiritedness” (p. 149) to the
comments. Furthermore, she found that her respondents imposed their own
purposes and steered the student writers away from their own purposes. She
claimed that this was particularly true for comments that flagged errors in usage,
diction, and style on first drafts.
Sommers (2006) revisited her 1982 study, this time taking teacher/student
relationships into account by asking instructors to comment on their own students’
writing, not anonymous papers. I will discuss this research in the section on
interpersonal dimensions of responding to student writing, later in the chapter.

L2 Process Research of the 1970s and 1980s

L2 scholars, such as Lay (1982), Raimes (1985), and Zamel (1976, 1983), were
influenced by the L1 process studies discussed earlier and therefore replicated them
in their exploration of L2 writers’ composing processes. There was also attention
in this literature to teachers’ responses to L2 writing. For example, Zamel (1985)
examined the written responses of 15 ESL teachers on their university-level ESL
students’ drafts. Overall, Zamel’s (1985), findings were similar to Sommers’s (1982):
her participants’ comments were vague, contradictory, and generic. However, most
interesting from an ESL perspective was Zamel’s (1985) finding that the teachers
in her study “overwhelmingly” saw themselves as “language teachers rather than
writing teachers” (p. 86). Zamel’s (1985) evidence for that claim was that the
teachers commented primarily on “surface-level features,” an indication that they
viewed students’ papers not as texts, but as a “series of separate sentences or even
clauses” (p. 86). According to Zamel (1985), attention to language in the comments
detracted from “larger, meaning-related problems” (p. 88).
My short discussion of composition-research history demonstrates that
questions about effective composition pedagogy and feedback have been
investigated for decades. Process-writing studies of the 1970s and 1980s spawned a
series of questions that are still being debated in the L2 literature: What is the
relationship between responding to students’ ideas and responding to language?
What guides teachers in choosing which type of feedback to offer? How does the
teacher/student relationship come into play? These questions are taken up next in
the literature review.
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 83

Related Literature: Responding to L2 Writing

Debate about Written Corrective Feedback

The primary controversy in the L2 writing literature on response … revolves
around the question of error treatment: does it help students improve their
writing or not?
(Casanave 2004, p. 87)
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A significant body of L2 research published between 1980 and 2015 examined

teachers’ flagging and/or correction of errors on student texts. Attention in this
work has been on which types of comments might lead students to correct their
errors on the same or subsequent drafts. These studies were exclusively concerned
with feedback toward accuracy, known as written corrective feedback (WCF), not
revision, though some studies compared both types of feedback to determine their
impact on correctness. This ongoing concern with correctness demonstrates that
the splitting of language and meaning persists in L2 composition, a concern raised
by Zamel (1985).2
Storch (2010) offered a review of 30 years of WCF literature, subdivided into
early research (1980–2003) and recent studies (2005 onwards). The review was
motivated by Storch’s (2010) concerns about the sheer number of WCF studies in
such publications as Journal of Second Language Writing (by her count 16 in that
journal between 2006 and 2009 alone) and about a lack of “ecological validity” (p.
30) in these experimental and quasi-experimental studies. By pointing out
methodological problems, she hoped to encourage research in which context
would be taken into account.
The early research, according to Storch (2010), investigated whether WCF leads
to improved accuracy. She further subdivided these early studies into two types: 1)
those comparing the effects on student writing of WCF and of feedback about
content; and 2) those focused on the effects of different types of WCF. As to the
first group, she found that of 11 studies, six demonstrated that WCF led to greater
grammatical accuracy. Yet, three of those examined only revised drafts, not new
pieces of writing thereby neglecting to demonstrate longer-term improvement.
From these 11 studies, Storch (2010) found that “the evidence in support of WCF
is not very strong” (p. 31).
As to the second group of early studies, those related to effectiveness of different
types of WCF, Storch (2010) found results to be mixed and contradictory. Some
indicated no differences between indirect and direct types. Others found indirect
feedback to be more beneficial while others found that direct types led to greater
accuracy. Storch (2010) attributed this inconclusiveness to a lack of comparability
between the studies, given that they examined different populations and types of
feedback and that they used varying time frames and measures of grammatical
accuracy. In addition, Storch (2010) was critical of the research designs, citing lack
of a control group in many, no attention to a new piece of writing that might
 84 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

demonstrate long-term effects of WCF, and lack of uniformity in measures of

grammatical accuracy.
In her review of 12 recent studies (2005 onward), Storch (2010) subdivided them
into those that investigated “whether WCF leads to improved accuracy over time” (p.
35) and those that investigated whether some types of WCF are more effective than
others. Unlike the earlier studies, most had control groups and all examined new
pieces of writing. However, Storch (2010) raised the concern that despite these
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improvements in research design, most were still experimental or quasi-experimental

rather than classroom-based and therefore had no clear applicability to teaching.
Despite these misgivings, in terms of findings, Storch (2010) reported that the major-
ity of the recent studies showed evidence of “a positive and statistically-significant
effect for WCF” (p. 39). On the other hand, the positive results were limited to
improvement on articles and past tense alone. As to the effectiveness of different types
of WCF, findings from the recent studies were “still inconclusive” (p. 40).
Storch’s (2010) main conclusion from her review of WCF studies is that future
research should avoid a decontextualized approach. Instead, it should be carried out
in classrooms, the feedback should be sustained over a semester, and the writing
tasks should be situated in the larger context of an academic program. However,
she is uncritical of the exclusive focus on error in this research saving her critique
for the methodologies, thereby leaving the theoretical and ideological assumptions
of WCF unquestioned, a point I return to later.
On the other hand, from the perspective of this chapter, it is interesting to note
that Storch (2010) called for attention in future studies to the impact of “affective
factors” (p. 42), including students’ attitudes toward different types of feedback and
toward the teachers providing feedback. Some of the studies Storch (2010) cited in
this regard are reviewed in the section of this chapter on interpersonal dimensions
of response.
In contrast to Storch (2010), Truscott (2007) sought to demonstrate the
“ineffectiveness of correction” in L2 composition, in a bid to counter the “wealth
of mainstream sources” (p. 255) promoting the benefits. He focused his review on
two groups of studies comparing the impact of feedback about errors and feedback
about content: 1) controlled experiments conducted between 1986 and 2001; and
2) uncontrolled experiments carried out between 1981 and 2006. Overall, Truscott
(2007) found that WCF “has (very small) harmful effects on students’ ability to
write accurately” (p. 263). Based on his conclusion that “research has found
correction to be a clear and dramatic failure” (p. 271), he wondered whether the
question about the effectiveness of error correction in promoting accuracy should
be replaced with a different question: ‘How harmful is correction?’ (ibid.).
Given Storch’s (2010) overall finding that WCF research is at best inconclusive
and Truscott’s (2007) more dramatic finding that it may in fact be harmful, why
does this research and pedagogy persist? How can we account for the fact that the
vast majority of L2 composition studies on responding to writing are focused on
error correction and not feedback toward revision, as called for by process scholars,
such as Zamel (1985), in the 1970s and 1980s?
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 85

Casanave (2004) attributed the abiding focus on error to the difficulty of

defining and studying “writing problems and writing quality at the levels of
content and rhetoric” (p. 87). Intending to address those aspects of writing, she
conducted a classroom-based study with her undergraduate students at a Japanese
university. Sensitive to her Japanese students’ reluctance to speak in class and
attributing that reluctance to their fear of making mistakes, Casanave (2004)
concluded that improvement in writing should focus not on correctness, but,
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rather, on the development of fluency and clarity along with encouragement to

take risks while composing and revising. To that end, she assigned and responded
to journals, inviting students to select their own topics. Individual journals
culminated in multi-chapter book projects written in peer groups. Casanave (2004)
responded mainly to the ideas in the journals, with some comments about
grammar and vocabulary. However, she did not ask students to revise. Instead, she
had them write all semester until they had accumulated 30 or more pages of
journal entries. When it came to the books, she “helped them revise” (p. 93) their
essays and poems until they were ready to be published. Acknowledging a lack of
“irrefutable proof ” (p. 93), Casanave nonetheless claimed that her students
developed greater fluency, diminished fear of making mistakes, and “pride and
enthusiasm about their final products” (p. 94). These improvements carried over
into the next semester when she taught the same group again.
I concur with Casanave (2004) that the persistent attention to WFC in the L2
literature is due to the perception that it is easier to identify and address usage
errors than, say, lapses in clarity and pride in one’s writing. However, I also believe
that the assumption that errors are easily identifiable can be attributed to the
pervasiveness in ELT of standard language ideology, one positing and perpetuating
a clear distinction between correct and incorrect linguistic features. Furthermore,
the continued focus on WCF underlies not just L2 composition research, but also
monolingual policies in educational institutions, such as CUNY. Despite calls for a
translingual approach that respects linguistic variation and acknowledges that
academic English varies (Horner et al. 2011), WCF persists.
To explore standard language ideology further, in the next section I review the
literature on teachers’ attitudes toward responding to student writing, a smaller
literature than the WCF one but that is nonetheless worth examining for what it
reveals about ideology and power relations.

Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Responding to L2 Writing

Hoping to move the conversation beyond whether or not WCF is effective, Lee
(2011) and Ferris, Liu and Rabie (2011) examined teachers’ attitudes toward
responding to student writing. These studies were conducted in different contexts
and with varying populations. Though power relations were not considered, this
research illuminated teachers’ opinions about their commenting practices, offering
an intimate look at the challenges of responding to L2 writing.
Lee (2011) examined 26 secondary Hong Kong (HK) English teachers’ written
 86 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

feedback on their students’ texts; she followed up by interviewing six of those

teachers. Aware of teachers’ frustration and exhaustion due to “never-ending
marking” (p. 378), Lee (2011) sought ways to diminish the difficulties and improve
the comments. To that end, she analyzed essays, ranging in proficiency from high
to low, that had been marked by the teachers.
Lee (2011) found that 94.1 percent of the feedback was focused on form, with
an average of 29 error feedback points in each essay. The most commonly used
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feedback type was direct error feedback (71.5 percent) that not only indicated
errors, but also corrected them. When interviewed about their commenting
strategies, the teachers explained that it was the “schools’ policy” (p. 383) to have
teachers correct every error on their students’ writing. This directive was backed
up by a teacher-evaluation system, which included inspection of teacher feedback
on students’ compositions by department heads who themselves were charged with
ensuring that the error-correction policy was adhered to. Furthermore, teacher-
evaluation forms included a question about teacher feedback with the choice of
“much, average, little, and none from which the appraiser could choose” (p. 385).
Despite uncovering this hierarchical surveillance of teachers’ comments, Lee
(2011) concluded that teachers should “critically reflect on their own [italics added]
feedback practices” (p. 386), as if the decision to attend to error was the classroom
teachers’ alone. What is left out of this recommendation is that, though teachers
complied with the policy, it had been formulated by administrators and policy-
makers who seem to have been operating according to standard language ideology
assumptions. Given the long history of the imposition of English in the HK
context and the changing postcolonial context, questions about the notion of a
single correct English could be raised: Whose English is correct? Who decides?
What is the impact on teachers and students of the WCF mandate? What opportu-
nities exist for questioning that mandate, given the types of surveillance uncovered?
For their part, Ferris, Liu and Rabie (2011) explored the relationship between
teachers’ philosophies about responding to writing and their actual feedback.
Through a survey of 129 US college writing instructors, interviews with 23 of
them, and samples of those teachers’ written comments on their students’ writing,
the authors sought to discover not only how their participants perceived
responding to student writing but also how “the participants’ own practices [italics
added]” might be “causing or adding to their frustration” (p. 39). To this end, Ferris,
Liu and Rabie (2011) focused on the relationship between teachers’ responding
philosophies/practices, their training, teaching experience, and knowledge of the
literature.
In addition, the authors noted “a host of contradictory emotions” (p. 45) in their
data. Conflicting emotions mainly revolved around respondents’ strong belief in the
value of feedback coupled with frustration about its demands along with doubts
about its efficacy. Fifty-seven percent reported that they believed commenting was
an important tool to help students improve their writing. Yet they also reported
resentment about the amount of time it required especially given their uncertainty
about its impact on students’ learning. In fact, of 51 written comments about the
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 87

question, “Which statement best describes how you feel about response to student
writing?” (p. 44), 28 reported, “some type of teacher frustration with time involved
with the task itself, or with student writers” (p. 45). The following comment was
offered as representative of that category: “Frustration and resentment stem from
being overloaded with students in these courses. Under suitable teaching
conditions, I would find it interesting and challenging” (p. 46).
Contributing to the time frustration was that respondents were overwhelmed
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not just by class size, but also by the number of courses they taught. Ferris, Liu and
Rabie (2011) explained that these instructors cobbled together a living by teaching
as many as four to six writing courses per semester on different college campuses
in Northern California. This meant traveling between different job sites, spending
little time in any one location and often having no access to office space on any of
those campuses.
Nonetheless, despite the authors’ acknowledgment of these punishing
conditions, their focus was not on ways to address the exploitation of underpaid
and overworked part-time faculty in higher education. Instead, their pedagogical
implications assumed that English language teachers should change their
commenting practices to lessen their frustration. Suggestions for reducing
frustration included: 1) comment on earlier drafts rather than final ones; 2) engage
students in ways to use teacher feedback; 3) analyze students’ needs and individ-
ualize written comments in accordance with those needs; 4) use “time-saving
tools” (p. 60) when responding, such as checklists and rubrics; 5) apply the findings
of WCF research when addressing “language issues” (p. 58).
Three of these suggestions are valid. Prioritizing comments by offering
feedback on early drafts creates opportunities for revision. It also makes sense to
instruct students in ways to use teacher feedback when revising and editing. And
rubrics can indeed save time. However, given the untenable working conditions in
which their participants taught, the other two recommendations are puzzling.
Suggesting that contingent faculty members increase their workload by analyzing
individual students’ needs without any reduction in number of students, seems
counterproductive at best.
As to the recommendation that teachers “learn more about the theory and
practice of WCF on language issues” (p. 58), the authors’ rationale was that the
teachers they surveyed “dealt with language-focused feedback in ways that are not
consistent with the findings and recommendations of L1 and L2 composition
theorists and researchers” (p. 59). Yet, as seen earlier in this chapter, there is a
notable lack of consensus in the research about the benefits of WCF. So, though
the authors counseled teachers to be guided by “the range of ‘best practices’
suggestions given in the L1 and L2 compositions literature about approaches to
error feedback” (p 59), it is hard to imagine how those practices might be gleaned.
The WCF literature is rife with conflicting suggestions from not correcting errors
at all given the harm the focus on error might produce (Truscott 1996, 2007) to
wholehearted endorsement of attention to one or two errors (Bitchener 2008)
with varying opinions in between. In fact, Ferris (2010) herself wondered about
 88 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

the applicability of WCF studies to classroom teaching given the actual demands
of teaching writing.
In sum, studies of teachers’ attitudes toward responding to L2 writing, though
commendable for including teachers’ voices, are limited by the narrowness of their
focus. While using a wider lens than studies looking only at student texts, they
nonetheless fail to consider the broader context of institutional policies, neoliberal
cutbacks in funding for public higher education that have led to hiring more part-
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time instructors, and ideologies influencing how teachers respond to writing.

Instead, teachers’ feedback practices are viewed as private choices made by
individual teachers to the neglect of the social contexts and politics of those
choices.
To their credit, Ferris, Liu and Rabie (2011) noted the deplorable conditions in
which their respondents reported working, yet their recommendations did not
consider how to challenge those conditions as a way to improve teachers’ lives and
presumably their feedback. Research taking these unfavorable working conditions
into account along with emotion labor would perhaps offer more humane and
productive ways of responding to student writing, a goal of this chapter.

Interpersonal Dimensions of Responding to Student Writing

Feedback is rooted in the partnership between student and teacher, and as in
any relationship, it develops its own language and meaning.
(Sommers 2006, p. 255)

… feedback not only communicates beliefs about writing, language or

‘content’ but expresses and negotiates human relationships.
(Hyland and Hyland 2006, p. 228)

… the feedback and revision process was a complex, dynamic, and social
process that was saturated with highly emotional, personal, and interpersonal
overtones.
(Lee and Schallert 2008, p. 179)

Whereas the previous two sections focused respectively on WCF and teachers’
attitudes toward feedback, this section discusses research about responding to
student writing in the context of teacher/student relationships. More than the two
other literatures, this one relies on affective dimensions. It attends to interpersonal
or sociocultural aspects of responding to writing by exploring how trusting
teacher/student relationships can encourage student attention to and successful use
of feedback.
Sommers (2006) carried out a four-year study at Harvard University of 400
undergraduate students (25 percent of the 2001 freshman class) “to see college
writing through their eyes” (p. 249). Regretting the absence of student voices in
her 1982 study, she aimed to widen her lens by including teachers’ written
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 89

comments on their own students’ writing as well as interviews with students about
the feedback.
Overall, she found that “feedback plays a leading role in undergraduate
development, but only when students and teachers create a partnership through
feedback” (p. 250). That partnership was solidified, according to her findings, when
teachers offered “honest critique paired with instruction” (ibid). However, most
teachers’ responses went “unread and unused” (ibid.) because they were either
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insufficient or excessive. Comments students considered insufficient were cryptic

and/or generic, not obviously related to what the student had written. Excessive
feedback offered too much commentary “on every compositional element all at
once” (ibid.). It is also interesting to note that one student-participant characterized
unhelpful comments as those “written to the paper, not to the student” (ibid.),
again suggesting the centrality of teacher/student relationships in the
feedback/revision process.
To Sommers’s (2006) surprise, her student participants attributed greater
importance to feedback than she had expected them to. She was especially struck
by the degree to which teachers’ comments played a “social role,” helping students
develop a sense of “academic belonging” (p. 251) and diminished anonymity.
Student respondents reported that when their instructors enacted the role of
thoughtful readers through their comments, students’ learning was “enriched,
deepened, and inscribed in memory” (ibid.).
Overall, then, Sommers (2006) found that among first-year Harvard
undergraduates, “feedback is monumental, their most personal, most intimate, and
direct interaction with their college writing culture” (p. 253). And for those
students to absorb and apply that feedback, she found that it had to be instructive,
not just evaluative.
Though their research context was much different than Sommers’s, Hyland and
Hyland (2006) obtained similar findings about the affective and heuristic roles of
feedback. Their case study of the feedback practices of two ESL teachers in a pre-
sessional English course at a university in New Zealand sought to examine “the role
of the interpersonal in constructing feedback” (p. 206), especially in negotiating a
reciprocal relationship. In addition to studying teachers’ end comments on various
student papers, Hyland and Hyland (2006) observed both classes regularly and
interviewed the teachers about their responding practices. They also recorded
think-aloud protocols while teachers were commenting on student texts.
Hyland and Hyland (2006) found that 44 percent of teacher feedback belonged
in the praise category, 31 percent was critical, and 28 percent included suggestions.
Related to the preponderance of praise was the observation that these two teachers
were conscious of the “interpersonal effects of feedback” (p. 211), including the
“potential of their comments to create a positive or negative learning context”
(ibid.). In the interest of promoting social harmony and positive learning, they
employed a variety of mitigation strategies, including pairing criticism with praise
or a suggestion, hedging comments, responding as a personal reader rather than an
expert, and using the interrogative form.
 90 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

According to Hyland and Hyland (2006), these mitigation strategies signaled the
delicacy and intimacy of feedback as a social interaction with the potential to
promote or undermine learning. The authors hypothesized that mitigation also
served to “moderate the teacher’s dominant role” (p. 214), a nod to power relations.
This supposition was backed up by think-aloud data demonstrating that the
teachers sought “to avoid causing resentment and hostility and to preserve their
relationship” with students (p. 221–222). It was also found that the teachers relied
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on their personal knowledge of the writer, task, and wider learning context when
giving feedback.
For their part, Lee and Schallert (2008) considered sociocultural dimensions of
teacher feedback in a Korean university academic writing course. Aiming to move
beyond an “individualistic perspective on writing” (p. 168), they took into account
“greater social and cultural meanings of writing,” (p. 168) including “the full
complexities of interpersonal relationships in which written comments were
perceived and interpreted” (p. 166). In the sociocultural context of this study, native
English-speaking (NES) teachers were prized over non-native English-speaking
(NNES) teachers, possibly leading to mistrust among Korean students in their
NNES instructors’ expertise. Positing trust as a social construct rather than a
psychological one, Lee and Schallart sought to study its impact on the uptake of a
NNES instructor’s feedback.
To that end, they examined the feedback of one NNES instructor, Dr. Kim, on
the drafts of two students: Sangho, whose English language learning had taken
place exclusively in Korea, and Jongmin, who had learned English in Canada,
Australia, and the US before migrating to Korea to complete high school and enter
university. Given his background, Jongmin reported being a more comfortable
speaker and writer of English than Korean.
Dr. Kim, a woman in her late 30s, had learned English in Korea though she had
lived in the US for one year while writing her doctoral dissertation in American
literature. At the time of the study she had been teaching English reading and
writing for six years in different Korean universities. Lee and Schallart (2008)
assessed her English as at times “inappropriately too formal, yet overall highly
proficient” and her written comments “on target and error-free” (p. 170).
The data consisted of background interviews with the teacher and students,
students’ writing with teacher comments and grades, classroom observations, and
text-based interviews in which the teacher explained her comments and the
students explained their revisions. Lee and Schallert (2008) found that Sangho
expressed no doubts about his teacher’s competence, exhibiting complete trust in
her ability to teach him. Jongmin, on the other hand, doubted his teacher’s English
ability and therefore mistrusted her written comments. These varying attitudes
played out in the students’ uptake of Dr. Kim’s comments. They also influenced
how she viewed them and her role as their teacher.
For example, Sangho had high expectations of the course from the outset, ones
that were met as he embraced the syllabus, writing assignments, and Dr. Kim’s
comments. She, in turn, was buoyed by his responsiveness and diligence. Their
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 91

rapport grew through one-on-one conferences for which Sangho had prepared
questions. These exchanges were satisfying and productive for them both,
regardless of the grades Sangho received.
By contrast, Lee and Schallert (2008) described the relationship between
Jongmin and Dr. Kim as “troubled” (p. 174). Jongmin’s lack of trust was mainly due
to his comparing her credentials negatively to those of teachers he had had outside
of Korea. For her part, Dr. Kim was unsure “to what extent Jongmin acknowledges
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my authority as an English teacher” (ibid.), wondering whether he took her

comments on his writing seriously. Overall, her concern was warranted. Lee and
Schallert (2008) noted that all of Jongmin’s final drafts “showed little attention to
the precise comments of the teacher” (p. 176).
Most interesting about this study is the focus on the impact of the social context
on teachers’ written comments and students’ uptake. Using the lens of trust, the
authors delved deeply into the impact of teacher/student relationships on feedback,
but not from a psychological perspective. Instead, their approach was to take into
account the “social and cultural influences of the greater context,” (p. 178) in this
case the issue of non-nativeness in an EFL postsecondary context, to explore
reciprocal trust between a teacher and her students. They found that trust was not
simply a matter of “human interaction” (p. 178), but was instead mediated by “all
the factors that influence writing” (p. 179), including the teacher’s status in the eyes
of the society, institution, and students.
Trust is an aspect of the teacher-student relationship that was previously
overlooked in the L2 literature on responding to student writing, pointing to the
need for greater attention to feedback and revision as reflections of the wider
context, one that can be examined through the lens of teachers’ emotion labor, as
I do in the rest of the chapter.

Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor: Data Analysis

The 1970s and 1980s literature on responding to student writing produced two main
findings: 1) teachers offered comments related to both form and content on early
drafts, potentially causing confusion and forestalling revision; 2) teachers’ comments
about ideas risked steering students away from their intentions toward an ideal text.
These findings helped cultivate interest in comments that might encourage students
to pursue their intentions by elaborating their ideas rather than prematurely editing
their writing. However, this research failed to consider the sociopolitical context of
teachers’ focus on correctness and/or an ideal text, including the impact on teachers
of institutional regulation and standard language ideology.
By neglecting power, composition researchers of that period tended to blame
teachers for what were considered inappropriate comments. Alongside faulting
teachers for possibly unhelpful or damaging comments, these scholars romanticized
students as thinkers who needed to be freed from the shackles of their teachers’
feedback to express their so-called authentic selves. This positing of students as
individual writers with private intentions is an example of “expressionistic
 92 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

rhetoric” (Berlin 1988, p. 485), the ideology of which locates power in student’s
minds and experience, not social conditions.
The sociopolitical context has also, for the most part, been left out of WCF
research with its attention to errors as unambiguous and uncontested artifacts of
students’ interlanguage, a modernist concept. Questions about what counts as error
and who decides, along with why correctness continues to be a primary concern,
are not usually considered in this literature. Error is presented as operating in a
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vacuum rather than in a context of regulation with consequences for both students
and teachers.
Given the lack of attention to social context in the response literature, I wanted
to discover any constraints under which teachers might operate when commenting
on student writing and any resistance to constraints. Therefore, when interviewing
teachers, I asked questions targeting the feedback process itself, hoping the answers
would reveal something about the emotion labor of teachers’ commenting
processes: 1) Do you assign writing in your classes? 2) If so, describe how you go
about reading student papers: Where do you read them? When do you read them?
How many do you read at one sitting? 3) What are some of the feelings that
emerge when reading them? 4) How do you feel about evaluating the writing?
Deliberately left out were direct questions about whether teachers commented
about ideas or language or both because I didn’t want to steer the responses in that
direction. By focusing on the routine aspects of giving feedback - where, when,
and how student papers were read - and the affective ones, I hoped to gain
understanding of the emotion labor and feeling rules of giving feedback, including
any conflicts and ambiguities.
The data analysis revealed emotion labor in four areas: 1) ESL as a service whose
requirements might conflict with teachers’ pedagogical philosophy; 2) the sense of
spending too much time or not enough time commenting; 3) what types of
comments to offer or what roles to adopt when commenting; and 4) expectations
of the teacher/student relationship, including parity between teaching and learning
and between teacher and student time on task. Each of these is discussed next with
supporting examples from the interview data.

ESL as Service vs. Pedagogical Preferences

All the respondents reported that they taught writing and that writing was central
to their pedagogy. This finding underscores the value attributed to writing as a
means of academic language learning in CUNY and the field of ELT. It also points
to the responsibility EL teachers are expected to assume in preparing NNES
students for future academic work, one not necessarily shared by instructors in
departments across the curriculum. This service aspect of ELT in CUNY is
expressed in R1:

R1: I teach a couple of classes that involve writing, all of which are designed
to get ESL students ready to do well in the regular Freshman English class.
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 93

Even though I did not solicit details about the types of writing assignments my
respondents made, many volunteered short descriptions. No single type of writing
assignment dominated, though all the respondents teach ESL courses in the same
university. Some said that they subscribed to what might be called process
pedagogy, assigning a sequence of freewritings as the basis for longer pieces. Others
reported basing their writing assignments on rubrics with specific objectives to be
achieved, especially ones coinciding with those comprising the CUNY Assessment
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Test of Writing (CATW). Still others were more oriented toward research-based
project writing. This finding about the variety of writing assignments suggests that
though ESL instructors in CUNY are expected to teach writing and to help
students pass the CATW, there is some latitude when it comes to composition
pedagogy.
However, despite the overall lack of uniformity, one respondent, who is an
adjunct, described being mandated to “teach essay structure above all” to prepare
students to pass the CATW. This requirement conflicted with this adjunct’s
preference for pedagogy that would lead students to “love the English language
above all first.” According to this teacher, a more desirable approach would be to
assign various genres, including poetry, with “no form” being preferable to a
“formulaic essay”:

R2: The writing assigned is required by the program I teach in. If I could
assign any writing I chose, it would be very different than what I am required
to assign. I feel it is incumbent on me to assign mainly essays, and to teach
essay structure above all, because the students will need to pass the tests. I
believe students need to learn to love the English language above all first. I
feel they need to read texts they love, to read poetry, beautiful, powerful
writing of all forms, to be able to write to express themselves in many forms
and in no form. Having to learn essay structure and learn to write a
formulaic essay in 90 minutes only reinforces their ambivalence about
English as a language they are forced to learn.

To address these constraints, this respondent reported using “meaning and

creativity” to navigate the clash between what might be call a pedagogy of multiple
genres and the program’s mandate of teaching a “formulaic essay.” In other words,
this teacher described a degree of agency, despite the constraints:

R3: That said, I seek to bring as much meaning and creativity into teaching
essay writing as I can. I respect the essay form, so I seek to make teaching to
the test as meaningful for students as I can. I find what is real about it and
focus on that, and I help them do well on the tests.

In sum, though most respondents reported a sense of obligation to help students

pass the CATW, in cases where their pedagogical preferences conflicted with that
essay exam, some found ways to balance its demands and their more meaningful
 94 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

and creative approaches. Nonetheless, the sense of ESL as a service to the wider
university was apparent in most responses, leading to emotion labor due to a clash
between prior training and demands of the mandated standardized writing test.

Too Much Time Responding to Writing or Not Enough Time

The responding-to-writing literature focuses mainly on the types of comments
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made and their content. What is overlooked is the daily grind, or more mundane
aspects of reading and responding. To get a sense of the time and energy demands
of reading and responding to stacks of student papers, I asked questions about when
and where the participants read them, including how many they read at one sitting,
hoping that both labor and emotion labor would be revealed.
The responses illustrated the sheer work of responding, including it being
“manageable but still the whole day” (R4), part of a long daily subway commute
(R5), and one that is put off “as long as possible” (R6):

R4: I usually read them in the course of a limited number of days. So I read
a lot on one or two or three days. A regular class is 28 students. In such a
class I would read maybe half of them on one day and the other half on
another day. So it’s like 14 and 14, something like that. It’s manageable, but
it’s still the whole day. It’s an off day and it’s the whole day.

R5: I read their papers on the subway mainly, during the 2½ hours I spend
commuting to and from work every day. I read them until I read all of them.
That will depend on how many I have at any given time.

R6: I read them all over the place. Not in my office because my office is too
cramped. There’s papers and books everywhere all out of order and it makes
me crazy to be in there so I don’t read them there. I read them in the subway.
I read them at home at my desk. I put off reading them as long as possible.
So I often read them all-day Sunday.

Not only was the amount of time discussed, but also emotion labor centered on
how much to write. For example, R7 highlights the difficulty a newly hired
instructor faced in a highly regulated pre-freshman program where the “general
consensus” was to spend no more than 10 minutes per paper. This respondent
reported feeling “pressure” at the time to keep up with that speed, wondering
whether quality was being sacrificed:

R7: They were very painful at first for me because I wasn’t quite sure what
to focus on and how to formulate my comments. So they would go very
slow and over time I sort of figured out some approaches and strategies to
make it better. So I would sit down and do three or four in an hour. No, like
two or maybe three in an hour. They were taking me 30 minutes each.
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 95

Eventually I got it down to like 15 or 20. But there was pressure to get it
down lower. Most teachers were doing it a lot faster. SB: Why was there
pressure? There was just a lot to get through with the other work. So, there
was sort of a general consensus that you were supposed to be getting them
done or they were assuming that you could get them done in ten minutes
per paper. There were different approaches that I think some teachers used
that probably weren’t as … emphasizing speed over quality. One of the shifts
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I made, somebody pointed out a strategy: reading a bunch of them first

before making a mark. I would get so anxious about it that I would start
marking them right away.

