EMOTIONAL LABOR: TEACHERS’ UNDERSTANDINGS OF THEIR EMOTIONAL LIVES IN PRESCHOOL CLASSROOMS

This study examines how early childhood teachers understand their emotional lives and explores the research question: How do early childhood teachers understand emotional labor in the daily life of the preschool classroom? More specifically, an emotional labor theoretical framework was used to analyze how preschool teachers self-regulate and manage their emotions. This framework suggests that we all do some amount of “acting” or “performance” of emotion in the workplace. A qualitative methodology was used to gather data from three semi-structured interviews and classroom observations. Participants were three preschool lead or assistant teachers and one preschool administrator working in a University early care and education center in the Southern Region of the United States. Findings indicated that preschool teachers understood emotional labor to be related to emotional support, emotional regulation, and emotional comfort/discomfort. Implications for practice from this study include the need for leaders to advocate for increased income, benefits, and support for teachers in order to prevent burnout, the need to spread awareness about the difficult emotion work that teachers do, as well as systemic work to normalize emotional expression in the ECE field.