HE Teachers and Emotional Labour
Consider the work you undertake and see if this article resonates with you:
Constanti, P. & Gibbs, P. (2004). Higher education teachers and emotional labour. International Journal of Educational Management, 18(4), 243-249.
The student as customer is always an interesting discussion. On one hand, the customer needs to be satisfied, on the other, the student needs to satisfy the criteria. It can always go that if the customer is too demanding of immediate satisfaction – passing courses and being pandered to – that they will be unsatisfied when they are out in the work force only to find that they are unprepared for the job. Customers do not always know what their future needs are. Take the customer that demands really low prices. After a few weeks, the product breaks. They realise that cheap and high quality do not necessarily equate in the same product. They can’t, however, see that an easy-to-pass education has a tendency to lead to failure, or at least job dissatisfaction, very soon after entering the workforce.
As for emotional labour, the term seems to be misleading in that this article describes it as a need to suppress feelings and emotions in teaching to satisfy the customer and management. I don’t see why this needs to be the case. It describes needing to always be positive and happy in a customer service environment and employees being trained to change their emotions. They present lots of literature to show that emotional labour is not productive in the end and can lead to negative consequences. I can see that putting on a positive attitude might be necessary in the extremely short interactions in some customer service industries, such as checkout operator in a supermarket, or a receptionist, but when there is extended interaction, such as with a teacher and students, why is there that compulsion? Surely if an appropriate relationship is built, with the high level of lecture – student interaction that is one of the 7 principles, then the students will realise that lecturers are human. If lecturers ARE emotionally invested in the teaching and in their students, then whether they are happy or not on a particular day does not take away from that overall sense of those lecturers caring about the well-being of their students.
An interesting point later in the article that perhaps the students don’t want to be seen as purely customers and have their lecturers showing false enthusiasm. That really does just make them seem like a commodity and not individuals. Yes, they want enthusiastic teachers, but can’t they see through the falsity if they are not genuine?
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