R8, too, describes a struggle around the amount of time commenting takes,
describing the process as “torture.” Indeed, R8 reveals the sense that responding is
a “constant source of stress” that has “has taken over my life.” Included in this
response is the expression of a desire to be more “efficient” and avoid attending to
“every mistake because it’s counterproductive”:

R8: I’m always carrying essays around to check and I’m always putting off
checking them. Because I think that it’s gonna be this torture. It’s just a
procrastination technique but also because it takes a lot of time. I do it better
when I’m waiting for something to happen like waiting for an appointment
or if I’m on the train I can do it and I get it done. But at home I’m always
putting it off. So lately I’ve been reading like four or five papers and I feel like
I get something done. And then I’m like, “Oh my God, I’ve only read four or
five. I’ve got 20 more to read.” It’s a constant source of stress for me and the
sense of a burden, a sense of guilt that I haven’t done it. So one of my goals
is to read them more efficiently and to not check every mistake because it’s
counterproductive. We all learn not to do that and then we end up doing it
… It’s such a relief to get it done. It makes me think that checking writing
has taken over my life and I need to have a sense of limit. Like some day when
I just don’t touch it. But I can’t really do that unless I get it done first.

Like R7 and R8, R9 expresses the concern that writing too many comments limits
the number of papers that can be read in one sitting:

R9: I can’t do probably more than three or four at a time because it’s just
exhausting and I just run out of energy to make comments, right?
Sometimes I just scribble way too much.

Finally, R10, from a part-time teacher whose response echoes some of the data
from Ferris, Liu and Rabie (2011), displays emotion labor related to marginal-
ization due to a lack of physical space allocated to adjuncts, those who carry out
the lion’s share of ESL teaching in CUNY, and a lack of compensation for the
work of responding to student writing:
 96 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

R10: I usually read them at home because, as an adjunct, I do not have an

office. I read them on unpaid time, as an adjunct, evenings and weekends.
How many I read will depend on how long they are. If it is a short essay, I
may read ten or more at a sitting. If they are term papers, I will read about
three or four at a time.

Types of Feedback Offered and Roles as Responders

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Emotion labor was apparent in two other sets of responses, one about what types
of feedback to offer and the other focused on what role to adopt when responding.
In the first group, the conflict was between form and content feedback. The second
group, similarly, revolved around whether to adopt the role of language teacher or
writing teacher.

Types of Feedback: Usage or Content?

Given the debate in the literature about the most effective ways of responding to
student writing, it was not surprising to discover that respondents reported
techniques for balancing feedback toward revision and toward correction. The
responses related to this issue were on a continuum from no attention to error to
a great deal, with varying amounts in between. I start this section with the
responses that reported no or little direct attention to errors (R11 and R12); both
expressed a preference for questions. In R11, the questions are directed to the
student writer toward greater elaboration of ideas. R12 reports self-directed
questions to guide the reading:

R11: So I guess I read with curiosity. So that’s how I respond. So I’m like,
“What happened? What do you mean by this? Where are you from?” For me,
it’s like a big why, why, why as I read. And that’s kind of how I read all papers.

R12: So I have adopted three little questions: What do I understand they’re

trying to say? What do I like about what they’re trying to say? Usually that’s
first. It’s either picking out a sentence or a description or something. And
then one suggestion. I also stopped marking up papers with lots of grammar
things because I realized that they were not doing anything with that so I
started marking errors in pencil so they could erase them and only a few. I
don’t do categories. I can’t be bothered with that. But in the next class then
I’ll give them back and ask them to work with their partner and fix those
things that they can fix. And I started having them keep a little record: What
I wrote, what it should be, and what kind of error that is.

It is interested to note that R12, from a very experienced ESL teacher who was
also a coordinator, observed that students “were not doing anything” in response to
marked errors. So instead of marking them, this instructor reported flagging them
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 97

with a pencil mark, engaging students in collaborating to “fix things that can be
fixed,” and encouraging them to keep a log to record their errors. This strategy
avoided the time-consuming activity of notating papers with categories of errors
(“I can’t be bothered with that”). It also raises the question of whether less
experienced or not as well-positioned instructors would give themselves, or be
allowed, the same latitude in their commenting practices.
At the other end of the commenting spectrum are two responses reporting the
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most error correction (R13 and R14). These discuss splitting the feedback into
two parts, one for ideas and the other for language. R14 reveals that this split is
reinforced by the department in which the instructor teaches, underscoring the
top-down directive to evaluate ideas and usage separately:

R13: Based on a very specific set of instructions, I’ve created a two-part

rubric. The first part deals with content issues; the second part deals with
grammar/mechanics. And what I do is I end up reading their papers twice.
I read them first for content things and I have my rubric at hand.

R14: I always give a double grade. I give a second grade for the grammar.
And I know that … I think a lot of ESL teachers do that and I know at
(name of college), we recommend to writing teachers often who will have
some ESL students in their class that they do that, that they grade the
papers like that. One grade for the ideas and another grade for the
grammar.

In addition to varying solutions to handling the relationship between language and

content were responses indicating the disproportionate responsibility that falls on
ESL teachers when it comes to responding to L2 writing. For example, R15 begins
by discussing different types of feedback: toward correctness, development, focus,
and organization. But, there is also a reference to getting “bogged down” in
correcting language, given the responsibility of being perhaps the only teacher to
comment on NNES students’ usage: “[I]f they’re not getting feedback on their
language from me, who are they gonna get it from?” Emotion labor, in this case,
consists of juggling three types of response: to language (given that other teachers
may not address it), to organization, and to ideas. R15 ends with the important
observation that responding to meaning requires the most energy and attention,
both of which may be in short supply “at the end of it.” This is an important point,
given the number of papers ESL instructors are typically expected to respond to
each week:

R15: … my idiosyncracy is if it’s filled with language issues I get bogged

down in the … in correcting the language. I guess I’m kind of old school in
that respect. I think if they’re not seeing … if they’re not getting feedback on
their language from me, who are they gonna get it from? But I still try to
step back after I’ve looked at it and ask questions about development, focus,
 98 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

organization. So I’m trying more to respond in the last four or five years,
trying more to respond to content and ask questions about meaning and …
but that also depends on how tired I am at the end of it. How much attention
I can dedicate to that.

As in R15, the sense of responsibility is strong in R16, compensating for what non-
ESL teachers might not offer. However, in R16, the supplemental work is not just
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commenting about grammar, but also challenging students’ assumption that their
writing will improve if they gain more grammar and vocabulary and simply “mush
them together.” This teacher outlines a paradox: whereas grammar correction is the
“reward” offered for writing a well-developed and well-organized paper, the onus
is also to teach students that writing is not just “words and grammar,” but, instead,
a more complex process:

R16: I mean I have an order in which I address issues. I start with

development. I go on to organization and clarity and at the very end sort of
treat grammar as a reward. Like if your essay is really well-developed and
organized perfectly, I will correct your grammar or at least I’ll indicate where
your errors are and ask you to figure out what’s wrong and if you can’t, we’ll
talk about it. SB: Why do you say “reward”? It’s kind of all they want from me
because they don’t know what writing is about. And I think maybe all the
feedback they’ve ever gotten is about grammar. They think that the problem
is grammar and vocabulary. If they just knew all the words and grammar, they
could mush them together and make writing. So I try to teach them it’s more
complicated than that.

Role as Responder: Writing Teacher or Language Teacher?

Related to R15 and R16: about EL teachers’ sense of responsibility to give
feedback about usage, were responses that explicitly referenced how the teachers
viewed their roles as responders, including conflicts among them. Embedded in
these responses was expression of varying degrees of confidence about choosing
between the roles or how to reconcile them.
In R17 and R18, the underlying question seems to be: Am I a reader or
evaluator? The answer in R17 is that the teacher is a reader who is able to see
students as “people who have something to say” rather than as “error makers”:

R17: So I don’t say that I’m marking papers. I say I’m reading papers. It also
changes my attitude toward the student. That’s the idea here: what are you
trying to say? And look at them as people who have something to say, not as
little error makers.

Less definitively, R18 expresses the intention of being a positive reader, open to the
value of students’ developing ideas. This requires setting aside any negative
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 99

experiences at work or at home that could impede openness to the text as one that
“has something to offer.” It is a goal, not easily attained, but aimed for and “taken
to heart”:

R18: You come to papers, to texts, every time you come to the text you
come to it with a different frame of mind. And something might have
happened to you. You might have had a bad experience with the student.
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You might have a personal issue. You might have been too tired. Your
children might have upset you at home. You know, something. So trying to
bring yourself to that reading in an emotional state where you’re kind of
positive and ready to look at the work as student work that is developing,
that is valuable, that has something to offer. Now this sounds lofty. It’s a
worthy cause. It’s not always easy. But it’s something that I’ve taken to heart.

R19 poses the question more explicitly: Am I a language teacher or a writing

teacher? In this response, it can be seen that there was a change from beginning
ESL teacher to the present. At the beginning, the answer was language teacher.
However, as the years went by the teacher learned to “sit on my hands” to avoid
correcting grammar prematurely and to notice and respond to the ideas:

R19: I also feel like you know when I first started out as an ESL teacher no
one really told me anything about how to teach writing. I did have a
tendency and I think many teachers have this tendency to immediately start
correcting the grammar. I felt like I was more of a language teacher than a
writing teacher and over time…I think I’ve heard other people say this, I
learned to sit on my hands and not immediately … I mean I think I’d
sometimes go so quickly into correcting grammar that I wouldn’t even
notice the ideas so much.

This is not to say that this particular teacher eschews grammar correction, but
instead reported using a split-grade system: one for ideas and the other for
language. The claim of a shift to writing teacher along with the split-grade
technique signals that the relationship between the roles of grammar teacher and
writing teacher is a vexed for this particular instructor, as it was reported to be for
many of my respondents.
Another example of tension between the roles of grammar teacher and writing
teacher can be seen in R20 where the respondent goes so far as to dramatize
grammar correction as an addiction: the ESL teacher makes corrections even after
promising, or warning, never to do it again. In this extended metaphor, both
teacher and students have their mutually dependent roles, with students not
checking their errors before turning in their papers and the teacher continuing to
correct them. The addiction is fed by entrenched habits, ones with questionable
benefits:
 100 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

R20: So I think I’m not helping myself and maybe not helping my students
as much as I could or should be by checking it for them. By being the first
one to mark their typed paper, right? They should mark it in some editing
way first. And I have said that many times to students that I’m not gonna
check your paper. If you want me to check your paper, you gotta mark
something on it first. And then I go and take it. So they know they can …
I don’t know if they do it on purpose. We’re like a bunch of alcoholics giving
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each other drinks, in a way. There’s just certain dependence, you know, that
they have to get past.

Similarly, R21 describes the impulse to make corrections as a strong “human urge,”
one that must be consciously curbed by “reading a bunch of them first before
making a mark”:

R21 One of the shifts I made, somebody pointed out a strategy: reading a
bunch of them first before making a mark. I would get so anxious about it
that I would start marking them right away … Still it’s a very strong impulse
to mark. And I always remember I wrote for my college newspaper and there
was a sign in the editing room: “The greatest human urge is not food or
drink or even sex, but the urge to change what someone else has written.”
And I always thought that was a really appropriate statement.

Overall, the responses about the types of comments respondents reported they
made and/or roles they adopted revealed emotion labor about the relationship
between error correction and comments about meaning, offering clear evidence
that this split is in full force in the field of ELT. Finding this tension in the data was
not surprising given the ongoing debate in the literature about WCF and its
relationship to feedback about content. Whether participants characterized their
responses as more readerly than evaluative or more grammar-intensive, the data
show a persistent lack of assuredness about the most appropriate types of feedback
to offer or the proper role to adopt.

Relational Aspects of Commenting: Expecting Reciprocity/Hoping for

Engagement
When answering the questions about which feelings emerge while responding to
and evaluating writing, two scenarios seemed to provoke emotion labor: 1)
students not incorporating into their writing what had been taught repeatedly; 2)
sensing that the student had spent less time on their writing assignment than they
were expected to or than the teacher had spent reading and responding. The first
theme is described playfully as “How many times have I told you?” The second is
titled, “How much time did you spend on this?” Emotion labor related to these
two themes was due to a clash between professional training and the reality of
student uptake.
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 101

This section ends with responses reflecting respondents’ desire to read writing
that reflects an authentic commitment on the part of students, titled “I always feel
engaged and deeply connected to the person whose paper I’m reading.” These
responses highlight reading and responding to student writing as a relational
activity, corresponding to the interpersonal and affective dimensions Hyland and
Hyland (2006) and Sommers (2006) discussed. When the relationship is honored,
as shown in students’ commitment to their writing, the emotional payoff is
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described in glowing terms. On the other hand, emotion labor is provoked when
there is a perceived breakdown in the relationship, signaled by a lack of student
engagement with their writing.

How Many Times Have I Told You …?

In R22 and R23, the teachers report getting “upset” and “testy” due to students
not following assignment guidelines or ignoring aspects of writing the teachers had
taught repeatedly. Awareness of those feelings seemed to act as a signal to rein them
in because if they remained unchecked, the written comments might reflect those
feelings or have a negative “spillover” on the reading of subsequent papers.
Therefore the teachers reported that they stopped commenting in those moments
to allow the upset feelings to pass, an aspect of their emotion labor:

R22: I try not to read more than six or seven at a time because I start getting
upset. So I read six or seven and I say ok I’ll come back later. SB:Why do you
get upset? Because most of the time somebody has not done something they
were supposed to do. Because like I mentioned I give them a very specific
set of instructions. They have gone through drafts of it. And unfortunately
… inevitably someone has not done what they’re supposed to do. So usually
when I hit that paper then I say, OK I’m going to stop reading now because
I don’t want this anger to spill over into other papers.

R23: When I find my comments getting testy, I stop reading. SB: Could you
say a little bit more about comments getting testy? Sometimes it’s because I feel
that I’ve said the same thing 93 times. I know that the magic number is
always one more than that, but … Or in many cases the things that I have
said to that particular student—stick to the topic, please be specific, do not
say, “And stuff like that.” I don’t know what that means. It has no meaning.
And so if I find an essay that is unsatisfactory in those respects.

R24 describes similar frustration when students don’t use linguistic features that have
been taught repeatedly, yet wonders about the source of the frustration: Is it my
teaching? Is it their learning? Is it a matter of insufficient time to absorb the lesson?

R24: When reading sometimes I’m maybe frustrated or even annoyed by

some errors. Like if I’ve taught students … it’s a typical ESL error for Spanish
 102 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

speakers to miss a subject. If they’ve missed the subject I put a little symbol
for them to figure it out. But it’s just like, “Come on, haven’t you learned that
before?” So I get frustrated that either I’m not teaching it effectively, they’re
not learning it, or they just need more time to learn it well.

Finally, in R25, there is a detailed description of emotion labor related to

frustration over students not carrying out the assignment as it had been laid out.
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Explaining that assignments are workshopped, with clear steps along the way, the
instructor wonders about the appropriate response when a student ignores the
steps, writing “a pretty good piece” yet one that did not conform to the instructor’s
guidelines. Should that paper be judged without regard to the instructions? What
about “institutional pressures” to be uniform and fair, especially when there are
students who did follow the instructions? Rather than arriving at an answer, the
instructor reports that the conflict is ongoing:

R25: I don’t just assign topics and leave. We workshop things and we go over
things and I try to make myself available and I really do take that very
seriously. And I’ve had papers that did not incorporate any of that or they
ignored or … Now do I have the right to be angry? From one standpoint
the students at the end of the day, have the right to choose how they write
their paper. And maybe they have their way of doing it and that way is not
wrong necessarily and this is not about right or wrong. But this is what I
think the tension is between individual ways of looking at education and
paths to get that and then the institutional pressures or needs for some kind
of uniformity and fairness and I think both are equally represented. And I
often feel torn about that because sometimes you’re presented with a pretty
good piece, but it didn’t really conform fully to whatever the task was. And
this is again … does it have to be or does it not have to be? For my own
personal purposes, it does not have to be. I’m looking at the way ideas are
developed. I’m looking at the kernels of thinking, anything that would be
good for their future development, anything that would serve them or take
them further. So it’s not that … but on the other hand, it has to be a way of
gauging student … fairness toward students. So you cannot allow one person
… that for me is always a conflict.

How Much Time Did You Spend on This?

In these responses, interviewees reported disappointment or frustration when
reading papers that seemed “tossed off ” or written up quickly “on the way to class.”
In these cases, teachers were conflicted about spending more time reading the
paper than the student may have spent writing it:

R26: If it looks like something the student has written on the subway in 20
minutes on the way to class … I don’t like to spend a lot of time on
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 103

something that was tossed off and I have often said, you know, “You need to
spend more time on this. You have good ideas, good examples, but it needs
to be worked on.”

R27: If I know that they didn’t put much time into it then of course there’s
… if I know the student … this is the third revision and I see that they’re
moving I’m very happy. But if I see that the student just wrote it up quickly
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and handed it in, I’m a little annoyed. They’re not putting in as much time
as I am.

R28 reports strong feelings (“disgusted and furious”) when students seemed to
have expended little effort on their writing, going on to speculate about what
might have diverted their time and attention. There’s a sense in this response of
tension between writing assignments and “competing media” with the latter
winning out, not just against homework, but also in-class work:

R28: I have been utterly disgusted by … I mean the things that make me feel
that way are when I have tried really hard with a student and they still seem
to be making the least possible effort. It seems to me and I’m imagining this,
I don’t know, but it seems to me they’re texting, watching TV, talking on the
phone and writing the paper at the same time. That’s the amount of attention
it feels like they’re putting into it. And it makes me disgusted and furious. Like
why am I bothering even reading this? And I’m sure I’m spending more time
on this than they did. And so I stop and say, “You have to try harder. I’m not
reading any further till you look at this and see how crazy this is and fix it.”
It’s all about effort to me, I guess. It’s all about paying attention. If they’re really
trying and they’re really paying attention and they’re doing the reading and
they’re trying to pay attention to English and how it works, it’s a thrill. And
it happens less and less though. I think it’s the competing media. There’s so
much of, “Couldn’t we just watch the movie?” “Do we really have to read this
book?” “Couldn’t I just take a picture of what you wrote on the board?”

“I Always Feel Engaged and Deeply Connected to the Person Whose

Paper I’m Reading”
The quote from my data that opens this subsection characterizes a set of response
highlighting the centrality of teacher/student relationships in the commenting
process. They demonstrate the connection between teachers’ investment in their
students’ writing and learning and their commenting practices, discussed further in
Chapter 6, on plagiarism. R29, for example, clearly expresses the reciprocity
between the student’s commitment to the writing and the teacher’s exhilaration:

R29: My feelings when reading them are very varied, depending on the
individual paper and who wrote it. I can feel frustrated, if a student seems not
 104 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

to be making progress. I always feel engaged and deeply connected to the

person whose paper I’m reading, since I want to teach them, to respond to
their writing in ways that will help them learn. I can feel exhilarated, when
I see progress in a student’s skills. Most of all when I see that a student is truly
expressing him or herself in a genuine way, saying things that they care
deeply about, showing that they are thinking critically, gaining deeper
understanding about themselves and their place in this world.
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So, too, in R30, there is a discussion of both disappointment when students have
not committed to the assignment and pride and pleasure when they demonstrate
“development,” “growth,” and “maturation”:

R30: I just touched on the point that inevitably someone has not done what
he or she is required to do. But there are many times I’m very proud and
very pleased. And I have no problem with telling them that: This is a very
good … I like how you constructed this paragraph. Or I like the examples
that you have given. Excellent structure. There are many times I’m very
excited about the development and the growth of their writing and the
maturation of their process.

Similarly, emotion labor is a feature of R31 where the teacher describes gratitude
when students care enough to be engaged and frustration when they don’t,
especially when “there’s things that you go over” and students show no evidence
of having absorbed those lessons, a concern raised in previous responses. But
beyond those earlier responses, in R31, references to gratitude and caring, and to
“intimacy” in R32, underscore that giving feedback and using feedback are
expected to be reciprocal. They may therefore either satisfy or disappoint:

R31: I also feel grateful that they produced. Grateful that they shared.
Grateful that they were engaged. And that they actually cared about what
they were doing. And frustration ‘cause I mean it’s in any class but partic-
ularly with the ESL ‘cause there’s things that you go over and people do the
same things all the time. Or they don’t do what specifically was required.
And I mean you can say it in a million different ways, but it still doesn’t seem
to be understood. Sometimes it’s a language issue, but sometimes it’s just not
paying attention. Sometimes it’s not caring.

R32: So sometimes I just look at these essays and as I say I’m sometimes
touched by what they’re writing. The level of, I guess, almost intimacy. The
things that they say that I would be surprised at.

In R33, the final response in this chapter, a range of emotion labor related to
responding to student writing is present. The response begins by promoting an
empathic connection between the teacher and student writer, explaining that
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 105

“you’re not just grading that paper in front of you,” but rather the person who
wrote it, an interesting connection to Sommers’s (2006) finding about the
relational role of feedback. Furthermore, perhaps to hedge bets about which types
of comments are most beneficial, this teacher uses rubrics. And perhaps to alleviate
student anxiety and confusion, “structure” and “process” are created, including a
timeline, an outline, and drafts. Yet, despite designing well-crafted assignments and
carefully attending to process, there may be aspects of the guidelines that are
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ignored, leading to frustration, as seen in earlier responses:

R34: I don’t know if this happens. If you’re able to divorce your mind from
the student, but it’s … I think it’s probably impossible for someone who’s
invested in their students at any level. Maybe there are people who can be
that cold and analytical when reading their students’ papers. But I don’t
know of anyone that can really be. So you’re not just grading that paper in
front of you. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing, right? That’s why to a degree
I want to give rubrics and I want to give the structure so they know what
to look for in the papers. I also always give students a timeline. Like I have
them turn in an outline. Like on this day you have to turn in a bibliography
like if it’s research. Or you have to turn in some sort of draft if it’s a writing-
intensive class. If not, there’ll at least be a time to share their papers. So there’s
a process to it. I also have them present their papers before they turn them
in so either as a poster or class presentation so at least they’ve had a chance
to get multiple types of feedback before they turn in their final draft. So that’s
part of it too in terms of grading is I know a lot about the papers and I know
what was a weak point or I know what I asked them to do: hey could you
work on this? So I guess that’s another emotion in terms of, hey I told you
three times to add this, why didn’t you? So that’s a frustration.

Conclusion
Sommers’s (2006) finding that “[f]eedback is rooted in the partnership between
student and teacher, and as in any relationship, it develops its own language and
meaning” (p. 255) was a welcome conceptual contribution to the literature on
responding to student writing. In addition, her observations about the centrality of
teacher feedback in establishing a sense of belonging among student writers is a
reminder that the type of feedback is perhaps less important than consistently
offering it, to signal commitment to the relationship and to student membership
in a community.
However, though Sommer’s finding that teacher feedback may contribute to
community-building is encouraging, left out of that equation is teachers’ emotion
labor when writing comments and reading subsequent drafts. The emotion work
present in my data was apparent in three overlapping areas: what types of feedback
to offer, what roles to adopt, and how to negotiate the teacher/student relationship
when it comes to responding.
 106 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

Concerning types of feedback, as in the L2 response literature, my interviewees

reported uncertainty around how much, if any, WCF to offer and what, if any,
impact it might have on writing development. Solutions varied from not
correcting, to flagging, to offering separate grades for language and ideas. There
was also evidence in the data of the additional burden of being students’ sole
instructor who attended to usage and therefore of the obligation to offer WCF. In
addition, one respondent who described WCF as a “reward” for good essays also
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reported a sense of obligation to convey that writing is not simply a matter of

acquiring grammatical knowledge and vocabulary that might then be “mushed
together.” Above all, there seemed to be a struggle around the relationship between
comments toward revision and those toward correctness, as in the literature
discussed earlier in the chapter, with some using rubrics to address both.
Along the same lines, there was evidence of difficulty reconciling roles: language
teacher (one who attends to WCF) vs. writing teacher (one who attends to the
development of ideas). In fact, a teacher who claimed early in the interview to have
shifted from language teacher to writing teacher later discussed an elaborate
process of signaling errors and a split-grade technique. In addition, one interviewee
described WCF as an addiction and another as a strong human urge. These
responses suggest the powerful draw of correcting, one that seduces both English
language learners, who expect correction, and teachers, who feel compelled to
provide it. Seen through the lenses of addiction, urge, and seduction, WCF appears
as a sticky object (Ahmed 2004), one that is difficult to resist despite a lack of clear
evidence of its short or long-term benefits. Given the stickiness of WCF, consid-
erable emotion labor is expended on a series of interconnected questions: Is the
time taken to correct well-spent? How, if at all, is it useful to students? Might it be
harmful, as Truscott (2007) claimed? Does it end up engendering desire for and the
offering of more correction?
The interview question that focused explicitly on feelings revealed emotion
labor in two areas of reading and responding: 1) lack of evidence in the writing that
the student had learned what had been taught repeatedly and; 2) a sense that the
student had spent insufficient time on the writing assignment. Regarding the first,
frustration was related to an expectation of reciprocity between teaching and
learning, especially when something had been taught repeatedly. However, though
most interviewees expected students to demonstrate in their writing that a
grammatical feature or composing skill had been learned, one wondered whether
students’ failure to apply particular lessons might be due to the teaching or lack of
time (“So I get frustrated that either I’m not teaching it effectively, they’re not
learning it, or they just need more time to learn it well”). I return to the relationship
between teaching and learning next in discussing the myth of improvement.
Responses related to the amount of time students might have spent on an
assignment and the ratio of that time to teachers’ time reading and responding
revealed a desire for parity. There was evidence of unwillingness to spend more
time reading a paper than the student seemed to have spent writing it. In addition,
one respondent discussed the role of “competing media” in drawing students away
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 107

from their writing to screens of various types, speculating that multitasking might
be the culprit in reducing not just time on task, but also attention.
On the other hand, interviewees described the time they spent reading and
responding to drafts not just in terms of the labor, but also in terms of possibly
strengthening teacher-student bonds, especially when students exhibited
investment in the process. Some of the phrases and words that emerged were
“deeply connected to the person whose paper I’m reading,” “very proud and very
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pleased,” “grateful,” and “touched.” Yet, despite the potential for pleasure and
satisfaction in reading student papers, frustration was a central feature of the data
mainly due to evidence that students had not yet learned what had been taught.

Coda: The Myth of Improvement

We’ve come to understand that, whatever one teacher says in commenting
on student writing, however local the context, however unreliable the
recommendation, and however uncertain the consequence, in the end, the
teacher is working meaningfully, not alone, but in good company, to advance
a process of verbal maturation that is always, already, underway, and that will
ultimately prove successful if only the learner is as motivated as the teacher.
When former students tell us that we made all the difference, we don’t
believe it, but we smile.
(Brannon and Knoblauch 2006, p. 15)

To address emotion labor related to concerns about students not showing evidence
in their writing that they learned what was taught, I will end this chapter by
discussing what Brannon and Knoblauch (2006) called the myth of improvement.
This is the belief that the comments teachers make on student papers will lead to
improved student writing, though research evidence is ambiguous at best.
Summarizing 50 years of research on responding to student writing, Brannon and
Knoblauch (2006) found that the question about the effectiveness of feedback
“remains unresolved” (p. 1). To address the “persistently unconvincing
demonstration” (p. 2) in composition research that teacher feedback leads to
improved student writing, they challenged assumptions guiding the research. For
one, they questioned the premise that only if “prompt and steady improvement”
(ibid.) is documented can it be said that response works. Proposing the more
rational assumption that “human development is unpredictable, irregular, and time-
consuming” (ibid., p. 3), they called for research and practice honoring the
complexity of composition teaching and learning and the indeterminate
relationship between them.
In making these claims about the tenuous relationship between teaching and
learning, Brannon and Knoblauch’s (2006) were taking a political position. The
danger of the myth of improvement, they claimed, is that it leads to the type of
measurement to which education has fallen prey in the neoliberal age of account-
ability. When it comes to composition, the myth of improvement, by propagating
 108 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor

the notion of fast gains given the right kind of teaching, justifies high-stakes
literacy testing, discussed in Chapter 4. In that paradigm, the burden is exclusively
on teachers who are expected to provide appropriate feedback in the service of
measurable results.
Brannon and Knoblauch (2006) also warned that the hortative rhetoric of
composition scholarship perpetuates the myth of improvement. This is partic-
ularly evident when composition scholars offer pedagogical recommendations
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that are not supported by their research findings. That is, even in cases where the
research failed to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between teacher
feedback and improved student writing, recommendations about feedback are
offered. Calling the mismatch between the research findings and the recommen-
dations a “sleight of hand” (p. 5), Brannon and Knoblauch (2006) proposed a
moratorium on claims about and recommendations for improvement. The focus,
instead, should be on “the impact of commentary on the quality of the
relationship between teacher and student” (p. 12). In other words, they called for
a shift in conceptualizing feedback from an instrument of “instantaneous progress”
(ibid.) to a means of social engagement. This represents a rejection of
“behaviorist” goals, promoting, instead, “the complicated intellectual, rhetorical,
logical, emotional, stylistic, ethical, political, and other dimensions of language
practice” (ibid., p. 14).
My reason for bringing in the myth of improvement at the conclusion of this
chapter is to urge greater latitude and equanimity when it comes to responding to
student writing. As Brannon and Knoblauch (2006) discussed in the quote that
opened this section, though giving feedback is both time-consuming and solitary,
we are not the only ones who have commented on our students’ writing and we
won’t be the last. Our students’ literacy acquisition is “always, already, underway” (p.
15) and we are therefore not solely responsible for it, nor should we expect instan-
taneous gains.
Despite this shared longitudinal responsibility, my data revealed individual
instructors’ emotion labor in the following areas: the right ratio of WCF to
comments toward revision, being too directive or not directive enough, and
spending too much time commenting, or not enough time. Given the lack of
consensus over the last 50 years about the short-term and long-term impact of
responding to student writing and my findings about emotion labor, English
language teachers might develop a more casual relationship to feedback as a way to
let students know we’re reading their writing attentively; that may be more than
enough. This is not to deny the burden of reading many papers in a short amount
of time and returning feedback in a timely manner, especially when teaching
numerous classes, sometimes at more than one location. But it might lead to
minimizing written feedback while still honoring relationships with students. As
well as reminding ourselves that improvement, however that might be defined, does
not fall to EL teachers—or any single teacher for that matter—alone.
 Responding to Student Writing and Emotion Labor 109

Notes
1 Matsuda (2003) offered earlier examples of process research and pedagogy, but
concluded that these “earlier attempts at pedagogical reform … did not attain the level
of success” (p. 68) of the more recent examples I draw upon in this chapter.
2 According to Pennycook (1994), the splitting of language and meaning indicates a
structural perspective, one that promotes ELT as a matter either of “focusing
consciously on language structures (be they syntactic or discoursal)” (p. 17) or of
focusing on meaning (p. 17). Rejecting both these views, poststructural theories posit,
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instead, the notion that “language itself has meaning, that it is not simply a medium
through which meanings based on some sense of objective reality pass” (ibid). Language
and meaning are inseparable, in tandem playing a “fundamental role in how we make
sense of the world and the world makes sense of us” (ibid). From this perspective,
teachers cannot respond to language without responding to meaning and vice versa.

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 6
PLAGIARISM AND EMOTION LABOR
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Academic dishonesty is prohibited in The City University of New York.

