A few thoughts on... recognizing emotional labor
Actually, a whole lot of thoughts on how foundational it could be to teaching - plus the March linkfest and April TOOS preview
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Emotional Labor Could Be a Foundational Shift - Start By Recognizing It
I first heard the term “emotional labor”during the pandemic, used in some casual conversation, and from context, the meaning seemed to be somewhere between “emotional energy” and what is traditionally thought of as “women’s work.” It resonated with me because there is a significant amount of emotional energy that is taken up leading, because by trying to stay calm under pressure, you’re often absorbing a lot of other people’s strong emotions.
And then I read this article by Susanna Crossman, an Anglo-French writer and clinical art therapist, about the complexity of managing the demands of emotional labor for staff in hospital settings through Conor Friedsdorf’s The Best of Journalism Substack newsletter (strong recommend - pricey for Substack but worth it.) And it turns out I had it partially right, but the article provided a depth of understanding that then made me wonder if some of the insights might apply to the complications of retaining teachers and staff at schools.
First off, I want to make it absolutely clear that I’m in any way drawing a direct equivalency between the real and dramatically high stakes of everyday hospital work and the day to day work of education. But in terms of the complexity of having a job where a key part of it is managing other people’s emotions while managing your own, there are undoubtedly similarities.
As I’ve said before - the work at independent school has changed, but the jobs generally have not, from what is required of the Board of Trustees on down the ladder. It’s manifesting in the complicated problem of faculty and staff recruitment and retention. And an association staffer recently shared that the numbers in the head of school pipeline are concerning. And then there’s the challenge of not only finding trustees, but finding trustees who are willing to take leadership roles.
Recently, I was talking to a trustee at a thriving school who said, “on the surface, everything is going well but I worry that underneath, the faculty and staff still haven’t fully rebounded from the pandemic.” She wasn’t complaining; she was musing. I kept thinking about that comment because it resonated with me in many conversations with independent school staff in all kinds of roles. Pandemic education made us fundamentally look at education differently and once we’ve seen it, we can’t unsee it.
And then add on the advent of AI and how that has so quickly impacted pedagogy as usual, so many kids dealing with anxiety and depression, the growing data about the ill effects of smartphones on kids and research that has to at least make you question whether or not we maybe had it kind of wrong about the SAT for decades. And maybe most concerning, the fact many families in every sector of society now view school as portable and optional. It makes you wonder what ground is solid under your feet.
Every time I go down this road, I also have to wonder if I’m romanticizing the “good old days.” And I think that’s part of it. It’s normal to see the past as being tinted pink. And there are plenty of things that I wouldn’t go back to about the good old days.
But it’s also true the world has changed and the work has changed. And that’s hard. And there are other ways to make a living.
So I started to wonder what might happen if we fundamentally rethought the role of emotional labor in education? What if we explicitly named it in job descriptions?