Penalties for academic dishonesty include academic sanctions, such as failing
or otherwise reduced grades, and/or disciplinary sanctions, including
suspension or expulsion …
1.2 Plagiarism is the act of presenting another person’s ideas, research or
writings as your own. Examples of plagiarism include:
a) Copying another person’s actual words or images without the use
of quotation marks and footnotes attributing the words to their
source;
b) Presenting another person’s ideas or theories in your own words
without acknowledging the source;
c) Failing to acknowledge collaborators on homework and laboratory
assignments;
d) Internet plagiarism, including submitting downloaded term papers
or parts of term papers, paraphrasing or copying information from
the internet without citing the source, or “cutting & pasting” from
various sources without proper attribution …
3. Reporting …
3.2 A faculty member who suspects that a student has committed a
violation of the CUNY Academic Integrity Policy shall review with the
student the facts and circumstances of the suspected violation whenever
feasible. Thereafter, a faculty member who concludes that there has been
an incident of academic dishonesty sufficient to affect the student’s final
course grade shall report such incident on a Faculty Report Form in
substantially the same format as the sample annexed to this Policy and
shall submit the Form to the college’s Academic Integrity Officer …
which shall contain, at a minimum, the name of the instructor, the name
 112 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

of the student, the course name and number and section number, the
date of the incident, a description of the incident and the instructor’s
contact information.
(http://policy.cuny.edu/manual_of_general_policy/article_i/policy_1.03/3/
text/#Navigation_Location)

The excerpt that opens this chapter, from the City University of New York’s
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“Academic Integrity Policy,” exemplifies the widespread characterization of

plagiarism as a type of “academic dishonesty,” punishable by lowered grades, failing a
course, and/or academic dismissal. In addition, the policy specifies related activities
teachers are expected to carry out: monitoring writing for plagiarism, confronting
students with suspicions of plagiarism, reporting suspicions, and remaining associated
with the investigation when it is turned over to administrators. These activities
suggest particular feelings rules, such as suspicion and hypervigilance, ones that could
potentially conflict with feeling rules acquired through professional training, such as
compassion for students who must navigate the complexities of writing academic
English. The possible clash between those feeling rules and teachers’ professional
and/or personal knowledge could therefore produce emotion labor.
In addition, the policy statement offers no hierarchy of violations. Instead all are
portrayed as equivalent types of academic dishonesty, from downloading an entire
paper and submitting it as one’s own to copying words without attribution. The
assumption driving this legalistic framework is that the difference between plagia-
rizing and not plagiarizing is clear-cut: a straightforward matter of a dishonest
student violating an unproblematic and uncontested code of ethics.
The scholarly literature on plagiarism, on the other hand, paints a more
complicated picture of activities gathered under the label plagiarism. This includes
factors not covered by university plagiarism policies, such intentionality, level of
students’ linguistic and academic literacy development, and the complexities of
attribution in the postmodern world.
I explore this scholarly literature next. First, though, I want to underscore that
the backdrop of the publications I will review and the data presented later in the
chapter is the punitive stance toward student writers of plagiarism policies, such as
the one cited at the opening of this chapter. This legalistic stance positions faculty
members as enforcers even when they may hold more nuanced views about the
challenges of academic writing and attribution. Despite instructors’ possibly more
complex understandings of student writing, they are expected to prevent, detect,
confront, and punish plagiarism as part of their teaching responsibilities, processes
that may have profound implications for their relationships with students.
The emotion labor associated with policing plagiarism is the focus of this
chapter, particularly in the later sections where I offer an analysis of my interview
data on this topic. Briefly, my findings uncovered emotion labor in four areas: 1)
noticing and pursuing suspicions of plagiarism; 2) teacher-student interactions
around plagiarism; 3) preventing plagiarism; and 4) causes of plagiarism. As to
causes, I devote a fair amount of space in this chapter to the controversial claim that
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 113

certain cultures value imitation and that students from those cultures are therefore
susceptible to plagiarism when writing academic English. This issue is discussed in
the latter part of the literature review, followed by a detailed discussion of the data
on the four areas of plagiarism about which I interviewed my respondents.

Related Literature
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There is a rich scholarly literature that grapples with issues related to plagiarism,
one that can be divided into three overarching areas: 1) problematizing plagiarism;
2) teaching plagiarism; and 3) teachers’ emotions around plagiarism. The first
category attempts to complicate the notion of plagiarism as an act of academic
dishonesty comparable to cheating on a test, as expressed in university plagiarism
policies. The second proposes ways to address plagiarism pedagogically. The third
investigates struggles instructors face when detecting instances of unattributed
writing in students’ texts as they juggle conflicts between their role as enforcer and
as teacher. Each of these areas is discussed next.

Problematizing Plagiarism
The literature that interrogates plagiarism can be further divided into L1 and L2
composition research. Though both complicate plagiarism by taking the social
context of writing into account, the L2 scholarship also grapples with questions
about the role of culture. Therefore I take up these literatures separately while
pointing out overlaps.

L1 Composition Scholarship
Both L1 and L2 composition scholarship on plagiarism challenge the assumption
that student texts are products that can be judged without attention to the sociolin-
guistic backgrounds of student writers. The L1 literature, more particularly,
concerns itself with the degree to which students were exposed to academic
literacy in their homes and schools before reaching college. For example, Hull and
Rose (1989) carried out case studies of “nontraditional” (p. 140) students, who they
characterized as unprepared for college-level academic literacy tasks. Rejecting
earlier text-based research methods, Hull and Rose (1989) instead adopted process-
based methods to investigate how their participants’ prior knowledge affected their
interpretation and fulfillment of writing assignments.
For example, Hull and Rose (1989) studied the writing processes of Tanya, a 19-
year-old student enrolled in an adult basic literacy course in an urban US
community college. Tanya had not completed high school and therefore faced a
steep uphill battle in her aspiration to become a nurse. Hull and Rose (1989)
observed and videotaped Tanya while she wrote a summary. After she was done,
they replayed the videotape and asked Tanya to provide a retrospective account of
what she had been thinking while composing.
 114 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

Hull and Rose (1989) observed that Tanya made “slight modifications in the
original, changing a word here and there, but copying whole chunks verbatim” and
juxtaposed “segments of the original without connecting them to each other” (p.
147). In addition, the juxtaposed segments were “drawn from disparate parts” (ibid.)
of the source text with no discursive signals to the reader of how those parts might
relate or cohere.
When asked about her writing process, Tanya indicated a twofold intention: to
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be faithful to the source text, so the “teacher’ll really know what I’m talking about,”
and to make small changes in the sentences she copied so the teacher would “know
I’m not really that kind of student that would copy” (ibid.). That is, she actually
aimed to avoid plagiarism, an intention that would not have been revealed through
analysis of her text alone.
When continuing their line of questioning, Hull and Rose (1989) discovered
that Tanya had been warned repeatedly not to plagiarize and she therefore worried
about doing so inadvertently. Her writing process, then, followed two objectives:
displaying knowledge and avoiding plagiarism, guided by the following rule:
“Change a few words so as not to copy” (ibid.).
Hull and Rose (1989) used the term patchworking to describe inexperienced
student writers’ process of reproducing phrases and sentences from the source text
and changing a few words. They also recommended that teachers encourage
patchworking, at least in the early stages of acquiring academic literacy. Pointing out
that “appropriation is a fundamental part of language” (p. 151), they highlighted
imitation as a useful tool, especially for non-traditional students. A clear departure
from forbidding and policing plagiarism, their “free-wheeling pedagogy of imitation”
(ibid.) invited students to copy academic language without fear of reprisal.
Hull and Rose’s (1989) concept of patchworking was taken up by Howard
(1995) who also promoted it as a developmental stage on the path to becoming an
academic writer. Dismissing the “juridical” construction of plagiarism, Howard
(1995) embraced patchworking as a “pedagogical opportunity” (p. 788) to engage
students in copying text as a transition to acquiring academic literacy. Claiming
that plagiarism policies are based on traditional textual values, including the notion
of authors as autonomous proprietors of original prose, she made a case for
patchworking, based on postmodern theories that challenge the outdated notion
of texts as property to be protected from theft.
Howard (1995) traced the text-as-property notion to the invention of the
printing press. Given that this technology allowed authors to profit from their
writing, copyright laws were enacted to protect potential profits. Although the
concept of plagiarism can be traced back further, to the ancient world, Howard
(1995) credited Gutenberg with provoking a “textual economy” (p. 790) driven by
notions of proprietorship, autonomy, originality, and morality, ones applied to
student writing through university plagiarism policies, in part as a way to protect
published authors from student theft of their property.
However, a new textual economy has arisen, according to Howard (1995), with
the advent of the Internet. In this textual economy, original authors are much more
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 115

difficult to locate. Texts are in flux often with no clear source, along with continual
modifications by multiple writers: “No longer do we have originators and
plagiarists … but the collective always unfinished text” (p. 791). Given this shift to
the new textual economy, Howard (1995) questioned whether the concept of
plagiarism as a violation of textual ownership is a meaningful one in the
postmodern context.
Furthermore, according to Howard (1995), university plagiarism policies are
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fundamentally flawed because they retain the modernist notion of autonomous

author, despite insights offered by postmodern theories about the instability of
authorship. She claimed, too, that expressivism, propagated by Peter Elbow and
other process-writing proponents, further justified policing plagiarism by
emphasizing writing as discovery of one’s authentic and original voice. To carve
out a middle ground between author as “Romantic originator” and the
“postmodern death of the author” (p. 795), Howard (1995) endorsed patchworking
and collaborative writing to encourage “positive plagiarism” (p. 796), in the service
of better academic writing.
Taking these ideas further, Howard (2000) recommended abandoning the term
plagiarism altogether. One reason for this later proposal was her growing awareness
of a lack of consensus among secondary and postsecondary teachers about how to
define plagiarism in the first place, despite their being charged with detecting and
punishing it. Howard’s reservations about the continued use of plagiarism as a
catch-all term was also related to the failure of university plagiarism policies to take
into account the developmental level and intentions of student authors. By
excluding these from consideration, institutions perpetuate the binary of academic
outsiders and insiders, those who already know how to write in sanctioned ways
and whose membership is therefore unquestioned (see also Starfield 2002). To
address the exclusion of outsiders and to acknowledge that plagiarism is used to
describe disparate activities, Howard (2000) proposed replacing it with three
separate terms: fraud (turning in a paper written by someone else), insufficient
citation, and excessive repetition. These, she claimed, should be treated as varying
concerns and dealt with accordingly.
In a further demonstration of how fraught plagiarism is for L1 composition
scholars, Howard and Robillard (2006) made yet another revision to the
terminology by proposing plagiarisms, in an attempt to counter the universalizing
tendencies of plagiarism policies. Adopting plagiarisms encourages teachers to
“ethically and productively apply” their “nuanced knowledge” (p. 3) about writing,
citation, and attribution. Pointing to the variety of “spatial, temporal, and cultural
contexts” of writing instruction, including students’ backgrounds, Howard and
Robillard (2006) called on teachers to “work with students to categorize
plagiarism as a form of authorship rather than a type of crime” (ibid.).
Perhaps to highlight the significance of context when it comes to plagiarism,
Howard and Robillard (2006) included an afterword by Bruce Horner, “Plagiarism,
Difference, and Power.” In this essay, Horner (2006) took up the politics of
plagiarism by interrogating the two main approaches he identified in both the L1
 116 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

and L2 composition literatures: developmentalist and archipelago. According to

Horner (2006), the developmentalist approach considers plagiarism as a type of
interlanguage in which students engage as they attempt to learn the conventions
of academic literacy—the approach taken by Hull and Rose (1989) and Howard
(1995), discussed earlier. Once students have acquired the conventions, they can be
considered proficient academic writers. Horner (2006) associated the developmen-
talist approach with patchworking pedagogy, given that its proponents
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recommended it for the early stages of academic literacy development, a step in the
direction of mastering the conventions.
The archipelago approach, on the other hand, constructs a deep division between
academic literacy and students’ literacies, viewing them as mutually-exclusive
discourses that do not inform or influence each other. Those subscribing to this
approach espouse respect for students’ discourses as features of their cultures, but
expect students to abandon their accustomed discourses in order to acquire academic
discourse with no possibility of contact between these disparate discursive islands.
Both the developmentalist and archipelago approaches share two problematic
assumptions, according to Horner (2006). One is that they leave intact the notion
of a “plagiarism crisis” (p. 173), laid at the feet of student writers. The other is the
construction of plagiarism as strictly a writing problem. This positioning neglects
the role of particular kinds of reading to determine whether or not a student text
is deemed to be plagiarized. That is, “[p]lagiarism, like error” is a “perception
resulting as much from reading practices as from writing” (p. 173). The politics of
plagiarism, like the politics of error, are grounded in judgments about acceptability
and appropriateness made by those who are empowered to judge and enforce
particular linguistic conventions. Gatekeepers stand to capitalize from the current
information/knowledge economy. They therefore aim to resolve tensions between
open-source and commidified information. To do so, they stabilize and standardize
knowledge for the purpose of commidification, trying to prevent its continual
revision and retrieval on the information highway.
One way to create that stability is by textualizing knowledge, including
“claiming that it inheres in a specific form and sequence of notations” (p. 174), such
as citation conventions. According to Horner, standard definitions of plagiarism are
not only grounded in the reification of textualized knowledge, but also in
positioning certain readers as guardians of conventionalized texts. Thus, teachers
have been recruited to guard those texts “in pursuit of particular interests” (p. 174).
For Horner (2006), then, the so-called plagiarism crisis has been perpetrated by
universities which sanction faculty members to oversee the interests of those who
capitalize from textual knowledge, at the expense of student writers. In the data
analysis section, I’ll discuss the emotion labor associated with that type of oversight.

L2 Composition Scholarship
In many cultures, especially those of Asia, achieving group consensus is more
important than demonstrating one’s own understanding and abilities … Such
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 117

an approach to learning is greatly at odds with what is expected of students

in most countries in the West, where individual effort and self-reliance are
considered meritorious and mutual assistance is not encouraged outside of
strict boundaries … It is not unreasonable to assume that a culture which
tolerates the idea of students sharing knowledge and responsibility in this
way, is one which is less likely to discourage copying and the appropriation
of ideas from other sources without copying them.
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(Sowden 2005, pp. 227–228)

I received all my education, with the exception of my graduate study, in

China, and I never recall any of my teachers telling us it was acceptable to
copy others’ writing and turn it in as one’s own, be it a paragraph or a couple
of sentences. On the contrary, all my teachers often warned us not to copy
others’ work. In fact, the concept of plagiarism as an immoral practice has
existed in China for a long time. Chinese has two terms for plagiarism and
they are both derogatory …
(Liu 2005, p. 235)

While Sowden seems to suggest that Asian culture contributes to the act of
plagiarism, I would point out that plagiarism is never allowed or made
legitimate by Vietnamese culture or education … Although memorizing
model essays or famous ideas is common in Vietnam, this is not at all for
plagiarism purposes. Showing respect for authority or showing politeness in
academic writing does not mean encouraging plagiarism.
(Phan Le Ha 2006, p. 76)

I open this section with these three quotes to illustrate a debate in L2 composition
about the role of culture in plagiarism. As seen in the first quote from Sowden
(2005), one side of the debate claims that plagiarism can be attributed to students’
cultures. Students copy from published texts, according to this argument, because
social harmony and group consensus are encouraged by their cultures while
original thought and individualism are discouraged or undervalued. The target of
this argument is usually Chinese students, or sometimes, more broadly, Asian
students, who are claimed to be influenced by Confucian philosophy, including a
reverence for authority, prizing of social harmony over individual achievement, and
a predisposition to quote scholars, such as Confucius, without attribution. Quotes
from Confucius are selectively included to bolster these claims, such as the
following: “A learner’s duty is to understand and master what those in authority
say, as transmission, before any independence of mind or creativity in a field can be
expected” (Cortazzi and Jin, as cited in Sowden 2005, p. 227) and “I transmit rather
than create” (Bloch 2007, p. 147).
While those who posit culture as an explanation for why Chinese, or Asian,
students might struggle with attribution and citation, they acknowledge that
culture is not unitary. At the same time, however, they retain their belief in culture
 118 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

as a contributing factor if not primary cause of plagiarism. For example, while

Bloch (2007) conceded that “[t]here is justifiable danger … in these charges of
‘otherness’ and ‘essentialism,’” (p. 142), he dichotomized “China and the West” (p.
141). Furthermore, he answered the question of whether “there is a dichotomy
between these two cultures” with “a qualified yes” (ibid).
For his part, Sowden (2005) warned about the danger of “degenerating into
stereotype” (p. 228), yet he seemed to do just that in offering the following four
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generalizations about Chinese culture and its possible effects on student writing: 1)
“Chinese academic norms … are the result in part of a long tradition of
reproducing Confucian teachings in civil service exams” (p. 227); 2) “the idea that
good students do not challenge their teachers or other authorities, but faithfully
copy and reproduce them” (ibid.); 3) “There is little tolerance of uncertainty. From
this perspective, plagiarism can be seen as a virtue” (ibid.); 4) “In many cultures,
especially those of Asia, achieving group consensus is more important than
demonstrating one’s understanding and abilities” (ibid.).
For their part, Jin and Cortazzi (2006), conceded that Chinese culture is not
unitary, but, rather, plural, given its geographical, ethnic, and linguistic diversity.
However, despite this acknowledged diversity, they circumscribed a shared Chinese
“culture of learning,” (p. 9) originating in children’s acquisition of Chinese
characters. They generalized the process of learning characters to all Chinese
learning, characterizing it as “repeated practice and mimetic production of teachers’
models or textbook examples, with the concomitant idea that being creative or
artistic can only happen after precise mastery of basic forms” (ibid.). As to
plagiarism, Jin and Cortazzi (2006) claimed that the Chinese “culture of learning”
can create difficulties for Chinese students studying in British universities,
including the following observation:

Some students (whose teachers in China only exceptionally drew attention

to ideas about individual authorship, origination and originality, ownership
and plagiarism) encounter issues in acknowledging sources and giving
references in writing. In Confucian heritages, sources did not need to be
mentioned … (p. 19).

On the other side of the debate, multicultural scholars, such as Kumaravadivelu

(2003), Kubota (2004), Liu (2005), and Phan Le Ha (2006), who grew up in Asia
and attended graduate school in the US, Canada, or Australia have challenged the
above-cited characterizations of the relationship between culture and plagiarism.
Being well-positioned to address the impact of cultures on academic membership,
they have complicated the cause-and-effect relationship posited by those who
attributed particular academic behaviors to cultural differences.
For example, Kumaravadivelu (2003), addressed not plagiarism specifically, but
more general ways in which TESOL scholarship perpetrates “harmful homoge-
nization” (p. 710) of Asian students. He identified three prevalent stereotypes in the
literature about Asian students: 1) obedience to authority; 2) lack of critical
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 119

thinking skills; 3) lack of participation in class discussions. While conceding that

some Asian students might exhibit these behaviors, as do some non-Asian students,
he objected to the field’s “remarkable readiness to forge a causal connection
between the classroom behavior of Asian students and their cultural beliefs” (p.
710), despite a lack of research findings supporting such claims.
Given the impossibility of isolating culture as a determinate of classroom
behavior, due to numerous other individual and social variables, Kumaravadivelu
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(2003) cautioned that viewing students through a monocultural lens contributes to

“a one-dimensional caricature of these learners” (p. 714). He further argued that
scholars who associate particular behaviors with Asian cultures without considering
the power differential between themselves and their students, are at risk of
manifesting a colonizing attitude.
Kubota (2004), too, discussed power in her critique of “the politics of cultural
difference” (p. 21). Taking a discourse approach to culture, she claimed that the
ways in which culture is discursively constructed fulfill “certain political and
ideological purposes” that serve to “exert, maintain, or resist power” (p. 22). To
counter both essentialist and assimilationist concepts of culture in second language
education, she proposed a reckoning with power relations. Though not directly
addressing plagiarism, she also raised concerns about ways that “conventions of
English are regarded as the norm” (p. 24) to which L2 writers are expected to
conform. Kubota (2004) therefore recommended that any discussion of culture in
applied linguistics should address the following questions: “Who benefits? Who is
oppressed? What concepts are resisted? What concepts are promoted? What are the
social, educational, and political outcomes?” (p. 37).
Possible answers to these questions can be seen in Liu (2005) and Phan Le Ha
(2006), quoted at the beginning of this section, who directly addressed Sowden’s
claims about the relationship between Asian culture and plagiarism. Based on their
cross-cultural experiences as students and scholars, they interrogated Sowden’s
assumptions about the impact of culture on overseas students’ academic writing.
Liu (2005), a native of China who received his PhD in the US, questioned
Sowden’s assumptions about the acceptability of copying from published texts in
Asia. He pointed out that the only evidence Sowden offered in that regard were
quotes from overseas Asian students who had been confronted about copying from
source texts without attribution. These students defended themselves by claiming
that this was acceptable practice in their home countries, an assertion Liu (2005)
denied by disputing the notion that copying from published texts is permitted or
encouraged in China.
The evidence Liu (2005) offered to challenge the claim about the acceptability
of plagiarism in China was not only his educational experience, but also his analysis
of six books about composition, three written by mainland Chinese authors and
three by Taiwanese authors. Four of the six were textbooks. He found that all six
texts discussed the need to cite sources, with one stating: “Plagiarism and copying
are immoral acts and should be opposed” (p. 236).
Liu (2005) also warned about the tendency in the L2 composition literature to
 120 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

conflate memorization and plagiarism. Conceding that memorization is an

important feature of Chinese education, he questioned Sowden’s “unwarranted
jump in reasoning” (p. 236) when the latter cited the use of memorization as
evidence that plagiarism is encouraged or permitted in China. Liu (2005)
explained that memorization is viewed as a scaffold for original writing, not a “tool
for copying” (p. 237).
Phan Le Ha (2006) too questioned Sowden’s conflation of memorization and
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plagiarism. She pointed out that though memorization of model essays and famous
sayings is encouraged in her native country, Vietnam, these practices bear no
relationship to plagiarism, which is actively discouraged. Copying the work of
fellow students, and from published texts, is punished, beginning in primary school,
according to Phan Le Ha (2006). In fact, she offered two terms in Vietnamese with
“the same or even more negative connotations” (p. 76) than the English word
plagiarism.
Having been educated in both Vietnam and Australia, Phan Le Ha (2006)
offered the perspective of an Asian student who had to navigate the complexities
of attribution in an Australian PhD program. One point she made in this regard
was the difficulty of ascertaining what might be considered common knowledge
in the Australian context and, therefore not in need of attribution. Given the
challenge of sorting common and uncommon knowledge, international students’
texts might be misread as plagiarized rather than read with empathic understanding
of that cultural hurdle.
An alternative to hypervigilance about plagiarism in international students’
writing, according to Phan Le Ha (2006), would be to encourage their customary
discourse practices, thereby welcoming alternative voices and conventions. In place
of jumping to conclusions about plagiarism, postsecondary teachers might
welcome unfamiliar composing and citation practices to avoid silencing students’
voices and “discouraging their creativity” (p. 78). This would be a move away from
the archipelago approach that forbids any blending of styles.
In a demonstration of how this blending might work, Phan Le Ha (2009)
described how she has carved out a “writing space that interweaves joyously my
multiple identities, experiences, values, and prior knowledge” (p. 138). This
included incorporating genres that are not usually found in Australian academic
writing, such as letters, poems, lullabies, and fairy tales, in her scholarly writing. The
aim of creating this more inclusive writing space was to resist the “deficit-oriented
stereotypes and assumptions” about Asian students “who are identified as having
problems with writing in English and are accordingly labeled as plagiarists” (p. 137).
A final point about the relationship between culture and plagiarism in L2
composition is what empirical research has shown about that connection. Pecorari
and Petric (2014), surveyed the literature on the role of culture, among other issues,
in plagiarism and found, overall, that it may be impossible to isolate culture “from
the web of language skills, discoursal adjustments and individual perceptions and
practices” (p. 287) that students call upon when writing. Their survey of case
studies, text-based interviews, and comparisons between student writing and its
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 121

source texts found that: 1) L2 writers often lift from source texts without
attribution; 2) teachers may not discover that students have copied from source
texts; 3) L1 writers may more frequently identify copied passages as plagiarized
than L2 writers and; 4) teachers have a tendency to believe that culture plays a role
in L2 students’ copying without attribution.
Perhaps the most interesting conclusion Pecorari and Petric (2014) drew from
their survey is that there is little evidence to support any significant difference
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between L1 and L2 writers when it comes to plagiarism, a finding that challenges

claims about the influence of culture. Along these lines, the authors cited three
studies that found “no significant difference between the two groups” (p. 286)
when it came to source use, and other studies that found “L2 and L1 users broadly
in line” (ibid.) when it came to attitudes toward plagiarism.
While Pecorari and Petric (2006) conceded that methodological problems in
researching plagiarism might call some of the findings into questions, they
nonetheless argued that even if L1 and L2 student writers were discovered to use
sources differently, culture is “not the only influence” (p. 286) on student writing.
Therefore, connecting those differences to culture would be a conceptual leap, not
supported by the “fragmented and contradictory … body of empirical evidence”
(ibid.).
To sum up this section on the role of culture in the L2 composition scholarship
on plagiarism, given the challenges of L2 writing and perhaps inadequate
instruction in what counts as common knowledge and what must be cited, culture
is not a particularly useful focus of interest. On the other hand, as Phan Le Ha
(2009) suggested, more could be done to welcome international students’
customary styles toward a translingual approach to academic writing. Furthermore,
it might be helpful to consider how to teach plagiarism, rather than how to avoid
it, the topic of the next section.

Teaching Plagiarism
Contemporary writing requires the expertise of a secretary crossed with the
attitude of a pirate: replicating, organizing, mirroring, archiving, and
reprinting, along with a more clandestine proclivity for bootlegging,
plundering, hoarding, and file-sharing. We’ve needed to acquire a whole new
skill set: we’ve become master typists, exacting cut-and-pasters, and OCR
demons. There’s nothing we love more than transcription; we find few things
more satisfying than collation.
(Goldsmith 2011a, p. 220)

I learned that song from Arlo’s old man. It’s an old gospel song, but Woody
was always adding his own. And I was never quite sure how many of the
verses were the old ones and which were the ones he added. And he
considered this was the normal way things should be. He once said of
another songwriter, “He just stole from me, but I steal from everybody.”
 122 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

Then I found out from my own father, he stated it in his own musicological
way, ‘Plagiarism is basic to all culture.’
(Seeger and Guthrie 1975)

My choice of Teaching plagiarism, rather than, say, Preventing plagiarism, as the

title of this section, is to highlight points made in the quotes above: plagiarism is a
feature of the contemporary world, expressed by the quote from Goldsmith. Yet, it
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also has a long history in the arts where, for example, folk singers such as Woody
Guthrie borrowed from other folk musicians just as Pete Seeger and others
borrowed from Woody. Sampling, that is, is not a new activity though technology
has broadened its speed and range, making sources more quickly and widely
available. Helping students navigate the contradictions between the predominance
of sampling in popular culture and its policing in universities is the focus of this
section of the chapter. Therefore, I won’t review the literature on how to teach
paraphrasing and citation in order to help students avoid plagiarizing, as useful as
that literature might be (see Angelil-Carter 2000; Gu and Brooks 2008; Pecorari
2003; Price 2003;Yamada 2003). Instead, I will review the literature on copying as
an essential feature of human expression: one that should therefore be
acknowledged in academia rather than simply resisted and punished.
Kenneth Goldsmith, author of the first quote, is a poet and professor of English
at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches courses with such titles as “Wasting
Time on the Internet,” “Uncreative Writing,” and “Interventionist Writing:
Writing Off the Page.” These titles reflect Goldsmith’s (2011a) philosophy that all
words are borrowed and that writers’ creativity is revealed in how they put together
borrowed words, phrases, and sentences. The myth of originality at the level of
words and phrases is challenged and replaced with acknowledgment that because
users of the same language share a lexicon, imitation is inevitable. To put it another
way, the exhortation to “use your own words” is meaningless.
According to Goldsmith (2011b), the contemporary technology-driven world
consists of “an unprecedented amount of available text” (n.p.). This textual
abundance begs not for more texts, but, instead, negotiating “the vast quantity that
exists” (n.p.), including sorting, organizing, and distributing what is already
available. Therefore, the tasks of today’s writers include “word processing,
databasing, recycling, appropriation, intentional plagiarism, identity ciphering, and
intensive programming, to name just a few” (n.p.).
Along these lines, Goldsmith (2011a) highlights patchworking as the iconic
feature of contemporary writing, including intelligent choices about what to
borrow and skillful arrangements of those words and phrases. In his “Uncreative
Writing” course, for example, his students are “rewarded for plagiarism, identity
theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing”
(Goldsmith 2011b, n.p.). According to Goldsmith (2011b), students thrive in this
course because what they had previously done surreptitiously is brought to light
and “reframed as responsibility rather than recklessness” (n.p.). The responsibility
lies in choosing among the vast array of texts what to include and what to omit, as
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 123

well as putting the pieces together in a thoughtful way. These are acts of creative
self-expression, Goldsmith (2011b) claimed, revealing as much about the writer as
personal narratives would: “Mimesis and replication don’t eradicate authorship;
rather they simply place new demands on authors, who must take these new
conditions into account as part of the landscape” thereby “grappling with new
questions concerning authorship, originality, and the way meaning is forged” (n.p.).
Two of Goldsmith’s (2011a) assignments demonstrated ways he highlighted
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issues of authorship, originality, and meaning-making in his teaching. One required

students to purchase a term paper from an online site, sign their name to it, and
turn it in as their own. Students also had to present the paper orally in class and
defend it, sometimes engaging ideas with which they didn’t necessarily agree. A
second assignment was to retype five pages of a published text verbatim. Not
knowing what the results would be, Goldsmith (n.d.) was gratified when students
reported that the exercise was “the most intense reading experience they had ever
had” (n.p.). Others reported awareness that typing the pages was a performance
involving their entire body. Still others became “intensely aware of the text’s formal
properties” (n.p.), triggering interest in texts not as transparent media for conveying
meaning, but as aesthetic objects.
Predictably, Goldsmith’s pedagogy has not been universally embraced in the
academy. For example, Zangrando and Pace (2011) decried Goldsmith’s pedagogy
as a violation of “the standards of ethical scholarship,” akin to the sale of toxic
mortgages and “corporate cooking of the books,” one they predicted would be
attractive to students who are “weary of rigor” (n.p.). In response to this critique,
Goldsmith (2011c) claimed that unlike corporate malfeasance, his pedagogy is a
“fully transparent and openly consensual environment” where students are invited
to participate in “otherwise forbidden” activities in a “safe and controlled
environment” (n.p.). He claimed that though his pedagogy differed from his critics’,
they shared a common goal: rigorous intellectual engagement.
The pedagogical benefits of copying are also taken up by Donahue (2008)
whose discussion of writing instruction in France offered a refreshing counterdis-
course to the standard East vs. West trope. Donahue (2008) explained that French
education does not strive to prevent students from copying from published texts;
in fact, in some cases, copying is encouraged. For example, when it comes to
literary texts, secondary school students in France are discouraged from
paraphrasing because reformulating literature “removes its aesthetic value” (p. 92).
Therefore students are told to either copy from the original literary work or
respond to it with “original thoughts” (ibid.).
When it comes to non-literary texts, such as memoirs and news articles,
secondary and early postsecondary French students are given detailed instructions
about how to summarize them, including reducing texts “to precisely one-quarter
their length, maintaining the original message, maintaining key phrases, while
shortening and condensing the text overall” (p. 93). The purpose of this
summarizing is to develop facility with “inhabiting voices, often appropriating even
the style, tone, or voice of the pieces to which they respond” (p. 93), a nod to
 124 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

Bakhtinian heteroglossia. Furthermore, students are not expected to cite their

sources, but rather copy from them without quotation marks or attribution.
It is only when French students reach the later years of their postsecondary
education and graduate work that they are expected to synthesize multiple sources
while citing and quoting from them. According to Donahue (2008), the transition
to this type of academic writing is a challenge for students due to their customary
ways of copying from sources. However, rather than judging and punishing
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students for “overly close work with sources” (p. 94), including “missing citations,
close paraphrase, word-for-word borrowing, or other forms of ‘copying’” (p. 95),
their postsecondary instructors respond empathically to students’ difficulty when
managing “polyphonic writing” (ibid.).
In other words, according to Donahue (2008), discussion of these challenges
among French academics does not revolve around the issue of plagiarism. Instead,
it focuses on identity, including how to cultivate and connect different textual
voices, especially given the power differential between student writers and the
published authors they read and whose work they write about. The aim is to help
student writers “understand the stakes, the history, the existing structures and
paradigms into which he or she is integrating written work” (p. 96), not to punish
them for a perceived transgression.
One of the pedagogical implications Donahue (2008) offered was to consider
copying as a mode of learning, given that all writing is a dual process of “reprise-
modification,” one requiring “simultaneous appropriation and transformation” (p.
98). After all, according to Donahue, utterances, even direct quotation, involve “an
always-dynamic-taking-up-and-modifying, past-present-future in degrees of
concert” (ibid.). This statement is congruent with Goldsmith’s claims about the
pedagogical value of copying.
Though neither Goldsmith nor Donahue address L2 writers, it is interesting to
consider how the former’s philosophy and pedagogy and the latter’s findings about
copying in the French educational context might inform the present discussion of
plagiarism. In particular, given that some of Goldsmith’s assignments engage
students in sanctioned imitation, how might this activity be applied to acquiring
additional languages and the role of patchworking in enhancing academic literacy?
A possible answer to this question can be found in Chandrasoma, Thompson
and Pennycook’s (2004) study of the role of copying as “symptomatic of the need
to use the writing of others to make it one’s own” (p. 176). In addition to the
Bakhtinian notion of utterances composed of borrowed words, their study of L2
writers drew on the Vygotskyian idea that imitation “may be the sine qua non of
the learning process” (ibid.).
Along these lines, Pennycook’s (1996) interviews of postsecondary Hong Kong
(HK) Chinese students revealed strong opinions about the role of memorization in
learning, also referred to as “reusing structures and words from others’ texts” (p.
225). One student reported that this process had been critical to his learning of
English in secondary school. Another student questioned the shunning of
plagiarism as a way of learning in postsecondary institutions. Still another raised
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 125

concerns about the hypocrisy of instructors who police plagiarism yet fail to cite
sources during their lectures.
Some students interviewed by Pennycook (1996) claimed that including copied
source material in their written texts in English was an act of resistance to the
continued colonizing effects of the language in the HK context. Reporting that
English was “an alien language” over which they had no ownership, these students
questioned the mandate to write English “in their own words” (p. 225), a
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meaningless concept in the HK context of linguistic imposition. Given these

constraints, Pennycook (1996) raised the following question: if “all language
learning is, to some extent, a practice of memorization of the words of others, on
what grounds do we see certain acts of textual borrowing as acceptable and others
as unacceptable?” (p. 202). This question is taken up in the conclusion of this
chapter.

Teachers’ Emotions and Plagiarism

This section reviews the limited scholarly literature on teachers’ emotions in the
context of plagiarism. Most interesting about this scholarship is that no matter how
nuanced the understanding of plagiarism or thoughtful the proposals for teaching
it, as seen in the previous sections, instructors work within a regime of plagiarism-
as-crime. Their conflicting emotions in light of that discourse are therefore
considered in this literature. Though this scholarship does not address feeling rules
and emotion labor per se, they examined the tensions between policing plagiarism
and mentoring students, ones that are relevant to the current chapter.
For example, Abasi and Graves (2008) studied the discourses surrounding
international students’ interactions with source material at a US university. The
data included interviews with professors across the disciplines about the impact on
them of the university’s plagiarism policy. Abasi and Graves (2008) aimed, in part,
to explore reactions to the mandate that portions of the plagiarism policy,
“[c]ouched in punitive language,” be reproduced on every syllabus. Professors in
their study reported a conflict between the legalistic discourse of plagiarism and
the educational discourse of their professional training. Most important was the
sense that inclusion of the legalistic language on their syllabi drove a wedge
between them and their students. This issue, one that showed up in my data as well,
and is therefore discussed later in the chapter, was articulated in the following
interview excerpt from Abasi and Graves (2008):

I felt like a security guard … My aesthetic or affective response for not

wanting to include it was because that’s just not the way I want to enter into
a relationship with my students when I’m teaching in a class and learning
with them (p. 229).

Along similar lines, Sutherland-Smith’s (2005) studied 11 English for Academic

Purposes (EAP) teachers’ perceptions of plagiarism and the plagiarism policy at an
 126 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

Australian university. To this end, she distributed a questionnaire and conducted

interviews; patterns she noticed in the two data sets were coded as themes. The
theme most relevant to the present discussion was “poor academic image” (p. 91),
meaning that respondents believed that reporting plagiarism might reflect badly on
them as teachers because they could be deemed insufficiently rigorous to have
prevented their students’ so-called academic dishonesty. This was particularly true
of contingent teachers, already in precarious work situations, who were concerned
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that a perception of “professional negligence” (p. 91) might lead to job loss. They
therefore chose not to report incidents of suspected plagiarism, instead dealing
with them one-on-one with student writers. As seen later in the chapter, this type
of negotiation, in lieu of reporting plagiarism, was discussed by my respondents
too.
Another theme uncovered by Sutherland-Smith (2005) was “burdensome
administration,” (p. 91) given the time-consuming process of tracking down the
sources of suspected plagiarism and compiling the report. Full-time instructors, in
particular, were reluctant to pursue the “often lengthy chase” (p. 92) of plagiarism
detection, due to their heavy teaching loads, publishing requirements, grant
applications, and administrative responsibilities. This reluctance was in part
attributed to the laissez-faire attitude of the university committee in charge of
adjudicating plagiarism cases. This committee had a reputation for exonerating
students, despite the number of hours teachers had put into preparing the
paperwork. In this regard, two respondents claimed that “the system fails the staff ”
and it was therefore preferable to “handle things yourself ’ (p. 93).
Similarly, Hyland (2001) found that her participants—two EAP teachers—did
not report incidents of suspected plagiarism at the university where they taught in
New Zealand. Using both think-aloud protocols and interviews, Hyland (2001)
discovered that the teachers struggled with how to interact with their students
when detecting apparently copied source material in their papers. For example, one
teacher said during a think-aloud, when coming across words that didn’t sound like
the rest of the student’s paper: “I hate accusing people of plagiarism, but when you
think it is, what do you do?” (p. 377). This type of question about how to handle
plagiarism was apparent in my data too and therefore discussed later.
Rather than accusing students of plagiarism, one of the EAP teachers in
Hyland’s (2001) study offered indirect feedback, such as “Where did you get this
information? Have you used quotations?” (ibid.). However, these types of
comments were not fully understood by the students and did not, therefore,
produce the results the teacher had sought.
The problem as both of Hyland’s (2001) participants saw it was that dealing
more directly with plagiarism amounted to “an accusation of a wrongdoing, rather
than … a way of pointing out a potential problem” (p. 380). They believed that the
problem might better be handled through further instruction, leading to greater
understanding and improved writing. And, though Hyland (2001) did not situate
the teachers’ concerns within a punitive plagiarism discourse, as Abasi and Graves
(2008) did, it is understandable, given the pervasiveness of that discourse, that the
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 127

teachers she studied adopted indirect means of dealing with suspected plagiarism
in “the most face-saving manner to the student” (p. 381).
For her study of the emotions of plagiarism detection and reporting, Robillard
(2007) examined both plagiarism scholarship in the L1 composition literature and
teachers’ blog entries about discovering plagiarism in their students’ writing.
Aiming to highlight the role of teachers as embodied readers of student texts, she
questioned the “near erasure of teachers’ anger” (p. 11) in the plagiarism literature.
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Affect must be considered, according to Robillard (2007), given that, unlike

plagiarism-detection software, teachers read student texts affectively. In this regard,
studying teachers’ anger highlights the relational aspect of responding to student
writing, discussed in Chapter 5.
Situating her research in Ahmed’s (2004) cultural politics of emotions, Robillard
(2007) wondered not so much what the emotions of plagiarism detection are, but,
rather, what they do. She posed the question, “How do teachers’ angry responses
to plagiarism function?” (p. 13). Having experienced that anger herself, she sought
to move beyond the authorial aspects of plagiarism involving “only the writer and
the text” (p. 15), a move also made by Horner (2008). However, unlike Horner
(2008), Robillard (2007) explored “the affective effects” (ibid) on teachers when
encountering plagiarism, asserting the need to acknowledge and probe teacher-
readers’ anger in those situations.
Robillard’s (2007) data consisted of her own reactions to plagiarism, the
scholarly literature on plagiarism, and teachers’ blogged responses to student
plagiarism. As to her own reactions, she described a range of emotions she had
experienced when reading a PhD student’s text, portions of which were in light
gray ink while the bulk was in black ink. When her observation about the
differently-colored inks was pointed out, the student attributed the lighter colored
text to printer problems. However, when Robillard (2007) later googled these
portions, she was “shocked” (p. 17) to discover that they were indeed plagiarized.
The shock was followed by anger that the student had lied to her, indicating to
Robillard (2007) that the student had assumed her professor was “stupid” (ibid.)
enough to miss the plagiarism.
Robillard (2007) followed up by offering the student a chance to revise with no
penalty, yet later she felt guilty for having suspected plagiarism in the first place and
for having followed up on her suspicions. The guilt was followed by anger, the
purpose of which was to re-establish her identity “as a writing expert who can and
will distinguish between authentic and inauthentic texts” (p. 18). The anger, she
surmised, was also connected to wondering whether she would have missed the
plagiarism if the plagiarized portions had not been lighter in color. This question
led Robillard (2007) to the following conclusion: “my desire for revenge when I
do catch a plagiarist is, at least in part, a desire to set an example for all those others
that I might not have caught or those who might think about plagiarizing in the
future” (p. 18).
However, along with her desire for revenge, Robillard (2007) acknowledged, as
did Abasi and Graves (2008), a conflict between her identity as a writing expert
 128 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

who can detect inauthentic texts and her identity as a teacher whose job is to
encourage, not punish, students. Yet, Robillard (2007) went even further in
exploring her emotions around plagiarism, wondering whether tension arises
because writing teachers, such as herself, who self-identify as critical teachers, have
an uneasy relationship with the mandated role of policing plagiarism.
Contradictions between the gatekeeping aims of plagiarism detection and the
social justice aims of critical teaching have the potential to generate anger,
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resentment, and shame.

As to her analysis of the scholarly L1 composition literature, Robillard (2007)
found that it focused mainly on distinguishing intentional and unintentional
plagiarism and seeking ways to prevent both. In doing so, she claimed, this literature
unintentionally perpetuates the implication that teachers’ anger around plagiarism
is not justified because if they had been able to prevent it, there would be no
emotional impact. The risk of this implication is that it suggests that those whose
students plagiarize are “‘bad’ teachers” (p. 22). It is interesting to note that this is
similar to Sunderland-Smith’s (2005) finding about EAP teachers’ concern that
they might project a poor pedagogical image if they reported plagiarism.
As to Robillard’s (2007) analysis of blogs about plagiarism, these were the
antidote to the scholarly literature. Here, teachers let loose with their anger about
plagiarism, representing themselves “as too smart to be fooled by scheming
students” (p. 22). Robillard (2007) found that teachers were unabashedly
emotional in the blogs, revealing that they perceived plagiarism as a “personal
affront” (p. 24). Furthermore, though some teachers in the blogosphere freely
expressed their pure anger, one exhibited what might be called emotion labor,
alternating between blaming himself and blaming the students, expressing
uncertainty about the legitimacy of his anger, a process Robillard (2007)
described as “arguing with himself ” (p. 25). Yet another teacher expressed his
anger about plagiarism in affective terms: “I can’t be passionate about my teaching
and yet emotionally impervious to those moments when my passion and my
values are trod upon” (p. 26).
Whatever the emotion labor of teachers’ plagiarism-detection might be, a topic
I explore next in the data analysis section, Robillard’s (2007) most relevant point is
that the scholarly literature has, for the most part, ignored the role of teachers as
readers who are emotionally invested in their students’ learning rather than dispas-
sionate or unengaged. Due to teachers’ emotional investment in student writing,
plagiarized portions of student texts are sticky objects to which teacher-readers’
emotions adhere. As Robillard claimed, “[W]e cannot have it both ways; we cannot
create an identity dependent on a relationship to students that is emotionally
supportive at the same time that we maintain an affectless response to plagiarism
or suspected plagiarism” (p. 27).
As both Horner (2008) and Robillard (2007) pointed out, composition teachers
are not software, but are embodied readers. Their emotion labor should therefore
be theorized to appreciate the emotional impact of the activities they are called
upon to carry out by plagiarism policies.
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 129

Emotion Labor and Plagiarism: Data Analysis

My interview questions about plagiarism revolved around four topics: 1) noticing
plagiarism in student writing and attempting to track down the source; 2) teacher-
student interactions around plagiarism; 3) preventing plagiarism; and 4) causes of
plagiarism.
The questions related to noticing plagiarism and tracking down the source
focused on respondents’ reactions to the texts themselves and any emotions
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adhering to those activities: 1a) In your ESL classes, have you ever suspected a
student of plagiarizing? 1b) If so, what made you suspect plagiarism? 1c) How did
your suspicions make you feel? 1d) Did you take any steps to track down the source
of the plagiarism? 1e) How did that process make you feel?
The questions related to an experience the interviewee may have had with a
student who seemed to have plagiarized shifted the focus away from texts to
teacher-student interactions: 2a) Did you discuss your suspicions with the student?
2b) If so, what did the student say? 2c) What did you say? 2d) What was the
outcome? 2e) How did the whole incident make you feel?
The question related to preventing plagiarism was: 3) What do you do, if
anything, to prevent plagiarism? The question related to causes of plagiarism was:
4) Why do you think plagiarism happens?
I next take up each of these areas separately to describe the emotion labor
teachers reported experiencing when noticing plagiarism, pursuing their
suspicions, approaching students with their suspicions, and preventing plagiarism. I
also include their speculation about why plagiarism occurs.

Noticing and Pursuing Suspicions of Plagiarism: Teachers and Texts

In terms of noticing plagiarism, several interviewees described the ease of
identifying plagiarized language when it appears in students’ papers. Their
responses indicated a sense that coming across copied language interrupted the
reading process, due to its obvious difference from the rest of a student text or from
other papers the student had written that semester. The use of the all of a sudden
and suddenly, in many of these responses, indicated that interruption:

R1: … it’s usually like a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs that don’t really
work and had a lot of issues and all of a sudden a really good two or three
sentences and you’re like, Whoa, where did that come from? And then you’re
like, oh no, that probably came from somewhere online or wherever. So it
typically is something that jumps out at you …

R2: There’s suddenly a very fluent part, you know it’s been plagiarized.

R3: And if suddenly there’s a whole paragraph in perfect academic English in

the middle of their essay, I know immediately that they didn’t write it.
 130 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

R4: … students were sort of plodding along and plodding along and then all
of a sudden this fabulous paper pops up from nowhere. And you know to start
googling.

R5: And all of a sudden this paper appears out of nowhere and it looks like it
was copied and it’s handed in toward the end of the semester.
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R6: And when I suddenly read this very good piece of writing, I know it’s
not yours.

R7: Suddenly you have someone citing something like, Jones, and there’s
nothing like that in the references. And you wonder if they pulled something
from another paper and they didn’t even check to see if they had the reference.

R8: … suddenly their sentence will really improve for a few words and then
they go back to being themselves.

Along with the reported obviousness of copied portions in student texts were
references to annoyance about having to stop reading and figure out what to do
next. That is, rather than reporting being angry at the students for having copied
(and as I’ll discuss in the next section, a fair amount of empathy was expressed for
students), teachers reported feeling frustrated by their interrupted reading and
having to follow up.
Annoyance, rather than anger, about the process of stopping their reading and
investigating further seemed related to ESL teachers’ awareness of the challenges of
writing in an additional language. The concern was more with having to take addi-
tional steps than it was with catching students in an act of intentional deception. The
next two responses, R9 and R10, highlight frustration with the process, including
handling emotion labor through self-talk about how to deal with an ambiguous situ-
ation rather than a clear-cut one of academic dishonesty. R9 showcases the burden of
having to act on the discovery of copied text in a student paper along with uncertainty
about how to handle it, perhaps demonstrating a clash between institutional feeling
rules (“you have to do something about it”), ambivalence about that mandate (“You
never want to …”), and lack of clarity about what the next step should be (“I think
you’re upset because you don’t know what to do”):

R9: You see it and you know you have to do something about it … I mean
I hate it. I hate it when that happens because you … Unless the student I
guess was clearly somehow, you had somehow categorized them and they
had been … I don’t know I think even the bad students, the ones who are
doing poorly in the class. You never want to … you get frustrated, right? But
even with students who are doing poorly, you feel like really upset because
it’s this … it’s not even upset. You just don’t know what to do. I think you’re
upset because you don’t know what to do.
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 131

R10, on the other hand, references initial indignation upon discovering copied text
(“You think I’m stupid, right?”), echoing Robillard’s (2007) discussion of the
violation of her expertise as a writing teacher. However, in R10, the initial
indignation is tempered with compassion and empathy (“I keep putting myself in
their shoes”). In addition, there is shame about experiencing the initial anger (“I’m
embarrassed to admit…”):
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R10: I’m embarrassed to admit that my first suspicion says to me, “Do you
think I don’t read these papers? You think I’m stupid, right?” And then I say
to myself, “OK, it’s not about you. They’re just trying to get through your
class.” And once I get past that then I recognize … I understand. I constantly
remind myself … I could not imagine going to Beijing and taking college
classes in Mandarin learning a whole new orthography. Are you kidding me?
No! So I have to keep putting myself in their shoes and that’s what I do.

The next responses, too, indicate more disappointment than anger toward students,
due to work the teacher had done to prevent plagiarism, as in R11. This response
is similar to those in Chapter 5 that expressed disappointment and frustration when
students failed to apply lessons that had been taught repeatedly. In R12,
disappointment is over the student’s work being more cut-and-paste than critical
thinking:

R11: Disappointed. I was disappointed because with it being a freshman

composition class I know that I teach about utilizing outside sources. You
know: this is how you properly cite, utilize an outside source. I tell them
you’re expected to use these sources. You just cite them. Just be honest and
cite them. So when you spend so much time doing that and going through
these examples, showing them so many examples of plagiarism and they still
do it, it’s really disappointing.

R12: You know sometimes when you do run it through Turnitin, you see
that they get one sentence from here and one sentence from there and one
sentence from there and they do cite the sources even, although sometimes
they make a mistake with a quote vs. paraphrase and so … but you know if
it’s all just pulled from different sources although it’s technically not
plagiarism I still I feel let down because the students didn’t really put any of
their own thinking into it. It’s like they pull everything from the sources. So
here’s another feeling: let down.

Not only did respondents report their own emotion labor regarding noticing
plagiarism, but also contrasted their reactions to purported much stronger ones of
colleagues in other departments, as in R15 (“I’ve met other colleagues who … it’s
like they’re on the hunt for plagiarism and won’t rest till they sniff it out. Like a
trained bomb dog.”). The reason given most often for that difference was that ESL
 132 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

teachers tend to be more focused on teaching language and skills than any
particular content, suggesting that they are less apt to take on the role of guardians
of textual knowledge, despite that mandate in the plagiarism policy. In fact, R14,
relays how assigning writing about students’ experience prevents plagiarism, a point
I return to in the preventing plagiarism section. However, given that teachers in
other departments are thought to be more punitive when it comes to plagiarism,
as in R14 (“People in other departments go nuts with plagiarism”), some
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respondents reported feeling responsible for warning students not to copy, as seen
in R13:

R13: You know plagiarism is not such a big deal for me … I’m more focused
on are they developing their language and if I see that it’s … you’re not going
to be able to do this in (course #) and pass. You gotta sit down and take the
test and other teachers will … you could get suspended for this. I talk about
this of course…But I’m not as … it’s not a trigger for me the way it is for a
lot of people.

R14: People in other departments go nuts with plagiarism because they have
more of it because they don’t ask students to write about experience. When
you ask students to write about experience you don’t get a lot of it.

R15: Whereas I’ve met other colleagues who … it’s like they’re on the hunt
for plagiarism and won’t rest till they sniff it out. Like a trained bomb dog.
And I get frustrated with that because like, you know, it’s not the purpose of
teaching. And that’s why I think when I find it, it’s like, that’s not why we’re
here, especially with second language students.

R16: It doesn’t usually make me mad. I have some colleagues who get really
mad about it, especially when students copy other students’ essays because
they can do that easily in the computer lab.

The consensus seemed to be that noticing plagiarism might be annoying, but not
anger-provoking, except in cases where students deny it (discussed in the next
subsection). For routine cases, where teachers came across obviously-copied
portions of source text in a student paper, the typical response was to write
questions on the student’s paper, as Hyland (2001) found, or talk to the student.
These responses were strikingly consistent across interviewees, especially for how
they ignored the plagiarism policy, including no mention of a “violation” or
academic dishonesty as there is in the policy. In fact, the data revealed a general lack
of reported consternation (“I don’t get alarmed”):

R17: I usually write, “Who wrote this?” When I suspect something in the
paper, I try to put the burden on them.
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 133

R18: I just put a mark through it and say, “Write in your own words.”

R19: And every once in a while I have seen a paper and I say, “This is
exceedingly well done. Did you have help with this?”

R 20: I would feel I would have to talk to them about it and stop it now. But
I don’t get alarmed. I understand it.
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R21: I simply called the student in and I said, “Look I don’t want to take
action, I’ve never taken action. Why don’t we try to rework this because I
know what you did in class. This is not your work. These are not your words.
Either you can try and attribute them to others or you can tell me what the
source was or can honestly tell me what you did or you can restructure it
because if I accept it like this I am probably going to have to at some point
do something about it.” In all the other cases, we wrote things out and the
students had a chance to sit down with me and tell me which pieces and
parts were taken from another piece.

One indication, though, of emotion labor was related to concern about whether
written or oral comments might upset or offend the student, given how loaded the
issue of plagiarism has become:

R22: I just wrote a comment on a student’s paper. “I suspect plagiarism.

What can you tell me?” Or, “How can you explain it?” And I thought, hmm,
am I being rude or am I being more neutral?

R23: I would never bring up plagiarism or talk to them if I couldn’t find a

source where they got it from. I might … I’m trying to think. Usually it’s
something I find that’s clear. I would not want to bring it up unless I found
the source. I wouldn’t write, “Where did you get this? This looks like
plagiarism.” I would talk to them, but I wouldn’t want to bring up plagiarism
if I didn’t have to.

To summarize the findings related to detection: respondents reported being able to

identify plagiarism easily. Detection was reported to be more of an annoyance than
a violation, yet one that required some response, thereby provoking frustration or
uncertainty. However, plagiarism was not viewed as seriously as it was reported to
be among colleagues in other departments. What can also be gathered from these
responses is an effort not to upset the student, who is seen as struggling, not to
damage the teacher-student relationship, and not to report the student to higher
authorities, but to handle it with the student directly. These relational issues are
considered further in the next subsection.
 134 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

Teacher-Student Interactions Around Plagiarism

Though respondents reported primarily being frustrated, disappointed, or annoyed
when encountering copied portions in students’ texts, one situation did seem to
provoke the type of anger Robillard (2007) described: students’ denial when
confronted about plagiarism, leading to further investigation to prove the
plagiarism, as in R24 and R25:
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R24: This one Chinese guy I was furious at him. I knew he knew what he
was doing. And he was teaching other students in the class to do it too. He was
like the plagiarism coach for the other students who were failing the course
… The horrible thing about it was that he denied it. So then I had to go and
put it in Turnitin and show him, you know, the seven different sources of the
sentences that he had put on Blackboard claiming to be his own. And he
became really angry and was shouting at me in front of the whole class because
I didn’t meet with him alone. He scared me a little bit. And I was shouting,
“Look, there’s the evidence.” And I was showing him on my computer screen
that said from the New York Times and the date. And he would not back down.

R25: So I think sometimes it makes me mad when they try to deny it when
it’s pretty clear what they’ve done and they try to pretend it’s their own
writing.

However, for the most part, respondents reported that students owned up to
copying when questioned by their teacher, perhaps a testament to the thoughtful
and non-accusatory approach taken. The follow-up to noticing plagiarism was
exclusively between the teacher and student and used as an opportunity to teach
the students about citation with empathy for their situation as L2 writers and
learners of US academic literacy conventions. As seen in the following responses,
the attitude expressed is that ELLs’ plagiarism is not usually a deliberate act of
deceit, but, rather, part of the process of learning unfamiliar genres. Also seen in
these responses is that the interaction between teachers and students is more of a
private lesson than a confrontation between an accuser and an accused, as made
clear in R26 (“I haven’t really accused them”). Also notable is the care taken to
avoid embarrassing or upsetting the student, with references to the teacher being
“gentle” (R28) and “nice kid” (R27) to describe a student who removed
plagiarized text when asked to:

R26: Sometimes after I’ve read the paper and say, “See me after class.” And if
they don’t stay, I grab them and say, “I know you have another class, but
please stay because I need to talk to you about something. Were you using
an article on the Internet?” Because that’s what it usually is. Not something
that we’ve read or discussed. So I say, “I’m glad you’ve been interested
enough in this topic to read a little more about it. And certainly it has
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 135

expanded your ideas on the topic, but you really just cannot lift somebody
else’s statements.” SB: How do they typically react to that? “I guess I shouldn’t. I
won’t do it again.” But I mean I haven’t really accused them.

R27: And I said, “It doesn’t really sound like someone your age would say
this.” And I showed him certain things and I said, “Can you fix it up?” And
he did. It was more his voice. SB: Did you try to track it down? No. I just knew.
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And then when he redid it, it was more his voice. So he ended up doing
really well. Nice kid.

R28: I underline it and say … I’m more gentle. I say, “Please be careful to
use your own words. I think you may be using the words of the author that
you’re reading.” SB: Does that work? Usually. They know and they sometimes
apologize, “I was so tired. It was midnight and I just couldn’t think of a way
to say it.” And I say, “Put it in quotation marks. If you’re so tired and you can’t
say it in your own words, put quotation marks around it. You can even put
the page number. That way I’ll know you know what you’re doing.” They’re
really fuzzy about the whole issue: plagiarizing and when it’s ok to copy
something and how to copy something and when it’s not ok.

R29: I’ll usually ask the student to come out in the hall to have a conver-
sation and I’ll say, maybe I’ll write, “Your words?” Or maybe even underline
a few vocabulary items and a few sentence and say, “You know I read this
and this look like a professional writing piece. Did you, like, copy this from
somewhere?” And just about always the student will sort of admit it: “Well,
I did a little research and I used that research a little bit.” And I said, “You
need to do this over again. The writing assignments in this class you need to
write in your own words. If you ever quote you have to put it in quotation
marks. And that’s fine. But mostly I want you to write in your own words.”

R30: I know that getting mad at students just sets up an uncomfortable or

unproductive atmosphere so I try to make light of it by telling them that it’s
a serious issue. But not accusing them in an angry way cause it’s just not
gonna work. So you have to work together.

As seen in the responses above, respondents indicated a desire to preserve an

empathic connection with their students. Further, and interestingly in terms of
power relations, teacher-respondents did not seem to view it as their responsibility
to uphold the terms of the plagiarism policy, as the following responses indicate. In
fact these responses can be seen as examples of flouting the tacit feeling rule that
teachers should be indignant when discovering plagiarism:

R31: Also who is harmed by that? Because they’re learning. They’re learning
the system, they’re learning documentation. All these things come naturally
 136 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

to me because I write all the time. But the students are coming to this the
first time. There’s so much to process and understand.

R32: As soon as you use the word, all those policies, all those discourses
around cheating, lying, being a bad person. Even if you don’t say that to the
person, but if you use the word plagiarism, that’s drama. I can deal with
lateness much easier than I can with plagiarism because it’s been sanctioned,
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especially in the US context.

As I discussed in the previous section, one way to interpret R31 and R32 is that
ESL teachers are sensitive to the difficulties of acquiring academic literacy due to
their awareness of the challenges for their students of unfamiliar language and
writing conventions. This is consistent with Hyland’s (2001) finding that ESL
instructors may avoid charges of plagiarism due to their awareness of non-native
English speakers’ struggles to write in an additional language.
However, another way to interpret the data on teacher-student interactions is
that some ESL teachers may avoid accusing students of plagiarism as a way of
resisting the plagiarism policy’s construction of plagiarism as a crime and of
teachers as criminal detectives who must punish offending students. The
preference for one-on-one interaction seems to point to both of those interpre-
tations. And, as I’ll show in the next subsection, considerable thought was reported
to go into preventing plagiarism through pedagogical strategies, with varying
degrees of success.

Preventing Plagiarism
In this subsection, my exploration of emotion labor focuses on the struggles
teachers reported around preventing plagiarism. These data fell into two categories:
1) responses indicating that plagiarism could be prevented through pedagogical
activities and; 2) responses indicating that plagiarism was the wrong issue to focus
on, a distraction from more important concerns.

My Pedagogy Prevents Plagiarism

In these responses, teachers outlined activities that were not just intended to
prevent plagiarism, but that they also claimed were successful at preventing it.
These included breaking assignments down into steps, grounding assignments in
personal experience, and vetting students’ source material. However, despite claims
that these activities prevented plagiarism, these same teachers, later in their
interviews, offered details about incidents in which plagiarism occurred. An
example of this incongruity can be found in the following pair of responses. In
R33, the teacher outlines ways of preventing plagiarism; in R34, the same teacher
describes an incident of plagiarism:
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 137

R33: I try to make the assignments unique enough that it really would be
very difficult to plagiarize … Because based on their own learning and I’ve
seen so many pieces of the puzzle that there’s nothing. How could you? …
I just see all the little pieces. Then they put it all together to create the larger
paper. Then their first assignment was their language learning autobiography.
So again that’s really so personal. How can you plagiarize that? And all the
assignments in pretty much all the classes I teach have this unique part about
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them. You could not buy the paper. You couldn’t take it from anybody ‘cause
it’s coming from experience.

R34: I wrote in the margins like, “Where’d you get this? This doesn’t sound
like you.” And then it kind of just got dropped. I didn’t … by the time we
were … this last semester I overscheduled … we did too much and so at that
point it was like, ok we’re done with the (name of assignment), we gotta
move on to the (name of assignment) now. So if I had continued to work
with that student on the assignment, it would have been a bigger issue. But
it was kind of like, we’re done, no more drafts. Ok, we’re done. You might
not think this is your best version, but we’re over. We’re moving on. So that’s
what happened there.

The contradiction between the initial claim of the pedagogy being plagiarism-
proof and later discussion of a plagiarism incident might indicate that this teacher’s
identity as good teacher included successful plagiarism prevention, as it did for
Sunderland-Smith’s (2005) respondents. The concern about “poor academic
image” (p. 91) may have played a part in the initial response claiming that students
would not be able to plagiarize given the way assignments were structured. In fact,
this claim was offered by other interviewees, as seen in R35 and R36, who also
later offered examples of students who had plagiarized:

R35: So the way the assignment is structured takes away a lot of stress down
the road and I think that’s preventative. There are 6 or 7 steps down the road
to the final project. I see their work so much that it’s never: I assign, they
bring back the full paper. A lot of drafting, a lot of process and that’s also
preventative, instructional.

R36: I think when you ask them to hand in scaffolding steps, you know, give
me an outline, give me a list of sources. To have them break it into steps and
hand in steps along the way. To give them an assignment which is not that
difficult. I tell them choose a topic that’s interesting to you.

R35 and R36, and others like it in the data, also raise the question of whether
pedagogical strategies intended to prevent plagiarism might be an attempt to avoid
detection and confrontation, especially given the possibility that students might
deny having copied, leading to further emotion labor, as seen in the previous
 138 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

subsection and in Hyland’s (2001) research. They indicate a possible preference for
sidestepping potentially difficult one-on-one interactions with students, congruent
with Sunderland-Smith’s (2005) finding about avoiding the “often lengthy chase”
(p. 92) of following up on plagiarism.
On the other hand, respondents’ answers to questions about preventing
plagiarism might depend on the amount of plagiarism noticed: How much
plagiarism constitutes a problem? This issue is exemplified in R37, the response of
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a teacher who offered both a method for preventing plagiarism (“More images, less
text”) and a nuanced description of the emotion labor of trying to figure out how
much is acceptable:

R37: I actually do struggle with how much plagiarism to accept in some

things, like in a power point project. That’s kind of another battle. Cause I’m
always telling them, “More images, less text” so that reduces the amount of
plagiarism right there, especially at lower levels … I struggle with the idea
that students are so unfamiliar with the whole topic they can’t necessarily put
it in their own words. If it’s power point maybe I’ll accept some copy and
paste information, but I try to get them to change it to what they can say
themselves because it’s for a presentation.

R37 indicates an attempt to achieve balance between plagiarizing and “what they
can say for themselves.” This speaks to the role of copying in learning to write in
additional languages, discussed in the scholarly literature. I return to that theme in
the conclusion of this chapter.

Plagiarism Distracts from More Important Issues

While there were only two responses related to plagiarism-as-distraction, both
were very thoughtful and therefore helpful to the current discussion. In R38, the
interviewee reports emotion labor related to the frustration that plagiarism policies
send students the wrong message. Even if these policies are successful in signaling
to students that they should cite sources, or as the respondent puts it “jumping
through these citation and reference hoops,” they do nothing to support writing
critically. In fact, according to R38, the exclusive focus on plagiarism by adminis-
trators may actually encourage cut-and-paste because as long as students use
quotation marks and cite their sources, they are compliant with the policy. This
teacher expressed the belief that administrators should instead support more
important literacy issues, such as critical thinking:

R38: So I mean people talk about plagiarism and certainly we’re getting
reminders of this plagiarism paragraph in the syllabus and what have you. I
don’t think that’s the issue so much, you know. I feel most students are
actually doing it. You tell them they have to cite and they cite. That’s not the
issue. I don’t feel I have a lot of plagiarism issues. I don’t think it’s the issue
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 139

so much. … It’s like they’re going through the motions and doing what
they’re told to do, cite this and cite that. But they don’t know necessarily why
they’re doing it. And I think that’s a problem. And if that were addressed,
why, and also what could be addressed. That to write a paper should also be
your own thoughts and your own reflections and not just jumping through
these citation hoops and reference hoops. And I even feel the administration
is just trying to cover their bases about plagiarism: Don’t plagiarize. There
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seems to be even among the administration a lack of real interest.

R39 has a slightly different focus while also addressing the issue of plagiarism-as-
distraction. Here the interviewee addresses students directly with some
exasperation, saying, in effect, if they plagiarize they’re not going to learn and the
teacher will be in the distasteful and distracting position of enforcer (“I haven’t
been able to teach because I’ve been looking for plagiarism and I have to do some
kind of sanction”). While the addressee at the beginning of this response is the
plagiarizing student, one can sense the power of the plagiarism policy, thrusting the
teacher and students into roles that are unrelated to the true purpose of their
interaction: improving academic writing. Also of interest is the embodied teacher
this interviewee enacts by refusing the accuser/accused binary, reestablishing a
preferred role of teacher as co-learner (“We’re here to learn something together”):

R39: Why plagiarize if you’re here to learn to write and improve your
writing? It’s not going to help you out; it’s not going to help me out. It’s just
gonna make it worse for us cause you haven’t learned how to write well. And
I haven’t been able to teach because I’ve been looking for plagiarism and I
have to do some kind of sanction. I tell them: What’s the point of plagia-
rizing if you’re here to learn how to write. Because it’s only going to make
it harder for both of us. So you talk about yourself too. This is partly who I
am. I do that in most classes where I position myself as a teacher, as a person
who’s here to … You come up with these metaphors. We’re here to learn
something together. I’m not here necessarily just to give you information.
I’m more than just a guide. Because a guide seems too much on the side. I’m
definitely more central to your learning than someone who’s just gonna walk
you through a museum. But I see tests, I see writing, I see all these things as
part of your learning process. I don’t see them as final products. So to
plagiarize as if yours is done doesn’t help you learn.

R38 and R39 express opposition to the terms of the plagiarism policy. The first
rejects the premise of the policy that citation is the central issue, claiming instead
that this focus encourages poor habits by emphasizing the nuts and bolts of writing
rather than the intellectual work academic writing calls for. The second refuses the
role of enforcer of the plagiarism policy and instead stakes out a more embodied
role, highlighting the relational aspects of teaching and learning (Robillard 2007).
 140 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

Causes of Plagiarism
My data revealed four overlapping discourses related to reasons interviewees gave
when asked about the causes of plagiarism: discourse of overextension, discourse of
linguistic insecurity, discourse of technology, and discourse of cultural difference.
Briefly, the discourse of overextension attributes plagiarism to students running out
of time to do an assignment due to other commitments. The discourse of linguistic
insecurity is grounded in the assumption that non-native speaking students
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plagiarize because they lack confidence that the language they’ve acquired is
adequate to fulfill the writing assignment. The discourse of technology highlights
the ease with which students can plagiarize from the Internet using cut-and-paste.
The discourse of cultural difference is similar to Horner’s (2008) archipelago
approach: students plagiarize because it is permitted in the educational systems in
which they began their schooling in L1.
Because the first three discourses are fairly straightforward, I offer examples
next without commentary. The discourse of cultural difference, on the other
hand, is more complex and therefore offered later with commentary, including
ways in which it overlapped with the other discourses in, at times, contradictory
ways.

Discourse of Overextension
R40: Almost all the cases I can think of is because students were writing
their papers the night before they were due and they were just … I mean it’s
not lazy. It’s just they didn’t … you could say they were disorganized I guess
and they just needed to get it done quickly.

R41: Cut corners, maybe save time, they’re overworked. I mean some of
them have a lot on their plates.

R42: They’re busy, they’re tired, they don’t have the words, they want to
finish the assignment. Maybe that’s all.

R43: I think when students are under pressure, it’s so easy. I mean we have
so many examples of people in real life who are very capable: Martin Luther
King; Doris Kearns Goodwin. So under pressure people will do what they
have to do.

Discourse of Linguistic Insecurity

R44: I think it happens because students don’t feel confident that they can
express their thoughts well enough. Let me make a full stop there. They can’t
express their thoughts well enough.
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 141

R45: Maybe think they can take a sentence or two and weave it in so it’s just
the confidence and desire to have something that looks correct. They’ve
been told enough times that what they wrote didn’t make sense … It’s not
that they were lazy or didn’t have the right answer. They just didn’t trust
their own writing.

R46: I think underneath it all they’re really insecure about their writing and
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they think anyone’s writing is better than theirs. And they’d rather copy and
risk getting in trouble than failing.

Discourse of Technology
R47: It’s the modern world where copying and pasting is so easy.

R48: I think that accessibility to technology, you can go on the Internet and
just grab anything. And you can also buy papers. They know about these
things. I think that’s one reason plagiarism happens.

R49: I know some people don’t think plagiarism applies to them because
they just looked up medical marijuana on the Internet and there was so
much information that they just sort of forgot where the information came
from.

Discourse of Cultural Difference

Most interesting to me was the way the discourse of cultural difference popped up
unexpectedly in the midst or at the end of a response grounded in one of the three
discourses just discussed. The overlap is a striking example of how discourses
circulate and land in utterances in sometimes surprising ways. R50 illustrates this
phenomenon. It begins by poking fun at the cultural explanation for plagiarism
and characterizing it as “stereotypical remarks.” However, R50 continues by
validating the discourse of cultural difference with a personal anecdote about
visiting China and being shown a temple the changes to which were unattributed
by the tour guide, concluding that “that kind of individual credit was not part of
Chinese culture.” Nonetheless, the response continues with two different
explanations for plagiarism: a desire to please the teacher and a fear of getting a bad
grade. It ends with the respondent saying, “That’s what you hear.” And though it’s
not clear which explanation “that’s” refers to: the cultural one, the teacher-pleasing
one, the failing-grade one, or all three, there’s a sense in this response of a lack of
strong conviction about any of them:

R50: I mean the anecdote that seems to be floating around is that, number
one: they don’t know. That’s what you hear, especially the Chinese students
don’t know because copyright is not a concept that’s a concern in Chinese
 142 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

culture? You hear these stereotypical remarks a lot. I hear that all the time:
“Oh you have to understand if they don’t cite maybe it’s maybe because
they’re from China. They don’t know better because the Chinese copy
everything without concern for copyright anyway.” And maybe there’s
something to it because when I went to China there was even a tour of an
old temple and it had been renovated so much that it was beyond not
recognition but … several people had done this and that to it. If you saw a
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church being changed in France or Germany and you had a tour they would
tell you the original architect and this tower was built by so and so a hundred
years later. They would know every single person who ever touched up or
created in the first place one of the elements. But in that tour in China even
the tour guide who was of course a tour guide for westerners mentioned that
this had been renovated, but nobody wrote down who built it in the first
place or who renovated it because it was not part of … that kind of individual
credit was not part of Chinese culture. So that kind of thing is always
mentioned it seems when it comes to Chinese plagiarizing. It seems they
don’t know that something is wrong. And of course the other thing we always
hear they want to please the teacher. Or maybe out of fear of getting a bad
grade. They want to hand something in that’s correct. So it’s better to copy
something that’s correct than something incorrect. That’s what you hear.

R51 echoes R50 in the use of “as we’ve heard,” suggesting that the respondent
does not hold the cultural explanation very resolutely, but simply reported what
others said or wrote about it, acknowledging the discourse as one that circulates in
institutions and publications, but may not satisfy as a useful concept. This
hypothesis is borne out by the fact that after offering a cultural-difference
explanation, the respondent offers, “the utilitarian purpose” of “just trying to get it
done”:

R51: As we’ve heard from Chinese culture, Asian cultures or Russian which
is also Asian … from other cultures it is expected that you would rely on the
expertise and knowledge of experts. To put out information as your own
when you’re the student is in some ways disrespectful. And there’s also the
utilitarian purposes as well. They’re just trying to get it done. They don’t
really understand all of the concepts so they locate key words. They think ok
this more or less answers the question and copy it. So they don’t really
understand the whole concept.

Similar to R50 and R51, in the following responses the discourse of cultural
difference emerged seemingly without strong conviction. In R52 it is offered as a
partial explanation (“That might be part of it”). In R53 the cultural-difference
explanation is presented as hearsay (“we always say they don’t know any better”)
yet that explanation is following immediately by an instance of overextension
discourse (“I need to get the assignment done and then just out of desperation”):
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 143

R52: Well, you know one aspect of this whole situation I think some
students come from educational systems where they’re expected to
memorize stuff and maybe it might be acceptable to just kind of parrot back
something that they’ve read. They might not feel that they should be using
their own language. They to some extent … they may feel that it’s ok to be
using somebody else’s language and it’s not ok to be using their own
language. That might be a part of it.
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R53: Well I guess we always say that they don’t know any better, like
culturally it’s ok. That’s one thing. Second maybe there is stress, like I need
to get the assignment done and then just out of desperation perhaps maybe
looking for something.

The responses in this subsection seem to reflect the debate about the role of culture
in the L2 composition literature, reviewed earlier in this chapter. They indicate that
more nuanced understandings of the role of culture are required, especially how
culture interacts with other aspects of writing. This is particularly true in my
research context, CUNY, the majority of whose NNES students migrated to the
US many years prior to college and therefore received much of their education in
the US rather than in their country of origin. These students’ writing is therefore
informed by an amalgam of cultural influences: native country, interim countries
in which they might have settled prior to migrating, ethnic enclaves in the US,
New York City public schools, and so on. To attribute their copying from sources
to a unitary “native” culture that sanctions plagiarism belies the complexity of their
experience as English language learners, including their placement in overcrowded
high schools where their writing may have received little attention, as discussed in
R58. This response articulates a strong counterdiscourse to cultural difference,
proclaiming that plagiarism cannot be attributed to “some kind of cross-cultural
bullshit … like some people like to say”:

R58: I mean 9 times out of 10 they know what they’re doing is wrong, but
they don’t have whatever they need to have to able to do it right. It’s not
some kind of cross-cultural bullshit about how in other countries you can
copy whatever you want, like some people like to say. Cause it happens across
cultures. It’s not a cultural thing. I think it’s possible that they were in high
schools in Brooklyn where the teachers didn’t read what they wrote. They
just wrote a bunch of words on the page and the teacher would put a check
mark on it. So this is the first time anyone has read what they wrote and
noticed they were plagiarizing. It could be that.

The emotion labor surrounding causes of plagiarism seemed to revolve around a

lack of firm belief in any one reason for why students copy from source material.
That is, I’m suggesting that my respondents’ affective struggle revolved in part
around the difficulty of attributing the copying to any single cause.
 144 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

However, it is also important to note that none of the responses attributed the cause
to academic dishonesty as the plagiarism policy does. Instead, emotion labor was driven
more by questions than by definitive answers about the causes: Do students
plagiarize because they are overextended and run out of time to do the
assignment? Do they copy from source material because they are insecure about
their linguistic abilities? Are they over-reliant on technology with its ease of cutting
and pasting? Do they come from educational systems that encourage
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memorization and copying? Which of these issues, if any, play a role and how, if at
all, do they interact?
Given that the teachers I interviewed offered more than one possible cause for
student copying from source texts it might be useful to pose these questions to
students at the beginning of the term as a way of gauging their thinking on the
issue. I will discuss that strategy in the concluding chapter where I offer
implications for instruction.

Conclusion
I began this chapter by reproducing part of the CUNY policy on “academic
dishonesty.” My aim was to situate the literature I reviewed and the data I analyzed
later in the chapter in the context of the punitive and legalistic discourse of
plagiarism in academic settings. In doing so, I highlighted the lens I used in
selecting the scholarly literature to review, formulating the questions to pose to my
respondents, and analyzing the data. Central to that analysis was the emotion labor
arising from conflicts between how the policy constructs plagiarism and teachers’
description of their experience dealing with instances in which students copied
from source material. This included tension between the policy’s tacit feeling rules
of hypervigilance and indignation and teachers’ reported feelings.
My findings were grouped into four areas: 1) noticing and pursuing suspicions
of plagiarism; 2) teacher-student interactions around plagiarism; 3) preventing
plagiarism; and 4) causes of plagiarism.
In terms of noticing plagiarism, respondents reported the ease of detection,
given differences between the copied language and students’ customary ways of
writing. From a hopeful perspective, this finding speaks to the strong commitment
among postsecondary ESL teachers in CUNY to assigning writing regularly,
reading it, and writing comments. Given the regularity with which these teachers
reported reading and commenting on their students’ writing, it is not surprising
that plagiarized language would be easily recognized.
However, despite the ease of detecting copied language, some respondents
reported emotion labor around what to do with their discovery. As reported in R9,
“You see it and you know you have to do something about it … You just don’t
know what to do. I think you’re upset because you don’t know what to do.” Not
knowing what to do seemed related to tension between the mandate to confront
plagiarizers, as if plagiarism were an unambiguous form of academic dishonesty,
and teachers’ more nuanced understanding of the challenges for non-native
 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor 145

speaking students of writing in academic English, especially open-admissions

students.
Thus, when it came to teacher-student interactions around plagiarism,
respondents reported handling the situation privately through written comments,
as Hyland (2001) found, or through face-to-face discussion. Care was given not to
accuse students of plagiarism and risk evoking “all those policies, all those
discourses around cheating, lying, being a bad person,” as one respondent put it.
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Rather the interactions were seen as opportunities to teach citation and to warn
students that other teachers might be less understanding.
However, there was one situation that provoked anger: when students denied
that they had plagiarized. The anger seemed related to having to pursue the “often
lengthy chase” (Sunderland-Smith 2005, p. 92) of proving the plagiarism to the
student, resulting in additional expenditure of the teacher’s time and emotional
energy. Students’ denial of plagiarism may also provoke anger because it seems to
question or disregard the teacher’s professionalism as “as a writing expert who can
and will distinguish between authentic and inauthentic texts” (Robillard 2007, p.
18).
Nonetheless, outside of the situation of students denying their plagiarism, little
anger was reported by participants. Of course, it’s possible that anger was under-
reported because of my methodology. By choosing to interview the respondents
rather than asking them to do think-aloud protocols, I was unable to access the
emotions they experienced while reading student papers, as Hyland did (2001).
Still, I think it’s accurate to say that my respondents have empathy for the
challenges of writing in additional languages and are careful not to confront
students or report their plagiarism to authorities, both with the aim of preserving
a compassionate relationship and of encouraging their students to persevere in their
pursuit of a college degree, despite the obvious challenges.
As to causes attributed to plagiarism, the data revealed four overlapping
discourses: discourse of overextension, discourse of linguistic insecurity, discourse
of technology, and discourse of cultural difference. While the first three were fairly
straightforward, the discourse of cultural difference was more complicated, at times
intersecting with the others in ambiguous ways. Above all, however, it appeared to
me that when cultural difference was offered as an explanation, it was done
without strong conviction, but instead reported with the caveat “That’s what you
hear” or “As we’ve heard.”
Despite a lack of attribution of plagiarism to cultural difference, one response
(R59) offered about the causes of plagiarism included an observation about
Bangladeshi students that could be instructive in considering the implications of
my research. In particular, it presents an opportunity to rethink current restrictions
against memorization and/or copying in ELT in the interest of taking a
postmodern approach:

R59: We have a lot of students from Bangladesh who used to have the testing
method where they had to memorize a passage and then write it down on
 146 Plagiarism and Emotion Labor

the test. Their measure of whether they did their work was being able to
reproduce it. And I talk about that and say this is different. You use your own
words, etc. … So I try to find out … I try to understand why they’re plagia-
rizing.

An alternative to the exhortation to “use your own words” might be to find ways
to incorporate memorization and reproduction in writing pedagogy. This tradition
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could intersect in exciting ways with the pedagogy described by Goldsmith (2011a,
2011b). Furthermore, as Phan Le Ha (2006, 2009) proposed, greater receptivity to
international students’ familiar discourse practices might prompt novel contri-
butions to the usual academic conventions they are expected to master in
English-medium universities. Inviting a blend of styles could invigorate academic
writing in ways discussed by those who advocate for translingual writing, such as
Canagarajah (2013) and Horner et al. (2011).

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 7
ATTENDANCE AND EMOTION LABOR
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The body is key here: it generates and carries much more meaning than we
have tended to see.
(Probyn 2004, p. 331)

… schools, much like churches, act as moral leaders, monitoring and

repressing the body’s participation.
(Darder 2012, p. 5)

This chapter takes up what might initially seem pedestrian topics: student lateness
and absence. However, though perhaps considered a minor aspect of pedagogy,
attendance is explored as a source of teachers’ emotion labor involving the presence
or absence of bodies in classrooms.
My interest in attendance stems from finding myself alternatively annoyed and
concerned when students missed or were late for class. I therefore wanted to
explore the issue more deeply from the perspective of institutional regulation of
attendance, including implicit feeling rules, and effects of enforcement or non-
enforcement on teacher/student interactions. More importantly, though, I sought
to address questions about bodies in classrooms: How might the presence of
teachers’ and students’ bodies in classrooms be theorized? What might absence
mean in this context and what is its relationship to teachers’ emotion labor?
Whereas literacy testing and plagiarism are regulated in CUNY by uniform
cross-university policies, when it comes to absence and lateness, policies vary.
Generally speaking, though, there is an attendance policy for students enrolled in
developmental and ESL courses: they are considered to have withdrawn from a
course when missing more than 15 percent of it. English language teachers, then,
are expected to monitor and record student attendance and exclude students who
accumulate an excessive number of absences from retesting on the CUNY literacy
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 149

tests. EL teachers’ varying responses to this mandate are discussed further in the
data analysis section of the chapter.
The interview questions I posed centered on effects of attendance monitoring
and enforcement on teacher/student interactions and relationships. As with high-
stakes literacy testing, plagiarism, and responding to writing, I aimed to discover
respondents’ reactions to whatever formal or informal rules circulate regarding
lateness and absence, how they reported feeling when their students violate those
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rules, and how they communicate their feelings about presence and absence to
students. Above all, I sought to discover how students’ absent bodies interacted
with teachers’ and students’ present bodies and what, if any, emotion labor was
produced in these interactions.
The interview questions were: 1) Do you have a policy regarding lateness in
your classes? 2) If so, how do you enforce that policy? 3) How do you feel when
students are late? 4) How do you communicate to them how you feel about their
lateness? 5) Do you have a policy regarding absence? 6) If so, how do you enforce
that policy? 7) How do you feel when students are absent? 8) How do you
communicate how you feel? The data, discussed later in the chapter, fell into three
categories: attendance policies, materialities of attendance monitoring, and
embodied classroom absence and presence.
The discourses uncovered in the part of the interviews related to attendance
were: discourse of resistance, discourse of relationality, discourse of student self-
regulation, discourse of emotional in-filling, discourse of teacher’s embodied
performance, and discourse of students’ embodied performance. Each of these is
discussed in detail in the data analysis section.
The literature review for this chapter, presented next, is in three parts: 1)
regulation of attendance, subdivided into teachers as managers and students as self-
managers; 2) theorizing bodies in classrooms, subdivided into acknowledging the
presence of teachers’ bodies and significance of students’ absent bodies; and 3)
materialities of absence, focused on technologies of attendance monitoring.
Mirroring the organization of Chapters 4 through 6, this one begins with the
literature review followed by analysis of the interview data.

Related Literature

Regulation of Attendance: Teachers as Managers and Students as

Self-Managers
The impact of student absence on teachers’ emotion labor has not yet attracted
scholarly attention. On the other hand, there has been considerable research
interest in “classroom management,” focused mainly on how teachers achieve what
are deemed to be well-functioning classrooms, those in which students behave in
sanctioned ways and perform according to specific guidelines. One subset of this
research, referred to variably as social and emotional competence (SEC); social and
emotional learning (SEL); and social and emotional aspects of learning (SEAL);
 150 Attendance and Emotion Labor

concerns the cultivation of teachers’ and students’ so-called social and emotional
skills, viewed as resources that can bring about sanctioned behavior in students.
However, though “social” is referenced in these skills-based pedagogies, the social
context and its impact on school behavior and relationships are, for the most part,
ignored.
I am including research on teachers’ and students’ social and emotional skills in
the literature review to offer a contrast to the poststructural and embodied
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approach I take toward attendance and emotions. This is an important contrast

because in SEC, SEL, and SEAL the aim is to cultivate “social” and “emotional”
skills toward appropriate behavior, which is claimed to be achieved in part through
teachers’ and students’ emotion management. In this literature, to be emotionally
literate, as a teacher or student, is to be emotionally-appropriate, according to pre-
determined norms, such as taming strong emotions and exhibiting a calm
demeanor. This is clearly not the approach I take to emotion labor.
Given the emphasis on self-control and emotion management in SEC, SEL, and
SEAL programs, it can be said that neoliberal ideology, and its discourses of “self-
actualization,” (Chun 2009, p. 112) drive their pedagogies. Classroom conflicts are
to be resolved not through collective airing of legitimate grievances or the
expression of strong emotions, such as anger and fear, but, rather, by tempering
those types of emotions, through techniques such as self-talk. To give some
historical perspective on these approaches, I begin this section with Tavares’s (1996)
discussion of how classroom management took hold as a dominant construct in
education.
Tavares (1996) attributed current use of the term “management” in education
to an ideological and historical shift in the twentieth century. Before that shift,
teachers were authorized to control students’ bodies through corporal punishment.
Power over students was centralized, mainly in religious institutions, and explicit,
with the use of tangible objects, such as rods, to inflict physical punishment.
Beginning in the twentieth century in industrialized countries, teachers were
tasked with managing student behavior, rather than overtly punishing what was
considered misbehavior. Classroom management was governed by discursive
practices that diffused and masked power. Specifically, the rise of psychological
sciences made their discourses available to education, according to Tavares (1996).
Psychological discourses offered what were considered “objective attributes” (p.
196) of good and bad student behavior, ones that could be measured. Teachers
became classroom managers who monitored student behavior, armed with
“models, norms, and procedures” (p. 198) rather than rods. Classroom management,
or enforcement of pre-determined behavioral norms, appeared “innocent of
power-related interests” (p. 197).
The use of models, norms, and procedures to monitor and codify student
behavior has spawned extensive research on classroom management. For the last 20
or so years, that research has focused largely on cultivating teacher and student
social and emotional skills to facilitate emotion management through SEC, SEL,
and SEAL. The literature on these programs can be subdivided into two types:
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 151

those focused on teachers as managers of student behavior and those focused on

students as self-managers. Next, I will briefly discuss studies from each of these
categories. Though attendance is not considered as a separate issue in this literature,
my aim in including some examples is to demonstrate the erasure of social context,
power, and bodies in the classroom-management literature that attends to
emotions. In contrast, later in the literature review I will discuss research
connecting bodies in classrooms and teachers’ emotions in their social contexts.
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Teachers as Classroom Managers: Cultivating Social and Emotional

Literacy
When teachers lack the resources to effectively manage the social and
emotional challenges within the particular context of their school and
classroom, children show lower levels of on-task behavior and performance.
(Jennings and Greenberg 2009, p. 492)

One impetus for US research on teachers as classroom managers is an increase in

their attrition after only a few years on the job. Due to this increase, ways to prevent
burnout and attrition are sought. Most striking about this research is its silence
about the possible role of unfavorable working conditions, such as poor pay, large
class size and test-driven curricula. The focus instead is on emotional skills teachers
should possess or acquire. The guiding assumption is that teachers quit their jobs
because they lack the emotional resources to manage their students in ways that
would lead to cooperative classroom behavior and improved academic
achievement. In addition to ignoring working conditions, the socio-emotional
skills literature tends to neglect wider social conditions that might contribute to
students’ and teachers’ despair, particularly in impoverished urban neighborhoods.
Jennings and Greenberg (2009) laid out the following “broad educational
agenda” (p. 491) in their review of research on the “prosocial classroom,” one
focused on promoting teachers’ SEC. While conceding that their agenda was a “tall
order” (ibid.), they nonetheless outlined the following responsibilities of a good
classroom manager, one suggesting a vast range of extra-curricular roles teachers
should play, including what might be labeled parent, physician, therapist, police
officer, spiritual leader, boss, and politician:

In addition to promoting students’ academic achievement, this agenda

focuses on helping students interact in socially-skilled and respectful ways;
practice positive, safe, and healthy behaviors; contribute ethically and
responsibly in their peer group, family, school, and community; and possess
basic competencies, work habits, and values as a foundation for meaningful
employment and engaged citizenship (p. 491).

Further delineating their comprehensive model of teachers’ SEC, Jennings and

Greenberg (2009) broke it down into five emotional, cognitive, and behavioral
 152 Attendance and Emotion Labor

competencies: self-awareness, social awareness, responsible decision making, self-

management, and relationship management (p. 494). It is interesting to note that as
wide-ranging as these competencies are, none is related to areas typically associated
with teaching: expertise in pedagogy and content knowledge. Indeed, management
eclipses teaching in the SEC model.
As to Jennings and Greenberg’s (2009) review of the research on “effective
classroom management skills” (p. 506), the authors conceded that though there is
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much hypothesizing about a correlation between classrooms that are conducive to

learning and teachers’ and students’ self-regulation, there is little empirical support
for this hypothesis. Yet, despite the lack of evidence, the authors make this
unsupported claim: “Teachers high in SEC know how to build strong and
supportive relationships through mutual understanding and cooperation and can
effectively negotiate solutions to conflict situations” (p. 507). Considering the
magnitude of social problems reflected in contemporary US classrooms as well as
accountability demands imposed on teachers through the increased use of high-
stakes testing, discussed in Chapter 4, these expectations are remarkably demanding,
if not completely unrealistic, particularly given teachers’ low pay and social status.
As I mentioned before, in the teacher-as-manager literature, the wider context
is ignored in favor of attention to how teachers and students might be taught to
control their strong emotions. The latter group is the focus of the next section.

Students as Self-Regulators: Social and Emotional Learning

Students who appraise themselves and their abilities realistically (self-
awareness), regulate their feelings and behaviors appropriately
(self-management), interpret social cues accurately (social awareness), resolve
interpersonal conflicts effectively (relationship skills), and make good
decisions about daily challenges (responsible decision making) are headed on
a pathway toward success in school and later life.
(Payton et al. 2008, p. 5)

Payton et al. (2008) offered a meta-analysis of studies of 317 SEL programs in the
US. Their rationale for the analysis was an increase in US students who are
“chronically disengaged from school,” especially as they progress from middle to
high school. They furthermore claimed that about “30% of high school students
participate in or experience multiple high-risk behaviors (e.g., substance use, sex,
violence, depression, attempted suicide) that interfere with school performance and
jeopardize their potential for life success” (p. 3).
Along with pathologizing children, by locating social and school dysfunction
with them, the SEL literature seeks to modify students’ demeanor, attitudes and
behaviors. Children are trained to manage their emotions to avoid behavior that
adults might find unacceptable and distressing. For example, Payton et al. (2008),
outlined an ambitious agenda of SEL competencies, including children recognizing
and managing their emotions so as to be able to “calm themselves when angry,
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 153

initiate friendships and resolve conflicts respectfully, make ethical and safe choices,
and contribute constructively to their community” (p. 4). Echoing Jennings and
Greenberg’s (2008) broad agenda for teachers, Payton et al.’s (2008) proposed skill
set lays tremendous responsibility at the feet of students who are charged with
regulating not just their emotions, but also their social interactions, regardless of the
level of stress in their lives, due to various types of social dysfunction they
encounter in their daily lives. In addition, the list of competencies assumes that SEL
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is a universal good and therefore appropriate for all cultures and social classes.
This universalizing tendency can be seen in the quote that opens this section.
The use of realistically, appropriately, accurately, and effectively suggests a single standard
of behavior and achievement that can be applied to any sociocultural context. How
that standard might be determined is not discussed. Instead, it is assumed that
training in SEL will “lead to improved adjustment and academic performance as
reflected in more positive social behaviors, fewer conduct problems, less emotional
distress, and better grades and achievement test scores” (ibid., p. 5). To support these
grandiose claims, the authors reported that the results of their meta-analysis
indicated “strong and consistent support for the value of SEL programs” (pp. 5–6).
Along the same lines of targeting students as the source of school dysfunction,
Weare (2010) offered as a rationale for her strong support of SEAL in UK schools
that 25 percent of children and young people have an “identifiable mental health
problem” (p. 6). She further narrowed the target to boys: “Anti-social behavior is
the most common mental health problem seen by the health services, affecting
more than five percent (particularly boys)” (ibid). Weare (2010), furthermore,
claimed that “the UK ranked at the bottom of the league” when it came to
“various aspects of the well-being of children” (ibid). Given the complexity and
racialized climate of the UK postcolonial school context (Rampton 2011), this
ranking is not surprising. Left out of that portrait, however, is the sociopolitical
context that could explain it. Instead, children are seen as the problem and
therefore in need of prosocial training.

Critique of Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning

… staff across the institutions were highly committed to the SEAL agenda,
believing troublesome behavior was best tackled by helping young people to
better recognise and handle their emotions. However, as our research
demonstrates, such practices and pedagogy worked to draw attention away
from the enduring gendered, racialised and classed dynamics structuring
institutional workings, while denying teachers and other school staff the
opportunity to reflect critically on their everyday practices and assumption.
(Gillies 2012, pp. 20–21)

One exception to the largely empirical research on classroom management is

Gillies’s (2011) two-year ethnography in three UK secondary schools that had
adopted a SEAL approach. Gillies (2011, 2012) and her co-researcher, Robinson
 154 Attendance and Emotion Labor

(Gillies and Robinson 2010) sought to test claims made by empirical researchers
about the benefits of SEAL by taking the school and wider social contexts into
account in a longer-term study. Research methods included participant
observation of whole-class and group activities, and interviews with students,
parents, teachers, and other school staff members. The student participants were
from a range of ethnic backgrounds, reflecting the diversity of contemporary UK
postcolonial society, including African, Caribbean, Eastern European, and Southeast
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Asian.
Gillies (2012) attributed teachers’ enthusiastic endorsement of SEAL to
widespread alarm about anti-social behavior among young people despite evidence
of a national decrease. Persistent media profiles of “unruly pupils disrespecting
authority” (p. 17) had fueled public appetite for educational programs that would
domesticate the putatively wild students, especially students of color and partic-
ularly boys, as mentioned earlier in regards to Weare (2010). SEAL was the perfect
vehicle to calm public fears with its implicit goal of taming feared Others while
being couched in progressive language. SEAL’s discourse of developmental
psychology voiced concern for the welfare of school children while masking its
subtext of social control of those at the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy.
Skeptical of SEAL’s seemingly progressive discourse, Gillies (2012) instead found it
individualistic and therefore unlikely to produce meaningful reform. She claimed
that it foregrounded “the personal determinants of educational exclusion at the
expense of broader social and structural relations” (p. 20).
This is not to say that the schools where Gillies conducted her ethnography
were problem-free. Given their location in impoverished urban areas, teenage knife
crime was prevalent. In fact, two student participants had been hospitalized with
knife wounds and acquaintances of three participants had died. Gang activity
prompted students, especially those traveling long distances to school, to commute
in groups. Yet, as teenagers of color convening in groups, they were often harassed
by the police.
Gillies (2011) found that, despite SEAL’s rhetoric of emotional literacy, “the
fraught and emotionally demanding environment of daily school life was at times
striking” (p. 190). Beyond the usual frustrations of classroom life, Gillies (2011) was
surprised by the extent to which “antagonism bubbled up under the surface” (ibid).
Finding teachers to be overwhelmed sometimes to the point of “near violence”
(ibid), Gillies (2011) began to question the “calm emotionally flat ideal” (p. 191)
promoted by SEAL. She hypothesized that it not only belied emotional
complexities of teaching, but also denied the role of passion as a motivator for
teachers, a point I return to in the literature review section on teachers’ bodies.
Gillies (2011) findings fly in the face of a central SEAL tenet: strong emotions
stymie rather than promote good teaching. To the contrary, teachers in her study
revealed an intense emotional bond to their work, one that ran counter to the
emotional literacy mandate to control emotions to achieve better classroom
management. I discuss this point further in the data analysis where respondents’
strong emotions about attendance are explored.
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 155

As to students, Gillies (2011) found that their strong emotions were met with
disapproval or sanctions, guided by SEAL’s “implicit and explicit ideals that are
racialized, classed and gendered” (p. 191). Operating within a normative framework
of white middle-class values, teachers called out or punished students for exhibiting
passion, carrying out what I would call emotional censorship. Furthermore, this
framework encouraged teachers to label students as having conditions they were
unqualified to diagnose. For example, one teacher interviewed for the study
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characterized a student, Harry, as having both autism and ADHD though he had
never been diagnosed with either of these conditions by a qualified professional.
From Gillies’s (2012) perspective, Harry’s behavioral problems might have been
attributable to the homophobia he experienced as a “‘camp’ boy interested in
cheerleading” (p. 24) rather than to a disorder. Yet, rather than addressing sexual
bullying, the school sent Harry to a Behavioral Support Unit where his purported
social and emotional deficits could be addressed.
Unofficial diagnoses were often racialized, according to Gillies (2011).
Behaviors such as fighting, throwing objects, and swearing were attributed to
problems of anger management, especially among black teenage boys who were
taught to stay calm. However, despite anger management training, “aggressive
acting out” (p. 196) persisted. In other words, SEAL didn’t work when it came to
reducing anger perhaps because it failed to address “deeper and more positive
meanings associated with being an angry person” (ibid.) in the students’ peer
relations, such as self-possession and self-protection.
Viewed in comparison to glowing assessments of emotional literacy in the
empirical studies discussed earlier in the chapter, Gillies (2011) findings are both
sobering for SEAL, and similar programs, and encouraging from a more humane
and critical perspective. Overall, she found that contrary to SEAL’s aim for an
emotionally-neutral school, “conflict and rows were central to everyday
interactions” (p. 199). Yet, school personnel lacked the training and finesse to
distinguish play fights and more serious conflict, leading to further labeling and
ostracization.
On a more encouraging front, she found that while the participating schools
stigmatized students who did not overtly regulate their emotions, interviews with
students and parents revealed emotional skills not apparent in the school context,
including empathy for and devotion to relatives and community members. Given
Gillies (2012) finding of “structural discrimination and institutional racism” (p. 30)
embedded in SEAL, her call for research in which “power dynamics, relational
struggle, loyalty, and passion” Gillies 2011, p. 201) are taken into account is partic-
ularly welcome. These aspects of teaching and learning issues are taken up next in
the review of bodies in classroom literature.

Theorizing Bodies in Classrooms

It is precisely because absence is rooted in processual corporality that absence
can unfold such disturbing power. Those who experience something as
 156 Attendance and Emotion Labor

absent have to fill the void that they experience with their own emotions,
they have to bridge the emptiness that threatens their established
expectations and practices.
(Frers 2013, p. 431)

My aim in discussing teachers’ and students’ bodies is to draw attention to

attendance as embodied whether students are present or absent. When they are
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absent, their non-attending bodies are noticed by teachers, who may be tasked with
recording or sanctioning absence while experiencing a variety of conflicting
emotions. Though the scholarly literature on bodies in classrooms does not specif-
ically interrogate attendance, embodiment is useful to the present discussion
because of its attention to emotions, or affect from a Deleuzian perspective. By
bringing in feminist scholarship on teachers’ bodies in classrooms, in the next
subsection, and cultural geography’s discussion of the significance of absence in a
variety of spaces in the following subsection, I hope to generate further interest in
the relationship between teachers’ emotion labor and attendance.

Acknowledging the Presence of Teachers’ Bodies

There remains a reluctance to foreground the teacher’s role and as such the
teacher’s body is equally marginalized. This is not only evident in the less
interventionist style of teaching that typifies progressivism but in the way in
which the classroom is organized. … [T]he teacher no longer possesses a
central presence within the classroom; rather they function more as a roving
monitor checking student progress.
(Watkins 2007, p. 770)

As seen in the earlier discussion of classroom management, neoliberal ideology

supports the adoption of a wide spectrum of teacher roles, including parent, spiritual
advisor, therapist, and so on. Yet, while the number of expected teacher roles may
have grown, they have a narrow purpose: to promote student autonomy through self-
teaching and self-regulation. Missing from the neoliberal agenda are the messy,
exciting, and unpredictable classroom interactions that can take place when curricula
are less regulated and teaching less narrowly-circumscribed along management lines.
In addition, according to feminist scholars McWilliam (2000), Watkins (2006, 2007),
Levy (2000), and Probyn (2004), common to various teacher-as-manager roles is the
erasure of teachers’ bodies. Restoring a central place for teachers’ bodies is therefore
an aspect of classroom attendance I explore in this subsection. The focus is the
presence of teachers’ bodies and their impact on students’ bodies.
McWilliam (2000) opposed neoliberalism’s corporatized vision of schools and
universities, finding that it robs classrooms of “voluptuousness, serendipity and
excess” (p. 27). She claimed that the marriage of neoliberalism and humanism
intensified the shift to teacher-as-manager, as discussed earlier in the chapter,
thereby excluding embodiment. Teachers’ bodies in the current climate are seen as
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 157

potential obstacles to efficient training in pre-determined learning outcomes.

Teachers’ bodies are also viewed as potential threats to students who are
increasingly constructed as vulnerable beings needing protection from various
dangers, including sexual harassment by their teachers. However, paradoxically,
according to McWilliam (2000), policing teachers’ eros to protect students against
harassment can have the opposite unintended effect: eroticizing students’ bodies.
Nonetheless, teachers’ bodies are reined in, sanitized, and “unsexed” (p. 29). Within
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a neoliberal framework, they are “stumbling blocks to best practice” and therefore
must be “stepped around, over, or on” (p. 32). The erasure of teachers’ bodies is
most apparent in online teaching where physical presence is avoided altogether.
Responding to the erasure of corporality, McWilliam (1996) promoted teachers’
bodies as unfinished sites of visible authority and as antidotes to their subordination
to prescribed learning outcomes. She advocated the recovery of desire as way to
resist dominant practices that have suppressed women’s bodies in classrooms and
other social contexts. Desire would replace the more sanitized aim of cultivating
motivation, an individualistic concept that relies on self-regulation. Desire in the
classroom context is physical, but not overtly sexual. It might include, for example,
students’ desire for the seduction of the teacher’s voice, whereby “the teacher’s
desire to teach meets the student’s desire to learn” (p. 402).
Watkins (2007), too, interrogated the “dubious status” (p. 768) of teachers’ bodies
in current progressivist pedagogy, given the emphasis on student-centeredness.
Pointing to the preference in student-centered teaching for peer over whole-class
interaction, she claimed that the former reduces teachers’ “overall presence and
bodily impact” thereby jeopardizing their “affective force” and possibilities for
“intercorporality” (ibid.).
Theorizing not emotions, but affect from a Deleuzian perspective, Watkins
(2006, 2007) posited “the impact of a body acting upon another body with capaci-
tation being the resultant effect” (p. 768). She maintained that traditional
pedagogies, by positioning teachers at the front of the class with students’ gazing in
their direction, invited teachers’ embodied performances, including the impact of
their voice, gestures, and knowledge displays. Like McWilliam (1996, 2000),
Watkins (2007) underscored the potential of teachers’ bodies to activate students’
desire to learn. More specifically she emphasized the “contagious potential of
affect,” (p. 769) an antidote to neoliberalism’s positing of students as self-contained
individuals who should tame their emotions, including their desire.
Watkins (2007) studied the classroom interactions of two Australian primary
school teachers, Narelle, more student-centered, and Jane, more teacher-centered.
She found that Jane’s more overt classroom presence triggered greater excitement
and interest, due to the “affective impact of her performance” (p. 778). In Narelle’s
class, on the other hand, the notable number of rotating and short-lived peer-group
activities diminished students’ attention.
Watkins (2007) also found that Jane and Narelle used their bodies differently,
with the former placing hers in prominent positions in close proximity to the
children thereby making affective contagion possible. By contrast, due to the
 158 Attendance and Emotion Labor

number of different groups and activities in her class, Narelle was unable to offer
embodied presence in ways that might have generated affective force.
Watkins (2007) cautioned, however, that she was not calling for a return to author-
itarian teaching dependent on oppressive teacher presence and techniques. Rather,
her major concern was that disembodied teaching reduces possibilities for “the trans-
formative potential of the affects” (p. 779) that teachers’ bodies may generate.
Also taking an embodied perspective to teacher/students interactions, Sime
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(2006) studied EFL students’ interpretation of their English language teachers’

gestures as a way to better understand the relationship between verbal and non-
verbal language teaching and learning. Her research was grounded in the
assumption that gestures, including hand and head movements, facial expressions,
eye contact, and touch gain “communicative value” through the collaborative
“interpretative effort of a speaker and an interlocutor or audience” (p. 212). Her
research examined the meanings EFL students attribute to teachers’ gestures as
complements to verbal instructions.
To that end, Sime (2006) played videotaped portions of EFL lessons for students
who had attended the classes in which the recordings were made. Using a
simulated recall protocol, she asked the students to signal which portions of the
videos were significant to them and, more specifically to “comment on the
teacher’s body actions” (p. 216). Participants were further asked to “focus on what
the teacher does, rather than what s/he says and see if these actions were of any
importance to you” (ibid).
Sime (2006) grouped the students’ comments about teachers’ gestures into three
categories: those related to learning, those related to emotional engagement, and
those related to classroom management and organization. Given the focus of the
current chapter, I will discuss the third. When it came to classroom management
and cooperation, participants seemed to appreciate a forceful teacher presence
expressed through pointing and eye contact, among other gestures. For example, it
was found that during whole-class activities teachers designated who should speak
and who should not, through pointing.
Overall, echoing Watkins’s (2007) findings, Sime (2006) found that gestures
increased when it came to teacher-dominated explanations and whole-class
activities of various kinds. Gestures were found to decrease when students were
engaged in independent work. Furthermore, teachers’ more overt presence,
demonstrated through obvious gestures, was interpreted and welcomed by the
students as the teacher being in charge. The ease with which students identified
the significance of their teachers’ gestures points to the need for greater attention
to teachers’ and students’ bodies in classrooms.

Significance of Students’ Absent Bodies

An absence … is a relational phenomenon that constitutes itself in corporal
perceptions. Someone has to miss something for it to be specifically absent.
(Frers 2013, p. 433)
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 159

Exploring the emotional impact of students’ absent bodies requires casting the net
beyond educational and feminist scholarship to human geography. As discussed
briefly in Chapter 2, there is growing interest among some human geographers in
the relationship between place, bodies, and emotions, sometimes referred to as
emotional geographies. Though the work I discuss next from this field lacks
explicit attention to classrooms as sites of emotional geography, it offers insight into
the relationship between presence, absence, and emotions and is therefore relevant
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to the data presented later in the chapter.

In their introduction to a special issue of the journal cultural geographies on
“Absence, materiality, embodiment, resistance,” co-editors Meier, Frers and
Sigvardsdotter (2013) described absence as a conceptual bridge that can mediate
tension between “the realm beyond death” and “everyday stuff ” (p. 424). That is,
absence is theoretically productive because it unites transcendence and concrete
human practices. Further, while theorizing absence as a feature of everyday
encounters and ordinary affairs, the authors underscored its “affective
quality”(ibid.).
Above all, Meier, Frers and Sigvardsdotter (2013) aimed to conceptualize
absence as relational, a process of “relations that give absence matter” (ibid.).
Alongside the “relational ontology of absence” (ibid), is the corporality of those
who experience absence. Perhaps most relevant to the current chapter is the
acknowledgment of absence as “something that has to be filled with emotions” (p.
426). Absence is not a void, not complete erasure of what was once present, but,
instead, “that which has an uncertain status, something that has to be attended to
in some way, being challenged or negotiated based on its lack of presence” (ibid.).
How teachers fill in student absence with emotions as a way of dealing with its
ambiguity is a focus of the data analysis presented in the last part of this chapter.
Similarly, Frers (2013) explained that absence is neither a thing nor a thought,
but rather “a relational phenomenon” constituting itself in “corporal perceptions”
(p. 433). Taking these ideas further, he discussed the relationship between absence
and presence as both the presence of absence and the absence of presence. As to
the former, we experience not the absent thing or person, but the absence itself.
And because of its lack of presence, we must animate it with our emotions and
imagination.
Concomitantly, there is the absence of presence of the missing thing or person
co-existing with the presence of absence. Both are the result of a disruption of
expectations. Accordingly, in the case of teachers, it might be hypothesized that
when their expectation of students’ presence is disrupted, they manage the absence
with emotion labor, a struggle between attendance policies, feeling rules,
expectations, and the relationship with the absent student.
Frers (2013) offered some real-world examples of the corporality of absence:
missing a step while walking down a staircase, unexpected silence following a
stream of sound, and the sun setting while one is reading at dusk. The examples
illustrate an embodied disruption in the flow of an activity as well as the
relationship between the material, the body, and expectations. For example when
 160 Attendance and Emotion Labor

it comes to missing a step: “I only miss the step because in this situation the stair
was a given to me as a complete stair, as such it was as much part of my projected
movement as my feet, my legs, my whole body” (p. 435). Embodiment is revealed
in how the person who experiences the absence conjures up corporally what was
previously there and what was expected to be there.
Frers (2013) offered another illustration of the relational quality of absence, one
whose relevance to teaching might be more apparent than missing a step. In this
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example, he described swimming off the beach of a German North-Sea Island. At

times, fog engulfed the beach obscuring it from his view. Although it was still there,
he couldn’t see it; it had “moved into absence” (p. 436). Concurrently, the fog hid
his body, at times, from the lifeguard who was monitoring his movements. Yet,
wordlessly the two remained connected throughout the time Frers (2013) swam:

I for my part managed my presence and absence - trying never to vanish for
too long, to ensure the lifeguard of my ability to quickly reappear and never
slip away completely, waving to him after one occasion where I might have
been gone too long, too far. It was through that fog, arising from the water
in which I swam and permeating the air that we breathed, that we were
present to each other in a very peculiar way—even when we had lost sight
of each other.

The reassurance Frers (2013) and the lifeguard offered each other corporally, he by
waving and swimming into view, and the lifeguard by watching, is a poignant
evocation of the relational and embodied qualities of absence, ones I return to in
the data analysis section.
In a similar vein, Parr and Fyfe (2012) aimed to establish “new emotional
geographies of embodied absence” (p. 615) by proposing ways to conceptualize and
study missing adults. Like Frers (2013), the authors discussed the relational quality
of absence, that is, the centrality of the relationship between the missing person and
those who notice the absence: “A missing person has to be noticed as not
inhabiting their rightful place in order to be termed ‘missing’” (p. 617). They
pointed to the geographical specificity of “missing, being missed, and missingness”
(ibid.), offering as a contrast the desaparecidos of Argentina and a teenager who
might temporarily leave home. Not only are there differences between individual
and collective forms of missingness, but also different scales and qualitative
differences in how they are missed. Most relevant to the current chapter, is Parr and
Fyfe’s (2012) recognition that the responses to missing people are related to a
diversity of “in-fillings of absence” (p. 618). These variations led them to define
missingness as “a contextual label for what happens during/for and in unexpected
human absence” (ibid.).
As to emotional in-filling, Parr and Fyfe (2012) discussed the politics of
missingness in terms of which absences are acknowledged and which go
undetected and/or unreported. For example, when a four-year-old white English
child, Madeleine McCann, disappeared in Portugal while her family was
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 161

vacationing there in 2007, massive global media coverage ensued. On the other
hand, those from disfavored populations who go missing, “the unmissed missing” (p.
634), receive little or no attention in the media.1 Given these disparities, Parr and
Fyfe (2012) called for scholarship on the emotions both of being missed and of
missing as a way to address the “uncertainties of the present/absent nexus” (p. 632).

Materialities of Absence
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Meyer (2012), whose interdisciplinary scholarship spans biology and sociology,

raised the following questions: “[H]ow is absence performed, materialized and
objectified” and “In and through which kinds of tools, objects, representations and
spaces is absence made present?” (p. 103). Pointing to the assumption that absence
may have as much effect as material presence, he claimed that absence has agency
and that it is performative. Further, “absence is also something we engage with,
something we do something to” (p. 104). To counter the usual dualistic approach
to absence and presence, Meyer (2012) offered a more engaged concept of absence
“as a trace and as something that needs to be traced” (p. 107), including actively
mapping, locating, and following, and a vestige of something that once was.
Meyer’s contribution, though useful in terms of theorizing the material and
agentive aspects of absence remained at an abstract level. Boden (2013), on the
other hand, offered concrete examples of the materiality of absence in discussing
her study of the impact on teacher-student interactions of software technology
designed to record student absences in Swedish schools. She contextualized her
study historically: increased regulation of Swedish schools coinciding with the
2006 election of a more conservative government. Given this shift to greater
regulation, Boden (2013) sought to discover how materialities, such as the widely-
used attendance software, mediated classroom relationships, using a feminist
relational materialist framework.
The software used a color-coding system to record latenesses and absences for
each lesson: blue signaled that the lesson had not yet been recorded; green indicated
presence; yellow indicated a valid absence; red indicated an invalid absence or poor
classroom behavior. Two examples from Boden’s study demonstrated how the
materiality of the software system intersected with gendered discourses to produce
particular outcomes regarding absence.
In the first example, a teacher and one of her fifth grade female students
demonstrated to Boden (2013) how the software functioned. When the student’s
page was pulled up, all three immediately noticed one red absence in a sea of green
and yellow. The single red indicator triggered the girl’s anxiety; she objected by
stating that the absence had been valid and should have been recorded as yellow.
After confirming with the student that she had been helping in the school cafeteria,
the teacher changed the indication to yellow for that lesson. The teacher later
confided to Boden (2013) that the student wasn’t “the kind who truants” (p. 1122).
In the second example, the teacher offered to show Boden (2013) the page of
a student with multiple absences. However, this student, a boy, was not present at
 162 Attendance and Emotion Labor

the demonstration of his page and could not therefore verify the accuracy of the
indicators as the girl in the previous example had done. Boden (2013) observed
that the sea of red on this boy’s page elicited no investigation by the teacher about
their validity. Instead, the number of red fields seemed to verify “the accuracy of
the notions about the student and the notions about the student verified that the
software was telling the ‘truth’” (p. 1124). Discursively speaking, given the
construction of boys as more likely to play truant than girls, who are constructed
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as more compliant, the software served to further perpetrate these gendered

discourses.
Materialities of absence is one of the areas of attendance that showed up in my
data, discussed next along with attendance policies and bodies in classrooms.

Attendance and Emotion Labor: Data Analysis

McFarlane (2013), whose discursive analysis of university attendance policy
statements is a rare example of research on this topic, took a strong position against
attendance regulation at the postsecondary level. He argued that because higher
education is “post-compulsory,” (p. 366), students’ attendance is voluntary and
should therefore not be monitored. Grounding his claims in what I would call
neoliberal and libertarian assumptions, McFarlane (2013) described students as
customers who “have a right to ‘consume’ as much or as little of the ‘product’ they
have paid for as they wish” (pp. 366–367).
Though McFarlane (2013) presented postsecondary attendance monitoring in
either/or terms, the data I present next reveals that the college instructors I
interviewed have complex views about attendance policies and student absence,
ones that cannot be covered with a simple for or against position. As was the case
with other topics they were interviewed about, respondents expressed ambivalence
about existing policies and their enforcement. Their views were largely based on
awareness of the challenges for publicly-funded college students of regular
attendance, given work and family responsibilities, coupled with distress when
students failed to show up. In other words, their responses indicated acknowl-
edgment of social pressures faced by their students as well as a strong desire for their
presence and emotional in-fillings in the face of their absence.
To give an example of this complexity, R1 initially opposes attendance policies,
on the same grounds expressed by McFarlane (2013): students are adults whose
attendance should not be monitored. This response falls within what I’m calling
a discourse of student self-regulation, discussed further in the data analysis.
However, as R1 continues, more personal reactions to student absence become
apparent. Grounded in a discourse of emotional in-filling is the expression of hurt
when students don’t show up for class. This is followed by more emotional in-
fillings in the form of questions: Does the absence indicate that the missing
student found the class uninteresting? Was the student instead offended by
something the teacher said?:
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 163

R1: And I should say to this coming from (name of country) where no one
cared whether you were in the class or not then hearing from Europeans the
American college system is like high school. Too much control. You’re an
adult. It’s up to you whether you come or not to class. I kind of feel a little
bit like that although I’m a dual citizen. I have feelings both ways. On the
one hand I think it’s up to them. They’re adults. On the other hand, we do
have a policy and it’s … well I do take it personally in that if they don’t come
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to class I feel I’m not doing an interesting enough job. I feel bad like I should
have made it more interesting. Or I feel like maybe something was said that
offended them and I don’t know what it is.

The complexity of R1 indicates that whether or not an attendance policy is in

place or whether the one in place is enforced or not, teachers may experience a
range of reactions to student absence. In my data I grouped these reactions
according to the following discourses: resistance, student self-regulation,
relationality, emotional in-filling, teachers’ embodied performances, and students’
embodied performances. These sometimes overlapping discourses are discussed
next in their relationship to the following themes: attendance policies, technologies
of attendance, and students’ embodied absence and presence.

Data Analysis

Attendance Policies: Discourse of Resistance

As stated earlier, CUNY students enrolled in developmental and ESL classes are
subject to the strictest rules when it comes to attendance. However, though I
interviewed only teachers who taught ESL classes, the attendance rules of which
are clearly spelled out, a lack of consistent enforcement of those policies was
evident in their responses. That is, a discourse of resistance was more apparent than
strict adherence to a set of institutional norms. This does not mean, though, that
the attitude was laissez-faire. Rather, emotion labor was apparent in the reporting
of ongoing tension among institutional norms, respondents’ preferred norms, and
the reality of working-class immigrant students’ lives. Furthermore, there seemed
to be contradictory feeling rules within the institution: vigilance and flexibility.
This can be seen particularly in two responses referencing the overturning by
departmental chairs of instructors’ enforcement of CUNY’s attendance regulation
of ESL students.
The reasons given most often for resistance to the university attendance policy
were that many CUNY students work, many have family responsibilities, and all
are dependent on often unreliable subways, buses, and even elevators in the case of
colleges located in tall buildings. In fact, several of the teachers who rely on the
same forms of transportation as their students expressed empathy for lateness, up to
a point. Instructors, then, were tasked with reconciling the attendance policy with
their knowledge of and observations about the challenges faced by their students.
 164 Attendance and Emotion Labor

In the face of these challenges, teachers reported loosely applying the existing
policy regarding lateness (R2), disregarding it altogether (R3 and R5), or creating
their own, such as the 15-minute grace period mentioned in R4. Furthermore, the
resistance expressed in R2, R3, and R5 is attributed to unwillingness to devote
teaching time to monitoring attendance and enforcing the university policy:

R2: A loose policy. I’ll accept 10–15 minutes because the subways weren’t
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working. That kind of thing. I don’t usually mark … I can’t be bothered

keeping a record to take a grade down.

R3: I make the announcement at the beginning that (name of institution)

has an absence policy. If you were late an hour that’s the equivalent of one
hour of being absent. But I never enforce that. I have to say that I never
enforce that. I don’t know, I’m not organized enough to do it.

R4: I have an overarching policy which includes a grace period of about 15

minutes. Our department and many people have various policies. I believe
in modern twenty-first century in a busy urban setting, the students have
very busy lives. It’s not nineteenth century Oxford or Cambridge and I feel
… I’m not really content with any of those … Somehow my students
manage.

R5: The program I teach in has a lateness policy, which is that three lates
equals an absence, and four absences mean the student is kicked out. I
disagree with this policy. I hate it. I cheat on it and do not mark students late
when they are at risk of getting kicked out of the program—especially if I
know that the student is late for a legitimate reason, which they discuss with
me … I am not there to coerce them. I do not believe in coercion. I do all
I can to teach them motivation, focus, organization in their lives, using brain-
based approaches I read about and practice. After that, college students are
adults. I respect their agency, their ability to handle their lives and schedules.
Students I teach have full-time jobs. They have young children. They are
attending school, on top of that, 25 hours a week with me. I could not do
what they do. If they are sometimes late, I respect that.

R6 reports that though teachers are permitted to bar students from the final exam
if they have accumulated more than the allowed number of absences, the teacher
chooses not to, thereby avoiding enforcement (“I don’t like to do that”). Because
excessive absence would most likely lead the student to fail the exam anyway, the
teacher declared: “I don’t have to do a thing,” evoking a discourse of student self-
regulation:

R6: I can bar students from taking the final if they have too many absences.
I have never done that. I don’t like to do that. I feel that if they have missed
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 165

so much classwork that they can’t pass the exam, then they won’t pass. I don’t
have to do a thing. They’ll do it to themselves.

Other responses (R7, R8, and R9) indicated not just resistance to the current atten-
dance policy, but also the creation of substitute policies that allow students to make up
the time through additional work (R7) or by completing missed assignments (R8 and
R9). In fact, R7 rejects the most serious consequence of the attendance policy
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(dismissal from the course), declaring, “I still wouldn’t throw them out”:

R7: And they’re only supposed to be absent 15 percent of the course hours.
And if they’re absent more than that I make them write an extra essay. I still
wouldn’t throw them out.

R8: I allow them to be absent or miss a class after three times. No questions
asked. I designed this policy because I believe that everybody has the right to
be sick or to have a problem or to have one of those days when nothing goes
right. You cannot face the world. I think that’s a fair way of looking at modern
living and modern pressures. So they … as long as they make up the work.

R9: I mean I had a kid who worked two jobs, something ridiculous. And he
would come in exhausted or come in late. And he said, “Look, I need the
class.” I said, “Make it up.”

R7’s declaration, “I still wouldn’t throw them out,” indicates that enforcement is
mostly left up to individual teachers, despite the clearly articulated CUNY-wide
attendance policy for ESL and developmental students. Given their implicit
authority, many of the respondents stated a willingness to resist the policy without
obvious concern about repercussions, as demonstrated in responses 2–7.
However, others expressed emotion labor over their resistance, indicated in R9
and R10. Whether the emotion labor was related to concerns about being judged
as permissive by me, in the interviewer role, or more generally is not clear.
Whichever it may be, both responses suggest self-consciousness about being
considered too lax. This concern is indicated in R9 by “I probably should be better
at enforcing” and “I need to be better about lateness.” As to R10, there is a pointed
reference to the interview being recorded. That reference to the recording device
and the use of “admit” regarding having “bent the rule” indicate apprehension
about non-compliance. On the other hand, R10 also legitimizes resisting the
policy out of a sense of social justice, mainly in “extreme and provable” cases of
student absence. However, a concern about repercussions of being perceived by
students as a permissive teacher is also expressed:

R9: Well I don’t like it [lateness] and so I probably should be better at

enforcing, but I think I’m in the middle of teaching and I kind of forget: ok
I need to remind them about that. So I need to be better about lateness.
 166 Attendance and Emotion Labor

R10: And I will admit and I know you’re taping it … I have bent the rule
if students have some issue and they’re willing to do the work with me still.
So the answer to that question is really contingent upon the situation. SB:
What kinds of situations arise where you bend the rules? Sickness. I had a student
who was pregnant. I didn’t even know she was pregnant. Gave birth. SB:
That’s a good excuse! There have been … it’s not often. Because when the
word gets out oh she’ll just bend the rule then you know … all the effort is
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out the window. So it has to be something extreme and provable.

Unapologetic resistance to attendance rules, then, was prevalent among

interviewees’ responses, with the exception of R9 and R10 expressing some worry
about not being sufficiently strict. One response, though, might serve to explain
the sense that the attendance policy was more on paper than an iron-clad rule and
therefore resistible. This response, R11, describes a situation in which a student
who contested the instructor’s enforcement of the attendance policy might be
backed up by a departmental chair overruling the instructor. This type of
interaction is reminiscent of Sutherland-Smith’s (2005) finding that university
committees in charge of plagiarism may exonerate students who have been
reported by their instructor to have plagiarized, leading to greater reluctance to
report. In the case of R11, the respondent describes the overruling by a depart-
mental chair as “scandalous” because of the violation of a stated policy:

R11: The department has a policy of I think it’s three lates equals an absence.
And they’re allowed four absences and after four you fail. And that’s supposed
to happen, but if then a student would then complain maybe to the chair,
but maybe they had six absences why am I being failed. They totally back
… they talk to the professor and say, “You shouldn’t do this.” Just I think
scandalous. If you have a rule you gotta follow it.

Overall, then, when it came to enforcing attendance policies, resistance could be

found at the level of instructors and, in one case, a department chairperson.
Though instructors told me that they included their college’s policy on their
syllabi, various strategies were employed when it came to enforcement. In some
cases teachers didn’t bother recording attendance at all, in other cases they
negotiated the rules with students, and in others they offered opportunities to
make up for absence with work. Perhaps the most important observation, though,
is that because the attendance policy exists, interviewees are continually put in the
position of deciding whether to follow it or not, an aspect of emotion labor that is
ongoing and will be discussed further in the conclusion.

Technologies of Attendance: Discourses of Student Self-Regulation,

Relationality, and Teachers’ Embodied Performances
In response to interview questions about how teachers enforced attendance rules,
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 167

various technologies with differing functions, were discussed. One technology

served to have students record their own lateness and absence, freeing the teacher
from that role, guided by a discourse of student self-regulation. Another functioned
to contact absent students, a more relational technology. A third joined materials and
teacher performance, a process of recording attendance while signaling disapproval
to late students’ body movements and positionings. Each of these is discussed next.
As to technologies used by students to record their own lateness, R12 expresses
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how “the late sheet” served as a surrogate gatekeeper “watching them and noticing
that they’re late”:

R12: But I do think actually the late sheet where they sign in is a message
in itself. I think it makes them feel like they’re … somebody’s watching them
and noticing that they’re late.

Another technology (R13) is a simple quiz used to take attendance thereby sparing
the teacher from having to enact that role while “enticing” students to be on time.
The easy test served as a tool of student self-regulation and attendance monitoring:

R13: The way I take roll is they have a quiz. And it’s what I call—I don’t say
this to them—but I call it a dum-dum quiz. It’s just a quiz that if you were
in class the last class and you did the homework, it’s a simple quiz. It’s usually
about five, ten questions. Something simple. True false. What are the parts of
an essay? Something like that to entice them to be on time. So that quiz is
my taking the roll. And they only have five to seven minutes to complete
that. Students who come in after that are tardy.

However, despite the removal of the burden from teachers of late sheets and
quizzes, some discussed additional burdens these technologies created. For example,
in R14 the instructor mentions shifting the burden of attendance monitoring to
the students who record their own latenesses yet bemoans having to tally them at
the end of the term. The “system,” while intended as one of student self-regulation,
ends up costing the teacher excessive time and energy, due to the burden being
shifted back when “tallying up all the numbers”:

R14: So I have a system where students sign in when they come in late. They
just put their name, the date, and the time to put the burden on them. And
then at the end I’m always kind of cursing the system cause I have to add up
the minutes. And I hate tallying up all the numbers.

Whereas the technologies described in R12, R13, and R14 served to watch, notice,
test, entice, or burden, other technologies appear not to have materialized
sufficiently to be used or relied upon. In R15 the sign-up sheet is forgettable; in
R16, various technologies are found to be meaningless, and therefore dispensable,
because the course is pass/fail:
 168 Attendance and Emotion Labor

R15: The sign-up sheet. When they come in they sign up and I tell them
that five minutes or ten minutes into the class I’m going to take it away from
the desk so that they can’t sign up. But I’ve yet to do it. I always forget.

R16: I’ve tried different approaches like having an activity in the morning,
like a ten-minute warm up. Or one time I tried having quizzes. I mean all
that is just … I mean there’s no grade so that doesn’t really mean anything.
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As far as more relational technologies discussed by teachers, these are ways to stay
in touch with students by collecting email addresses and/or cellphone numbers.
Absence triggered the use of these technologies, either by the teacher (R17) or the
absent students themselves (R18), who had been instructed to gather fellow
students’ contact information to be able to make up the work, a more self-
regulatory yet also relational process. In the case of R18, relationships are cultivated
among students, shifting responsibility away from the teacher for reminding
students about missed work:

R17: What I do is I have a card and I get their cellphone numbers so if there
are two [absences], let’s say, I will text them.

R18: At first class they’re all exchanging emails. They need to have six sets
of emails. So these are their peer contacts. And they have to make sure that
they make up the work. No questions asked for the reasons.

In R19, materiality and relationality are multifaceted. The text message to the
absent student functions in various ways: a warning, a reminder of the absence
policy, an expression of concern, and material evidence in case of the student’s
future contestation of a low or failing grade (“If they were go to the chair”) due
to absence. This last part of R19 is reminiscent of R11, indicating possible conflict
with the departmental chair around the instructor’s enforcement of the attendance
policy:

R19: I’ll text them. I text a lot with them. And this seems like, OK you have
two absences or you know two more and you’re outta here. Give them that
warning or how are you? What’s going on? We’re worried about you kind of
situation is how I frame it. More about, is everything ok? And then remind
them about the absence policy. I feel like in that way if they were to go to
the chair I’ve given them warning, you know?

Two responses discuss a relationship between the materiality of attendance

technologies and the teacher’s embodied performance. The first, R20, describes a
way of combining the materiality of “the giant roster” and body movements used
to signal disapproval: “a dirty look,” “point[ing] to the board” and a performance
of recording the lateness with an exaggerated motion, “a flourish,” while uttering
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 169

words that acknowledge the lateness. Equally interesting is that the teacher engages
in this embodied performance not primarily to enforce a policy, but, instead, to
signal that the lateness was noticed and that the teacher cares about whether or not
the student is present:

R20: If they’re late during the freewriting, I just look up, give them a dirty
look, point to the board and go back to writing. If it’s after that, I take the
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giant roster out with a flourish and put a big circle around their, you know
… and I say, “Hunh, it’s 9:40.” Because you know I don’t want them to
imagine that I didn’t notice or that I don’t care.

In R21, the notecard is the vehicle for taking attendance and calling on students.
However, because using the card might be too subtle, unlike the “giant roster” in
R20, and fail to communicate to students that attendance is being enforced, the
teacher carries out “a big performance” or “a show” of using the card thereby
enacting attendance-taking in a visually obvious way:

R21: I usually put everyone’s name at the beginning of the semester on a

notecard. They fill out a notecard with their information. Sometimes I just
use them to call on students randomly. But also then mark the attendance. If
they’re not there and they come in late, I’ll check that they were late. So I
usually do that especially at the beginning of the semester. I’ll make a big
performance of taking attendance everyday at the beginning. … Part of my
enforcement is making a show of it and then if there is a student who’s in
particular difficulty talking to them after class.

R21’s final words about a student’s lateness as an embodied signal that the student
might be “in particular difficulty” and therefore in possible need of a face-to-face
meeting with the teacher is characteristic of responses in the next section on
teachers’ reactions to students’ embodied performances of lateness and absence.

Embodied Classroom Absence and Presence: Discourse of Students’

Embodied Performance, Discourse of Relationality, Discourse of
Emotional In-Filling
Whereas R20 and R21 offered examples of teachers’ embodied performances related
to attendance, in this section I discuss the emotion labor of noticing students’ late-
to-arrive and absent bodies. These responses reveal that the ways in which students
perform late arrivals and absence may make an impression on their instructors.
R22–R25 report ways in which late students’ bodily comportment when
entering the classroom affect their teachers’ reaction to the lateness. For example,
in R22, the teacher reported reading students’ late-to-arrive bodies for indications
of their level of respect. Of particular interest is the teacher’s detailed attention to
students’ gait, hygiene, and speed of entry into the class when late:
 170 Attendance and Emotion Labor

R22: If they come sauntering in, freshly bathed, and relaxed an hour late for
class I feel like they’re disrespecting me. If they come hurrying in and they
get right involved in what we’re doing I don’t mind at all.

Similarly, R23 notes whether students’ bodies are performing either discretion or
a desire to “make a spectacle out of themselves.” According to this response, when
students make noise coming into the classroom, they draw attention away from the
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teacher, other students, and classroom activities to their own bodies. This type of
spectacle transforms lateness from an act that is “bad enough” to a “nuisance:”

R23: I mean it depends how they’re late. You can walk in discretely and not
make a nuisance of yourself. But a lot of time students are late because they
want attention. They make a spectacle out of themselves. And I say, Could
you please come in quietly? It’s bad enough that you’re late.

Similarly, R24 expresses a preference for students to be as unobtrusive as possible

so that their bodies don’t distract, offering specifications about speed of entry,
removal of outerwear, body position, and noise level. According to this response,
the late body should merge with the present bodies as quickly as possible, following
these specifications of bodily comportment:

R24: I always tell my students just come in quickly, take off your coat and
everything, get ready, just slip into your seat.

Like R24, which specifies ways for late bodies to make themselves as unobtrusive
as possible by blending in, R25 describes a preference for late bodies to be placed
at the periphery of classroom action, away from the other bodies. Of particular
note is that late students are instructed not to move their bodies between the
teacher’s and the other students’, a performance that would sever the connection
and provoke the teacher’s annoyance, though this point was expressed playfully:

R25: So I tell them … it’s on my syllabus. If you’re going to come in late

you need to take the seat closest to the door. Cause if you walk across while
there’s some interaction between me and the class, there’s no telling what
might come out of my mouth to you (laughs).

R26 and R7 focus on not just being unobtrusive, but also silent and self-reliant.
The student should not interrupt other students or the teacher, but, instead figure
out on their own what the class is doing:

R26: I say things like, “At least try to come in quietly and don’t interrupt
anyone if we’re still freewriting. Just sit down and write about why you were
late if you can’t figure out what the topic is. Whatever you do don’t come
up to my desk and start talking to me.” Because they do that so often.
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 171

R27: I don’t like it when the class is disrupted and also if somebody comes
in and we’ve been working on something and they say, “I don’t get it.”

Whereas the previous group of responses specified teachers’ preferred bodily

comportment of late students, the next group of responses (R28–R35) have to do
with teachers’ relational expectations when students are absent. They underscore
the importance for teachers that students not go missing without an explanation.
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Disappearance in these responses was reported to trigger an in-filling of the

absence with unpleasant emotions, ones that might be avoided if an explanation
were offered.
R28 and R29 explain that the presence of an absent body triggers a desire to
know why the student is not in attendance. The preference therefore is to be
alerted ahead of the absence, lateness, or early departure. In R28, unexplained
absence is responded to relationally by a query to a classmate or call to the absent
student:

R28: Cause I also expect them to email me if they’re gonna miss class, if
they’re gonna be late, if they have to leave class early. To explain it to me
ahead of time.

R29: I ask students if they’re gonna be absent more than a couple of days to
give me a call and/or emailing. Some do and most don’t. But if they’re
missing for a couple of days I’ll either ask their classmates if they know
anything or I will call them and find out what’s going on. And that works
well.

Without a direct explanation from the missing student, via email, text, or phone
call, teachers reported that they fill in the absent body with various emotions.
These range from feeling as if the student doesn’t care (R30) to sensing that he or
she is “blowing off the class” (R31) in which case the teacher might be inclined to
withhold helping that student in the future. In R32, the reciprocity of absence and
presence is expressed as teachers and student being “in this together,” drawing on
a discourse of relationality:

R30: I feel better if they let me know by email or by calling the office than
if they just don’t show up. If they don’t show I feel that they don’t care. Even
if it’s valid or they’re working.

R31: It’s that whole thing of like when I feel I can trust a student that is
gonna be upfront and honest with me then I don’t take it personally at all
when they miss. Especially if they’ve told me ahead of time or even if they
tell me afterwards, “Hey I had a family emergency.” Fine, I understand. But
when a student just misses and I don’t know why and they don’t tell me then
I do start to think the student is just blowing off the class and I’ll take it more
 172 Attendance and Emotion Labor

… I will definitely not feel as in need of giving them any kind of help with
their grade or anything in the future.

R32: If you have to be absent, please let me know. I’d really appreciate it.
Same way if I’m gonna be absent I’ll let you know. Just to build that sense of
respect. We’re in this together.
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On the other hand, two responses (R33 and R34) indicate that absent bodies
might serve as a signal of trouble or difficulty in the student’s life, reminiscent of
R21, triggering the teacher’s desire to investigate further, and perhaps find a way
collaboratively to prevent future absence. In this regard, in R33, absence and
lateness are described as “an opportunity.” The student’s absent body triggers the
teacher’s hope of getting to know the student better as a way to “address
something.” Similarly, in R34, absence triggers a sense of obligation to investigate
the cause of the missing student and to “try to correct the situation”:

R33: And in some ways it was an opportunity if they were late or if they
missed a class it was a chance to talk to them and to get to know more about
them. So there was something also kind of I guess in a weird way something
positive about that. A chance to address something.

R34: If a student’s absent an awful lot and not doing the work I guess I start
thinking, “Well this is a student that’s gonna fail the class.” And I feel that I
have an obligation to try to find out if there’s something wrong for one
thing. To try to talk to the student. I don’t just decide I’m gonna fail the
student and not even care about what’s happening. So I guess my first feeling
would be concern about the student. That I think there’s probably a problem
here and I would try to communicate with the student. Maybe my main
reaction is I feel some concern and feel like I have a responsibility to try to
intervene and to try to correct the situation.

Finally, the last response (R35) is notable for its discussion of the emotion labor
of enforcing attendance for this inexperienced teacher. Here the teacher
poignantly describes the discomfort of addressing a student’s absence, grappling
with the mandate of approaching the student face-to-face and the potential
discomfort and embarrassment for the student. To better understand these issues,
the teacher reported reading a book on discipline after which the embodied act
of approaching students about absence seemed less intrusive and more caring.
Nonetheless, the face-to-face act remained “awkward and anxiety-inducing”
particularly given that it consisted of the teacher’s more powerful body
approaching the student’s. The antidote of approaching the student “quietly”
enacted sensitivity to the potentially confrontational aspect of attendance
enforcement for both the teacher and student:
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 173

R35: So it was something I was uncomfortable with it at first. And then

when I … from observing other teachers I came to develop a way that … I
wouldn’t usually address it right away. But I might go up to a student after
they came in and, say, everybody’s working on something and say, “Hey I
noticed you were late today” and see what they say. And I read a whole book
on it, Discipline with Dignity, that kind of reinforced and also added additional
perspectives on this. And then I also had to come around to believe in the
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fact that I’m helping them when I do this rather than confronting them and
calling them out and embarrassing them. I’m trying to help them and this is
something that’s gonna be helpful to them. And they want to know that you
care about them, that you’re asking them about it. So I didn’t want to let it
go. It was always still a little awkward and anxiety-inducing to have to walk
up cause there was a certain amount of confrontation in it. But I would
usually try to go up to them quietly.

Conclusion
My questions to teachers about attendance revolved around three issues: policies
regarding lateness and absence; how they enforced those policies; and any feelings
students’ lateness and absence triggered. I found that though ESL and developmental
students are subject to clearly articulated rules around attendance, the enforcement
of those rules is inconsistent. This may be because the feeling rules guiding
enforcement are contradictory with vigilance and flexibility competing. In other
words, there seems to be an ethos of implicit acknowledgment of the challenges
faced by open admissions immigrant students at various institutional levels. Due to
these challenges, respondents reported emotion labor related to ongoing conflict
among institutional norms, their own norms, and the reality of their working-class
students’ lives of juggling college, jobs, commuting, and family demands.
Some respondents reported enforcing the rules, some developed their own, and
some disregarded them all together. Some also shared that they worried about
bending the rules though this concern might be attributable to the interview
context. However, two responses indicated that oversight by departmental chairs
might lead to overturning an instructor’s application of the attendance policy.
Along with the finding that attendance regulations are unevenly enforced,
respondents reported that they had created their own technologies to deal with
student lateness and absence. They used these technologies to take attendance and
entice promptness, such as giving a quiz at the start of class.
Relational technologies were also used to keep teachers and students connected,
such as texts and emails. Some teachers drew upon those connections when
students were not present. Others expected students to alert them when they
would not be present. In other cases, teachers left the connecting up to the absent
student who was expected to contact peers to be filled in on assignments.
The most interesting data, however, was what I called “embodied absence and
presence.” Here teachers revealed how they filled in students’ late-to-arrive and
 174 Attendance and Emotion Labor

absent bodies with emotions. Dividing these response into two groups, I first
discussed the impression made on teachers of students’ performance of lateness.
Most striking was the extent to which some respondents reported attending to the
comportment of late-to-arrive bodies, with specific expectations of the ideal entry.
Students were expected to avoid distracting the teacher and fellow students or
severing the connection between them. They were to slip into their seats quietly
and figure out on their own what the class was engaged in. One teacher also
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expressed a preference for the placement of students’ late bodies on the periphery
of the classroom for minimum obtrusiveness.
Equally interesting were the data on teachers’ need to know why students are
absent so as to avoid unpleasant in-fillings, such as students disliking the class or
having been offended by something the teacher had said. Yet other teachers
considered absence as an opportunity to get to know the student better, an entree
to a conversation about why were not present on a particular day and whether
there might be ways to improve attendance by addressing any difficulties students
might have been experiencing.
From a pedagogical perspective, the most important implication of this chapter
might be that teachers could do more to let students know that their late and absent
bodies are meaningful, not invisible or insignificant. As one of the respondent’s put
it, “…I don’t want them to imagine that I didn’t notice or that I don’t care.”
Making it clear that the teacher notices and does care about presence, lateness,
absence, and bodily comportment might lead students to understand how they
signal interest, lack of interest, disrespect, concern, and so on, through their bodies.
There could be greater awareness of the impact of gait, body position, gaze, voice
volume, and so on, with discussion of how these might vary according to cultures
and social situations. A classroom attendance policy taking bodies into account
could be co-created so that mandates would not be top-down, but, rather, collab-
oratively generated. Suggestions along these lines are elaborated in Chapter 8.
Teachers could also discuss how they fill in absence with emotions, such as
concern and annoyance. They might also reveal that the burden of taking and
enforcing attendance can be a distraction from teaching. Discussion of the emotion
labor of attendance could include the example of Frers swimming in the fog,
waving to the lifeguard. The use of this metaphor could serve to sensitize students
to ways that absence and presence are reciprocal and relational, not simply a matter
of policies and procedures.
These suggestions and others are discussed further in the next chapter on
implications for pedagogy.

Note
1 Gillies (2011) offered a field diary entry on this very point as an example of SEAL
teaching in one of the schools where she conducted her study. Students were surfing
the web in a group, under the supervision of a teacher, when an image of Madeleine
McCann appeared along with her story. One of the black male students commented
that if he were kidnapped no one would make such a fuss. Others students agreed, but
 Attendance and Emotion Labor 175

the teacher said that though that might be true to a degree, the students should think
about “the poor little girl that this has actually happened to” (p. 194). According to the
field notes, Linden and the others seemed unconvinced by the teacher’s intervention.

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 8
CONCLUSION AND
PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
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As ESL coordinator at the College of Staten Island for almost 30 years, I was
charged with communicating CUNY’s policies to the instructors I supervised,
including regulations related to the mandated reading and writing assessment tests,
attendance, plagiarism, and other matters affecting student-teacher interaction.
Conflicts were therefore apparent to me between institutional policies, classroom
experiences, professional training, and pedagogical philosophies. However, it did
not occur to me during most of those years that those conflicts were a possible area
of research.
It was only when I embarked on Considering Emotions in Critical English Language
Teaching: Theories and Praxis (Benesch 2012) that I sought to explore the
relationship between emotions and power. Reading in fields as wide-ranging as
economics, education, cultural studies, and sociology, I found ways to theorize
emotions critically. During this search I came across the concept of emotion labor,
one that seemed particularly well-suited to examining English language teachers’
responses to institutional power, including possible conflicts with their training and
beliefs. Having discussed emotion labor in one chapter of the 2012 book, I thought
it deserved a book-length treatment.
The twin concepts of emotion labor and feeling rules, originally proposed by
Hochschild (1979, 1983) drove the research presented in this book. Both draw
attention to relationships among teachers’ emotions, their training/experience, and
institutional power, allowing for the study of emotions not as biological responses
or cognitive appraisals, but, rather, as sociocultural phenomena.
By posing questions about pedagogically-challenging issues and scenarios in the
interviews I conducted with CUNY English language instructors, I aimed to
uncover any emotion labor they experience in their adherence or resistance to
institutional policies and the implied feeling rules of those policies. Aside from the
findings about emotion labor, summarized next, my aim was to exemplify and
 178 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications

encourage sociopolitical approaches to studying emotions in ELT, a corrective to

the cognitive approach traditionally taken. I did this both by theorizing emotions
from a poststructural/discursive perspective and by using the lenses of emotion
labor and feeling rules in my analysis of my respondents’ answers to questions about
literacy testing, responding to writing, plagiarism, and attendance. In doing so, my
focus was not on individual teachers’ psychological responses. Nor did I study the
impact of aspects of their identities, such as gender, ethnicity, or social class, on the
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emotions they discussed. Instead, I attended to emotional discourses circulating in

ELT, as revealed in the respondents’ answers to interview questions, and what these
might demonstrate about the interplay between institutional power and the sticky
topics I invited the participants to discuss.
From a political perspective, my focus on emotion labor was an opportunity to
discover ways in which the clash between English language teachers’
training/beliefs and institutional policies might be tapped into for transformational
purposes, such as greater authority for English language instructors. This approach
to emotion labor as a healthy response to inevitable conflicts is a departure from
mainstream emotion-labor research, described in Chapter 3, and the social and
emotional skills research discussed in Chapter 7. That research equates emotion
labor with emotional distress, or workplace incompetence. It therefore seeks to
mitigate emotion labor through processes that encourage workers to diminish their
strong emotions in the interest of more efficient work. In educational institutions,
attempts to reduce emotions and emotion labor, as in the emotional literacy
programs discussed in Chapter 7, aim to diminish conflict and in doing so risk
permitting the most powerful discourses to dominate, while shutting out teachers’
expertise and personal knowledge.
The approach taken in this book is not to alleviate emotion labor, but to shine
a light on it so that it can be seen as unavoidable tension between competing
interests. Instead of attempting to eradicate emotion labor, it can be drawn upon as
a tool to address incompatibilities and work toward better conditions for teachers
and students.
This is not to deny that the clash between disparate discourses may create
confusion and/or discomfort. Instead, I’m suggesting that the conflicts be
acknowledged so that teachers do not have to experience them privately, a situation
that can lead to self-blame and doubts about their pedagogical competence. Instead,
discursive incompatibility can be highlighted as an unavoidable feature of ELT
through which teachers might consider their choices and work toward policies and
practices that are most appropriate for themselves and their students
(Kumaravadivelu 2008). With this approach, emotion labor can serve as a platform
for organizing with colleagues to reform poor pedagogical conditions, such as over-
reliance on standardized literacy tests to exclude students from college-level courses,
unreasonable numbers of papers to grade, and punitive plagiarism policies.
Next, I summarize the findings from each interview topic. This is followed by
suggestions for applying the findings about each area of emotion labor to
classroom-based activities.
 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications 179

Findings Summarized

High-Stakes Literacy Testing

Evidence of teachers’ emotion labor emerged in my data about the impact of
CUNY’s reading and writing assessment in several areas. Overall, respondents
expressed ambivalence about high-stakes testing communicated as five overlapping
discourses: discourse of inevitability, discourse of unfairness, discourse of injustice,
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discourse of gratitude, and discourse of shame. The intermingling of these conflicting

discourses in respondents’ answers served as evidence of teachers’ emotion labor.
For example, the discourse of inevitability in the responses suggested the
tremendous success of the literacy testing industry in postsecondary institutions.
An indication of that success is that assessment tests were discussed as natural and
necessary aspects of English language teaching. It seemed unimaginable to have
ELT without standardized testing for placement and determination of proficiency
to move on to first-year writing courses.
However, inevitability was not a stand-alone discourse, but, rather, enmeshed with
a discourse of unfairness whereby respondents raised concerns about both technical
and linguistic aspects of the actual high-stakes literacy tests in use. In particular, cultural
bias in writing-test prompts and unfavorable testing conditions were discussed.
Also entwined with inevitability and unfairness was a discourse of injustice,
highlighting the unlevel field on which NNES students play. Questions raised by
participants included: Should NNES be tested with the same instruments as NES?
Should scores on assessment tests be the sole determinants of who is permitted to
enroll in first-year writing? How can the impact of students’ socioeconomic status
be taken into account, including their experience and comfort with proficiency
testing, to achieve more just measures?
Overall, respondents’ emotion labor centered on the responsibility they are
charged with as the sole preparers of open-admissions students for entry to the
mainstream, judged by passing the high-stake literacy tests. In terms of feeling rules,
respondents seemed to reject the implicit institutional assumptions that academic
literacy can be achieved quickly and that it can be measured by standardized tests.
Guided by awareness of the years of neglect their immigrant students faced in
overcrowded urban high schools, they expressed concern about the responsibility
thrust on them to prepare students for the literacy demands they would face in
future courses. So, whereas the feeling rules of literacy testing policies seem to
imply that teachers gamely accept the mission to get students through the gates
quickly, respondents expressed doubts about that expectation while trying to fulfill
it, despite the uphill battle.

Responding to Student Writing

The debate in the scholarly literature about what kinds of feedback to offer on
student writing was reflected in the participants’ responses. In particular,
 180 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications

uncertainty about which types of feedback, if any, are effective in promoting

students’ literacy development was present in the data. Solutions to the problem of
not knowing which is most effective varied from not offering written corrective
feedback (WCF) to using rubrics to giving one grade for usage and one for ideas.
In terms of institutional feeling rules, as with high-stakes literacy testing, the
assumption seemed to be that ESL instructors must stoically accept the role of
language teacher who fixes students’ grammar once and for all so that faculty in
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other departments will not have to be bothered. Awareness that postsecondary

English language instructors may be the only ones to address usage issues created
a sense of responsibility to offer WCF. Furthermore, students’ strong desire for
WCF drove some respondents to provide it, despite doubts about its effectiveness.
Aside from questions about which types of feedback to offer, teachers expressed
disappointment and frustration when students appeared not to have learned what
was taught in their writing classes and/or hadn’t devoted sufficient time to their
writing assignments. Some expressed an expectation of parity between teaching
and learning, one that was not always evident in students’ writing. Thus, while
some respondents discussed satisfaction with student progress and commitment to
learning, others expressed frustration that there was insufficient evidence that their
feedback had had an impact on student writing.
Concluding Chapter 5, I cautioned against subscribing to the myth of
improvement in responding to writing. This is especially true for postsecondary
teachers of urban immigrant students, who may have received little writing
instruction in high school and no substantive feedback. Expecting teacher feedback
to have an immediate or even observable effect on subsequent drafts and papers is
not necessarily warranted, according to the related literature I reviewed in that
chapter. Instead, as Sommers’ (2006) longitudinal research demonstrated, it is the
relationship with a trusted reader that undergraduate students recalled, not the
specifics of the teacher feedback they received over the four years of the study.
Therefore, rather than agonizing over which types of comments to offer or
spending inordinate amounts of time responding, EL teachers might develop a
more relaxed attitude toward feedback. This more casual approach would indicate
that we are attending to and care about what students wrote without offering a
comprehensive account of all the issues to attend to in the writing. This is
especially important for part-time instructors who often have a punishing number
of papers to read at any given time because of the number of courses they teach.

Plagiarism
My questions about plagiarism were in four areas: 1) noticing and tracking down
sources of plagiarism; 2) teacher/student interactions around plagiarism; 3)
preventing plagiarism; and 4) causes of plagiarism.
In terms of noticing, plagiarism was reported to be easily detectible. Being
familiar with their students’ writing and with student writing in general,
respondents discussed the obviousness of plagiarized portions. In some cases,
 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications 181

interviewees reported tracking down the source, as evidence of their discovery of

plagiarism while others didn’t.
Matters were more complicated regarding what to do when coming across
portions of student writing that had obviously been copied from published sources.
Far from being unambivalently indignant and vengeful, as the feeling rules of the
CUNY plagiarism policy imply, respondents reported struggling with the
requirement to do something while refusing a punitive approach.
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As to following up with students regarding plagiarism, respondents reported

handling the interaction privately through written comments or face-to-face.
Efforts to avoid embarrassing or shaming student writers were also reported. Some
respondents discussed a conscious attempt to bypass the discourses of plagiarism
policies, including cheating and dishonesty. Instead, the comments and face-to-face
discussions were viewed as pedagogical opportunities, ones that reiterated citation
practices and/or cautioned students that other instructors might not be as tolerant
of copying. Overall, respondents expressed compassion for EL students and a desire
to guide rather than punish them for copying.
When it came to questions about why participants thought postsecondary ELLs
plagiarize, the following overlapping discourses appeared in their responses: discourse
of overextension, discourse of linguistic insecurity, discourse of technology, and
discourse of cultural difference. Interestingly, the discourse of cultural difference was
the one that emerged as a hedge, or hearsay, rather than with a strong embrace. For
example, respondents used phrases such as, “That’s what you hear” or “As we’ve
heard” when discussing cultural differences as a cause of ELLs’ plagiarism.
Instructors’ tendency to handle plagiarism directly with students rather than
reporting them may, in part, be due to the onerous process that is spelled out in
CUNY’s plagiarism policy. Given the requirement to include one’s name, course
name, and contact information, it’s understandable that instructors would be hesitant
to follow through with the reporting process. For instance, reporting might be
associated with the instructor’s inability to prevent plagiarism thereby possibly
jeopardizing their jobs, especially part-time instructors’. Though this impediment to
reporting plagiarism didn’t show up in my data, the wording of plagiarism policies
merits attention. In the pedagogical implications section, I offer ways to address this
wording, toward more humane and contemporary approaches to plagiarism.

Attendance
Rules about absence and lateness in CUNY vary, with greater regulation of
developmental and ESL students. Therefore English language teachers are required
to take attendance and can prevent students who exceed the allowed number of
absences from retaking the assessment tests at the end of the semester.
Despite the attendance rules, a discourse of resistance was notable in responses
to questions about enforcement. Resistance may be attributable to a contradiction
between the vigilance implied by the attendance policy and flexible enforcement
at various administrative levels. It seems that despite published attendance rules,
 182 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications

given CUNY’s open-admissions policy, lateness and absence are at times

overlooked as a way to acknowledge the onerous schedules of working-class
students who often have jobs and family responsibilities.
However, despite evidence of a lack of consistent enforcement of the published
attendance policy, instructors reported a variety of attendance-taking technologies
designed for students to monitor and record their own presence and absence.
These included a sign-in sheet and a quiz at the beginning of class.
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From the perspective of emotions, however, the most interesting findings about
attendance were related to embodiment. These emerged through two discourses:
teachers’ embodied performance and students’ embodied performance. In the case of
teachers’ bodies, there were reports of teachers performing their reactions to the
arrival of late students through gestures indicating disapproval. These instructors did
not simply notate latenesses quietly, but, instead, made their displeasure about students’
late-to-arrive bodies clear through visible and dramatic bodily performances.
As to the discourse of students’ embodied performance, respondents reported
specific postures they preferred to observe in late students as well as postures they
did not want to see. Mainly, late students were not to draw attention away from the
teachers. Instead, they were to enter the classroom unobtrusively or take a seat near
the entry door. Furthermore, some respondents expressed a preference for
latecomers to discern on their own what was going on so as not to divert fellow
students’ attention away from the instructor or current classroom activities.
Respondents also reported that when students are absent, there is a preference
for relationality, through emails, texts, or phone calls. These relational tools prevent
teachers’ emotional in-fillings in the face of student absence, such as questions
about whether the student is in trouble or if they dislike the class or teacher. On
the other hand, some respondents embraced absence as a chance to inquire into
the student’s reasons for missing class, leading to greater understanding of their
challenging lives and any obstacles to attendance.

Pedagogical Implications: Emotion Labor as a Tool for

Collaboration and Change
English language teachers can draw upon emotion labor as a signal of disharmony
and therefore a tool for collaborating with students and colleagues to achieve
greater understanding and possible reform. Too often newly hired EL instructors
struggle privately to reconcile contradictions between their professional training,
scholarly literatures, their early experience in the classroom, and what they are
assigned to do as EL specialists by their institution (Johnson and Golombek 2002,
Verity 2000). Were they taught about emotion labor in their professional training
courses or graduate studies, that sense of isolation might be avoided. They could
attend to their own emotion labor in the workplace as a sign to reach out to
colleagues and/or students to develop solutions collectively.
For example, when I joined the faculty at the College of Staten Island in 1985,
I was the sole ESL specialist on campus. Not only was I professionally isolated, but
 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications 183

the campus itself was geographically remote with no subway service connecting it
to the rest of New York City. Therefore, when I learned of the existence of a
CUNY-wide professional forum for discussing pedagogical issues, I jumped at the
chance to join the group, the CUNY ESL Council, and attend its monthly
meetings in Manhattan. There I found like-minded colleagues as well as those I
disagreed with. Because the CUNY ESL Council was open to full- and part-time
ESL instructors, diverse political positions informed our discussions about the
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CUNY assessment tests, writing assignments, program structures and other matters.
One reform we brought about, after lengthy campaigning, was a 15-minute
extension on the timed multiple-choice CUNY Reading Assessment test, leading
not to large-scale reform, but to greater numbers of students passing that test.
Another way for EL instructors to benefit from emotion labor, rather than
experiencing it silently and privately, is to inform students about its impact. In this
way, students can become aware that their presence, absence, work, and classroom
participation affect their English language instructors, and vice versa. This
awareness might lead to more humane and reciprocal connections, ones honored
by feminist theorists who decried the erasure of teachers’ bodies in the classroom,
particularly women’s bodies (Levy 2000, McWilliam 2000, Probyn 2004).
Attention to emotion labor can restore the political significance of students’ and
teachers’ bodies in classrooms in ways that were indicated in the data around the
discourses of teachers’ and students’ embodied performances.
Furthermore, students can be invited to discuss and write about any emotion
labor arising from clashes between their expectations of academic life and their
experience, especially the impact of institutional regulations. Examples of how
these and other connections might be made are offered next, grouped around the
four areas that my emotion-labor research focused on.

Literacy Testing Conditions

Students can be engaged in writing about and discussing their experience taking
the assessment tests that placed them in their current class. This assignment serves
to address concerns like those that appeared in my data, such as unfair and unjust
testing conditions. To this end, I distribute a questionnaire at the start of ESL
writing and reading classes, with the following questions:

Literacy Test Questionnaire

1. When was the last time you took the (name of test)?
2. Where did you take it?
3. Were you comfortable while taking the test? Why or why not?
4. What was most difficult for you about taking the test?
5. How did you feel when you got the score? Why did you feel this way?
6. What changes, if any, would you like to see in the test?
 184 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications

These questions, and others, can be the starting point for a full-class discussion
of testing conditions, and other issues, prompting students to recall their experience
which, when shared, can uncover external conditions that might have distracted
them and should therefore be changed. When leading discussions about their
answers, I’ve learned about various distractions my students faced. For example, one
class informed me that there were proctors who worked on their laptops during
the test, producing noisy clicks that disrupted students’ concentration.
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Another issue that arose was how often proctors should announce the passing
of time while students are working on the test. Most reported that they wanted to
be informed only when five or ten minutes were left. Despite this preference, some
proctors announced the remaining time every five or ten minutes, needlessly
distracting students.
A third distraction that emerged is fellow students walking out of the testing
room before all students have completed their test. Their exiting was reported to
cause not just a rupture of attention, but also concern, among those who hadn’t
finished, about whether they should complete the test more quickly. To address this
distraction, I now ask students to collaboratively create a policy around exiting
before others are done. The usual consensus has been that everyone should stay
until the test time is over, out of consideration for their peers. A side benefit is that
those predisposed to rushing may slow themselves down and use the full time they
are allowed on the test.
Though these issues may seem trivial and fail to address larger questions about
testing and tracking, they engage students in thinking about the mutability of
current conditions. I say this because I report students’ concerns to the testing
office, with which I’ve cultivated a good relationship. Their responsiveness to
students’ preferences, including not permitting proctors to use laptops, has
demonstrated to students that they have a voice in improving conditions. My hope
is that this demonstration may spur them to action in other domains as well.
Instructors who may not have a direct relationship with their testing offices can
report students’ concerns to their supervisors who in turn might report them to
those in charge of testing.

Responding to Student Writing

The greatest dilemma about responding to student writing seems to be that the
feedback may not produce noticeable improvement in student writing. This means
that the often lengthy time teachers spend reading papers and writing comments
might be unproductive, even counterproductive. Yet, English language learners
often expect and sometimes demand feedback, usually written corrective feedback.
Failing to comply with this expectation could upset students and even diminish the
respect they have for their EL instructors.
To address these issues, English language teachers might discuss their emotion
labor around responding to student writing as a way to prompt students to
question their own assumptions about teacher feedback. To this end, a
 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications 185

questionnaire can be distributed when collecting the first set of papers of the
semester. Its purpose would be to encourage students to think about the types of
feedback they’re accustomed to, its utility, the type of feedback they’d prefer and
why, and so on. Here are some possible questions:

Feedback Questionnaire
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1. How much time did you spend writing this paper?

2. How much time do you think the teacher should spend reading your
paper?
3. What kind(s) of feedback are you used to getting on your papers? Do you
find this feedback useful or not useful? Why?
4. What type(s) of feedback would you like to receive?
5. How would that feedback help you?

These questions can lead to whole-class discussion of the types of feedback

students have received in the past, the purposes it has served or failed to serve, what
types of feedback they desire, and how they believe it might help them. The most
fruitful aspect of these discussions is that they can help students deepen their
understanding of writing, beyond issues of correctness. Discussion of students’
answers to questions about feedback is a collaboration between teachers and their
students about responding to writing and using that response in a conscious and
productive way. At the same time, expectations about improvement can be
tempered by knowledge that one semester may not be sufficient to observe
significant changes in student writing (Knoblauch and Brannon 2006).
At the institutional level, it might be beneficial to discuss responding to writing
with colleagues across the curriculum. For example, a college administrator told
me that the number one complaint of humanities faculty is the workload of
responding to writing, along with doubts about the impact of the written feedback.
A college-wide discussion about how much time to spend responding, what to
write, and what to expect from the feedback could improve the comments as well
as students’ uptake, leading to more satisfying experiences all around.

Plagiarism
Given the mismatch between CUNY’s plagiarism policy and teachers’ responses to
finding copied language in their students’ papers, a good place to start pedagog-
ically is the policy itself. A critical discourse analysis of the plagiarism policy allows
students to consider the punitive language, the extent of the sanctions, and any
confusion about the institution’s demand that they use “their own words” when
writing in additional languages.
Critical discourse analysis might be launched by reading the policy and
answering the following kinds of questions:
 186 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications

Analyzing the Plagiarism Policy

1. Who do you think wrote the policy?
2. Why do you think they wrote it?
3. Underline any words that you think are interesting or important. Why did
you choose these words?
4. Underline any phrases that you think are interesting or important. Why
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did you choose these phrases?

5. How, if at all, does the policy apply to you as a student?
6. Do you think the policy is a good one? Why or why not?
7. Do you think it is effective? Why or why not?
8. How, if at all, would you change it?

Whole-class sharing of students’ answers to these questions can lead to frank

discussion of copying: its role in students’ prior experience, if any, and its possible
role in their future writing. Furthermore, a redrafting of the policy is an
opportunity for students to consider the merits and pitfalls of copying from
published texts and how they might position themselves as either for or against
plagiarism.
Another pedagogical intervention is to experiment with Goldsmith’s (2011)
assignments, such as the one in which he requires students to write an essay
sourced entirely from published texts. The requirement to write a coherent text by
cutting and pasting from multiple sources forces students to attend to syntax,
vocabulary, transitions, meaning, and so on, demonstrating that plagiarism, when
done in the most extreme manner, is quite challenging.
Furthermore, newspaper articles about plagiarism can be assigned as writing
prompts. One that I have asked English language learners to write about,
“Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age” (www.nytimes.com/2010/
08/02/education/02cheat.html) offers a balanced discussion of citation challenges
that arise when students use Internet sources, including questions of fair use and
attribution. Yet, the article also draws on the discourse of technology by acknowl-
edging the ease of cutting and pasting. My students have taken a range of positions
when writing about this article. Some included personal examples that described
receiving failing grades after copying without attribution. Others revealed their
continued confusion about citation, given the lack of transparency about
differences between fair use and the requirements of attribution. Still others have
promoted the benefits of copying from sources as a way of learning new material.
Given the variety of responses the above-mentioned article elicited, it, and similar
articles and essays, can be a useful starting point for classroom discussion of the
meanings and implications of plagiarism.
At the institutional level, revising current plagiarism policies might be
considered to move away from a legalistic and punitive approach toward greater
nuance and acknowledgment of the difficulties of mastering academic discourse.
 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications 187

Along these lines, Howard (1995) recommended redrafting plagiarism policies as

an activity that could be initiated by an English department or across departments
to achieve more humane approaches to the very complex issues of originality and
citation that have emerged in the postmodern digital world.

Attendance
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Teachers can discuss the emotion labor they experience when students are late or
absent to dramatize the significance of attendance. Far from being unnoticed,
students’ presence and absence communicate a variety of messages of which they
may be unaware. Therefore a discussion of the meaning of attendance can alert
students to messages their bodies may convey. Teachers’ revelations about their
emotion labor in relation to attendance humanizes pedagogical relationships,
helping students understand the significance of their presence and absence beyond
the enumeration of permitted lateness and absence.
Aside from telling students about their emotion labor around attendance, teachers
can learn about students’ beliefs about and approaches to attendance, including any
obstacles that might prevent them from attending. This classroom-based research
could be carried out by posing the following questions at the start of the semester:

Attendance Questionnaire
1. What has caused you to be late in the past?
2. What might cause you to be late to this class?
3. What has prevented you from attending one or more classes?
4. What might cause you to miss my class this semester?
5. How can students in this class help each other maintain their attendance
and keep up with the work?

Like the plagiarism policy, the attendance policy can be shared and analyzed.
Using critical discourse analysis, students can study the language, audience, purpose,
and penalties. They can be invited to write a policy for the current class, one that
comports with their experience and daily lives. By engaging directly with
attendance issues, students can become more aware of the impact of their presence
and consider the consequences of absence and lateness.
Furthermore, presence might be discussed from the perspective of degrees of
attention. This could be done by exploring what it means for one’s body to be
present while one’s mind is elsewhere. The distractions of texting and checking
social media can be considered, with students drawing up policies about classroom
attention.
At the institutional level, it might be useful to review attendance policies with
administrators to ensure that they are fair and reflective of the ad hoc policies being
carried out by instructors.
 188 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications

Anything Else? Implications for Future Research

Finally, I share some topics not covered in this book, ones that could be explored
in future research. These were revealed at the end of the interviews when, if we
had not exceeded the allotted time, I asked respondents whether there were other
topics related to pedagogy and emotions that they wished to raise. Their answers
can be grouped into the following categories: 1) a lack of institutional commitment
to NNES students in courses across the curriculum, with the entire onus of English
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language teaching falling on EL teachers; 2) how the ethos of caring about students
in the field of ELT clashes with the ethos of academic detachment in postsec-
ondary settings, leading to questions about appropriateness; 3) students’ desire for a
teacher younger than the respondent, or ageism among students; and 4) lack of
attention in CUNY (and in my research questions) to English language learners’
speaking, with the focus solely on English language literacy. Given these issues, I
end this chapter with questions that were not covered in my research but that
might guide future emotion-labor research:

1. What is the emotional impact on EL instructors of being positioned as those

who fix NNES students’ language once and for all, as a way of preparing them
for the mainstream?
2. What tension might teachers in postsecondary settings experience between
notions of an academic classroom atmosphere and a caring community? How
might they reconcile these differences?
3. What is the role of age in postsecondary English language learners’ perceptions
of their instructors? How do these perceptions affect older EL teachers?
4. What emotion labor might arise in relation to teaching speaking to English
language learners at the postsecondary level?

Coda
Across the interdisciplinary field of L2 studies, scholars are increasingly taking
a keen interest in investigating the forms and functions of emotion…
(Prior 2015, p. 3)

At the end of Considering Emotions in Critical English Language Teaching: Theories and
Praxis (Benesch 2012), I expressed hope for an affective turn in ELT, as there has
been in fields such as geography, political science, sociology, history, and cultural
studies. Indeed, interest in emotions and affect has grown, not just in ELT but also
in the wider field of applied linguistics. This can be seen in the work of Appleby
(2013), Dewaele et al. (2016), Dörneyei and Kubanyiova (2014), Gabrys-Barker and
Bielska (2012), Golombek. and Doran (2014), Motha and Lin (2013), Norton
(2013), Pavlenko (2012), Prior (2015), Takahashi (2013), Warriner (2013),
Waterhouse (2012), and others who have contributed to the expanding literature.
Some of these authors took a cognitive approach to emotions while others
 Conclusion and Pedagogical Implications 189

departed from the individualism of a cognitive orientation and considered the role
of power relations in English language teaching and learning. Whatever the
orientation, all foreground what had been a tangential area of applied linguistics
research: emotions of English language learners and their teachers.
I look forward to future publications that take emotions into account toward a
deeper and more comprehensive understanding of teaching and learning processes.
I particularly hope that others will be moved to study English language teachers’
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emotion labor as a way to highlight the relationship between institutional policies

and teachers’ professional training, beliefs, and experiences, including compliance
and resistance.

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 INDEX
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Page number with a n indicates an endnote resistance 10–11, 163–6, 173, 181–2;
policies 148–9; questionnaire as
Abasi, A. R. 125 discussion aid 187; regulation of 149–51,
absence: corporality 159–60; embodied 162; student absence, emotional
168–9, 173–4; emotional in-fillings obligations 171–3, 174; students as
160–1, 162–3, 171–3, 174, 182; self-managers 150–1, 152–3, 162–3, 182;
materialities of 161–2, 168; mixed students, presence of 169–71; teachers as
reactions 10; as performative 169–71; as classroom managers 150–1, 151–2,
relational 159–60, 167–8, 173, 182; 156–7; teachers’ presence 156–8;
students 156, 158–61 technologies of 157, 166–9, 173
acting, deep: job satisfaction 45; socially Australia: literacy, national assessment
accepted emotion 40 policy impacts 61–3; plagiarism policy,
acting, surface: burnout potential 45 teacher perceptions 125–6; teacher
affect: absence 159; contagious potential presence 157–8
157–8; Deuleuzian concept 62; feedback Au, W. 57
practices 84, 88–9; plagiarism detection
127, 128 Barger, P. 43
affective labour 62 Barrett, L. F. 16, 19–20, 32
affective turn 15, 27, 188–9 Beatty, A. 14
Ahmed, S. 2, 16, 28–32, 106, 127 Belsey, C. 17
Appleby, R. 188 Benesch, S. 4, 6. 16, 30, 34n, 177, 188
Angelil-Carter, S. 122 Berlin, J. 5, 92
anxiety: absence, teacher/student Berthoff, A. E. 6, 82
interactions 172–3; emotion labor and biological approaches to emotions:
anger 46; external judgement 63, 64; criticisms of 19–20; Ekman’s basic
student test preparation 58; student emotions 18–20; Facial Action Coding
writing and feedback 6, 94–5, 100, 104–5 System (FACS) 19; innateness and of
Assaf, L. C. 57–8 the brain 16, 18–19; Saussure’s theory of
attendance: discursive analysis 162, 187; language 16–17; structuralist
embodied performance 157–8; emotion egalitarianism 17–18; universality 16–17,
labor, data analysis 149, 162–73; lateness, 18–19, 33
interruption as disrespectful 169–71, Bitchener, J. 87
174, 182; lateness, policy enforcement Bloch, J. 118
 192 Index

Boden, L. 161–2 discourses: cultural difference 141–4, 145,

bodies: erasure of 157; student’s absence 181; data analysis 11–12, 62–3; deficits
156, 158–61, 174; students, presence of 63; embodied performance 157–8,
169–71; teachers’ presence 156–8; 168–71, 182; emotional in-fillings
theorizing 155–61 160–1, 162–3, 171–3, 174, 182;
Brannon, L. 5–6, 107–8 gratitude 68, 74–5; inevitability 58–9,
Britton, J. 6, 81 68, 69–70, 78, 179; injustice 68, 71–4,
78; linguistic insecurity 140–1;
Calkins, L. 82 overextension 140; relationality 167–8,
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Canagarajah, A. S. 146 171–2, 182; resistance 62, 64, 163–5;

Casanave, C. P. 85 shame 68, 75–6; student self-regulation
Chandrasoma, R. 124 167–8; technology 141; unfairness
China: acting and teacher burnout 45; 59–60, 68, 69–71, 78, 179
memorization and plagiarism 120; Donahue, C. 123–4
plagiarism and cultural stereotyping Dörneyei, Z. 188
117–18, 119–20, 141–2
Chun, C. W. 54n, 150 Ekman, P. 18–20
City University of New York (CUNY): Elbow, P. 5, 115
attendance policy 11, 148–9; literacy Emig, J. 81
testing and language policy 4–5, 12n, emotional exhaustion 45–6
67–8; literacy tests and emotion labor emotional geographies 15, 30–1, 159
research 66–9; plagiarism policy 8, emotional literacy: emotional skills,
111–12 cultivation of 151–3; SEAL initiative
classroom management 149–51 (UK), critique of 153–5
Clement, R. 25 emotional skills: student self-regulation
Clough, P. T. 34n 150, 152–3; teachers as classroom
cognitive approaches to emotions: managers 149–52
“academic emotions” 22–4; appraisal of emotion labor: catalyst for reform vi–vii;
events 21; criticisms of 26–7; emotion commodification in workplaces 41–3;
episodes, components of 21–2; stimulus concept modifications 12, 43–6;
appraisal and language learning 24–5, 33 corrective revisions, burden of
Cohn, J. F. 19 responsibility 96–8, 108, 180; discursive
College of Staten Island (CSI): attendance identities, managing contradictions
policy 11; literacy tests, mixed opinions 50–1; discursively-constructed 48–9;
4; plagiarism policy 8 emotional dissonance 45, 48, 50–1;
Comber, B. 62–3, 78 external judgement 63, 64; feedback
compassion: plagiarism detection 112, demands 94–6, 106; future research
131–2, 134–6, 145, 181 topics 188; Hochschild’s concept 1, 38;
Cormack, P. 62–3, 78 Hochschild’s concept, critique of 46–9;
cultural politics of emotions 28–31, 33 lateness, policy enforcement resistance
CUNY Assessment Test in Writing 165–6, 172–3, 181–2; literacy testing,
(CATW) 67, 69, 71, 74, 76, 93 contributing factors 4–5, 53; modernist
CUNY ESL Council 4, 67, 183 assumptions 48–51; multi-dimensional
CUNY ESL Discipline Council 67 and directional 51–2; pedagogical
implications 182–7; personal history
Darder, A. 148 53–4, 182–3; plagiarism, causes of
Darwin, C. 18, 19–20 143–4; plagiarism, confrontation
Davidson, J. 15 avoidance 134–5, 137–8, 145, 181;
Dewaele, J-M. 188 plagiarism detection, teacher’s anger
Diab, R. L. 80 127–8, 130–1, 134, 145; plagiarism,
disappointment: plagiarism detection 9, effects of 8–10; plagiarism policy,
130–1; social norms, rejection of 29–30; reluctant enforcement 125–6, 132–3,
student commitment, lack of 102–3, 135–6, 144–5, 181; poststructural
180; student reaction as catalyst 52 approaches 47–52; power relations 37–8,
 Index 193

47, 64; professional dilemma 52–3; Frers, L. 155–6, 158, 159–60

professional identity and testing Fulwiler, T. 82
pressures 53, 57–60, 59–60, 65, 73–4,
77–9, 179; psychological perspective Gabrys-Barker, D. 188
39–40; qualitative approach 47; Gillies, V. 153–5, 174–5n
quantitative approaches 44–6; research, Goffman, E. 38
tool for 177–8; role as responder, reader Goldsmith, K. 121, 122–3, 186
or evaluator 98–100; social perspective Golombek, P. 188
38–9; structural approach 43–4; student government policies: literacy tests and
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absence 171–3, 182; student reciprocity, performance culture 52–3, 59–60; test
lack of 100–2, 180; student test compliance and accountability 61–2
preparation 58–60; student writing, Grandey, A. A. 44
feedback policy and practices 85–8; test Graves, D. 81
compliance and accountability 61–3, Groth, M. 43
73–6; unequal power and injustices
71–2 Hamp-Lyons, L. 65
emotion management 38–9, 41, 54n, happiness, socially mandated 29–30, 39
149–51 Harding, J. 26–7
emotion rules 51–2 Herman, D. 17
emotions: “academic emotions” 22–4; Hochschild, A. R.: commodification of
appraisals 21–2; basic emotion approach emotions in workplaces 41–3; emotion
(Ekman) 16, 18–20; biological labor, concept of 1, 38; emotion
approaches 16–20, 33; brain, relationship management 38–9, 41, 54n; feeling rules
with 16, 18–19, 24–5; cognitive 39, 42–3, 54n; signal function 42;
approaches 21–7, 33; commodification surface and deep acting 40; unitary
in workplaces 41–3; cultural-politics authentic self 48
approach 28–31; innateness 16, 18–19; Hoffman, E. 25
mediated 28–9; overlapping and shifting Hong Kong: direct error feedback 85–6;
31; positive and negative binary memorization and plagiarism 124–5
formulation 22–4; poststructural/ Horner, B. 115–16, 128
discursive approaches 14–16, 28–33; Horowitz, D. 6
power relations 28–9, 31, 33; signal Howard, R. M. 114–16, 187
function 42; social perspective 38–9; Hull, G. 113–14
structuralist egalitarianism 17–18; Hyland, F. 89–90, 126–7, 145
universality 16–17, 18–19 Hyland, K. 89–90
emotion work 48–51
English for academic purposes (EAP) 6 Imai, Y. 27
English language teachers, postsecondary 2, indignation: plagiarism and policy response
182–3 1, 9; student commitment, lack of 103;
English language teaching (ELT): critical teaching to the test, injustice of 72–4
vi–vii, 33–4, 53–4, 177–8; postsecondary
2, 182–3 Jaggar, A. M. 26
Jennings, P. A. 151–2
feeling rules: conscious defiance 42–3; Jin, L. 118
contradictory 40, 86–7, 112, 127–8, Johnson, K. E. 182
130–1, 173, 181–2; definition 1, 39; Johnson-Laird, P.N. 21–2
defying 42–3, 51–2, 93–4, 135–6;
emotional conventions 39; implicit 1, Keller, M. M 45–6
39, 148, 179; obedience to 33, 42, 97; Kimura, Y. 54n
resistance to 52, 62, 163–6, 181–2; tacit Knoblauch, C. H. 5–6, 107–8
1, 9, 53, 54 Korea 90–1
Ferris, D. 86–8 Kostogriz, A. 61–2
Fineman, S. 47 Kubota, R. 118, 119
Frenzel, A. C. 22, 24 Kumaravadivelu, B. 118–19
 194 Index

Lay, N. D. 82 Norton Peirce, B. 27

learning culture 65
Leavitt, J. 15 Oatley, K. 21–2
Lee, G. 90–1 open-admissions: institutions 3, 78–9;
Lee, I. 85–6 policies 4, 67, 78, 179, 181–2; students
Levi-Strauss, C. 17 67, 173
Levy, B. 156, 183 Oplatka, I. 54n
Lewis, M. 20, 34n
Liew, W. M. 52–3, 59–60 Parr, H. 160
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literacy tests, high-stakes: cultural bias and patchworking 113–14, 115, 122–3
unfair administration 69–71, 78, 179, Pavlenko, A. 27, 32–3
184; emotion labor, contributing factors Payton, J. 152–3
4–5; emotion labor research at CUNY Pecorari, D. 120–1
66–77; endorsement as assessment tool Pekrun, R. 22–4
61–2, 74; English, perpetrated Pennycook, A. 17–18, 28, 109n, 124–5
dominance 64; exam culture 65; fairness Perl, S. 81
and justice distinctions 65–6, 179; gates Phan, Le Ha 117, 118, 120, 121, 146
to higher education 67, 71, 72–3, 77, Plamper, J. 14, 15
78–9; impact findings in US 57; plagiarism: academic dishonesty 111–12,
inevitability of use 69–70, 179; linguistic 126; Asian students, stereotyping 118–20,
discrimination and exclusion 59, 62–4, 141–2, 145–6; causes of 140–4, 145, 181;
65–6, 68, 71–2, 179; professional CSI policy 8; CUNY Academic
identity and testing pressures 53, 57–8, Integrity Policy 111–12; distraction from
59–60, 65, 73–4, 77–9, 179; learning 138–9; emotion labor, data
questionnaire as discussion aid 183–4; analysis 129–44; emotion labor, related to
resistance to standardization 62, 64; 1–2, 7–10; feeling rules implied 1;
student reaction 4; teaching to the test, institutional policies 111–12, 126; L1
related shame 75–6 composition scholarship literature
Liu, D. 117, 118, 119–20 113–16; L2 composition scholarship
Loh, C. E. 52–3, 59–60 literature 116–21; legalistic discourse 112,
125–6, 144, 186; memorization 119–20,
Makoni, S. 28 124–5, 145–6; noticing and pursuing
McFarlane, B. 162 suspicions 127–8, 129–33, 144–5, 180–1;
McNamara, T. 65–6, 68 patchworking, pedagogical opportunity
McWilliam, E. 156–7 114, 115, 122–3, 186; politics of 115–16;
Massumi, B. 34n prevention activities 136–8; questionnaire
Matsuda, P. K. 109n study 125–6; reprise-modification 123–4;
Mayher, J. S. 82 sticky object 128; teacher/student
Meier, L. 159 interactions 126–7, 132–6, 145, 181, 186;
Meyer, M. 161 teaching of 121–5; textual ownership,
mind/body: relationship 25, 26, 29; split 15, Internet’s impact 114–15
21 poststructural/discursive approaches to
Moors, A. 21–2 emotions: criticisms of 31–3;
Motha, S. 188 cultural-politics approach 28–31, 33
power: discourses of 3, 48–9, 50–1, 54,
National Assessment Program-Literacy and 125–6; imbalance 43, 53; individual and
Numeracy (NAPLAN), Australia 61–3 social norms 29–30, 90; institutional
neoliberalism: classroom management 30–1, 52–3, 64, 119, 150; relations 12,
policy 150–2; ideology of 61, 150; 28–9, 33, 53, 54, 56, 85, 90, 119, 135,
teacher monitoring and accountability 189; resistance to 64, 135–6; unequal 47,
61–2; teacher’s role 156–7 53, 71–2; in workplaces 37–8, 47
New York University (NYU) 5–6 Price, M. 122
Ngai, S. 33 Pribram, E. D. 26–7
Norton, B. 188 Prinz, J. 34n
 Index 195

Prior, M. T. 188 cultivation of 149–50

Probyn, E. 148, 156, 183 social and emotional competence (SEC)
process: pedagogy, advocacy and critiques 149–50, 151–2
5–6; vs. product debate 6–7; writing social and emotional learning (SEL)
5–6, 81–2 149–50, 152–3
professional identity: classroom Sommers, N. 82, 88–9, 105, 180
management 150, 151–2; learning Sowden, C. 116–17, 118, 119–20
culture in assessment 65; non-native standard language ideology 7, 85, 86
teachers, perceptions of 90–1; plagiarism Starfield, S. 115
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and student relations 112, 125–6, 134–6, sticky objects: acceptance/rejection

144–6; student commitment 101–3, consequences 29–30; concept of 29;
106–7, 180; teacher monitoring and plagiarism 128; written corrective
accountability 61–3, 73; testing feedback (WCF) 99–100, 106
pressures, effect on 53, 57–8, 59–60, 65, Storch, N. 83–4
73–4, 77–9 structuralism 16–18, 43–4; Saussure 16–17
Sutherland-Smith, W. 125–6, 166
Rabie, B. 86–7, 88 Sutton, R. 58–9
Raimes, A. 6, 82 Svasek, M. 14–15
Rampton, B. 153
responding to student writing: belief in Takahashi, K. 188
despite workload 86–7; feedback Tavares, H. 150
process, data analysis 92–107; frustration teacher feedback: belief in despite
over repeated misinterpretation 100–2, workload 86–7; interpersonal, valued by
106, 180; interpersonal dimensions students 89–90; L1 and L2 process
88–91, 184–5; L1 process-writing writing, research 81–2; learning culture
research 81–2; L2 process research 82; 65; sociocultural interpretation 90–1;
myth of improvement 107–8, 180; peer student writing 6–7; written corrective
groups 6–7, 85; revision, burden of feedback (WCF) 83–5, 87–8
responsibility 97–8, 180; student Tracy, S. J. 48–9, 50–1, 54
commitment, lack of 102–3, 106–7; Trethewey, A. 48–9, 54
teachers’ attitudes 85–8; teacher’s role, Truscott, J. 84
reader or evaluator 98–100; time
demands and quality sacrifices 94–6, UK: SEAL (social and emotional aspects of
106, 185; written corrective feedback learning) programs 153–5
(WCF) 83–5, 87, 92, 106, 180 United States: literacy tests, impact findings
Robillard, A. E. 115–16, 127–8 57; teacher certification, preparation
Robinson, V. 14 dilemmas 59–60
Robinson, Y. 153–4
Verity, D. P. 182
Saussure, F. de 16–17 Vietnam 117, 120
Scherer, K. 22
Schumann, J. H. 24–5, 27 Warriner, D. S. 188
Seeger, P. 121–2 Waterhouse, M. 188
self: authentic 45; contextual 48; Watkins, M. 156, 157–8
crystallized 49; discursively-constructed Weare, K. 153
48–9, 50–1; essential 48; false 40; inner Wetherell, M.32
vs. outer 39, 40; mediated 48; preferred Wharton, A. S. 44, 46
49; public vs. private 48–9; real vs. fake written corrective feedback (WCF) 83–5,
27, 40, 48–9; unitary authentic 48 87–8, 106
Shohamy, E. 56, 63, 64
Sime, D. 158 Yamada, K. 122
Singapore 52–3, 59–60 Yorio, C. 6–7
social and emotional aspects of learning
(SEAL): critique 153–5; emotional skills, Zamel, V. 6, 82
 196 Index

Zangrando, R. L. 123
Zembylas, M. 30–1, 51–2
Zhang, Q. 45
Zhu, W. 45
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