English teachers' emotions and identity in rural primary schools in mainland China : a critical narrative ethnographic study

Abstract

Being an English teacher in a rural primary school in China involves complex and multiple emotional experiences, as they are immersed in institutions serving poor and marginalized communities in under-resourced teaching conditions and face negative views of rural education, including that rural teachers are inferior to their urban counterparts in English language teaching. The ways in which rural teachers emotionally engage in their work by responding to and shaping these challenging conditions are worth exploring. This narrative study aims to critically examine the complexities of three rural English teachers’ emotional experiences in mainland China. Teachers’ emotional experiences were examined based on several notions. There are particular emotional rules (Zembylas, 2002) implicit in these institutional norms and broader narratives that teachers perform. These rules pervade and shape emotional geographies (Hargreaves, 2000b), professional relationships teachers have with administrators, students, parents, and colleagues. When teachers experience emotions arising from conflicts at school, this produces a kind of labor (Benesch, 2017), that is, a struggle over one’s identity, meanings, and practices. Taking up a social constructionist epistemology, the three rural English teachers’ emotional experiences were studied through a critical narrative ethnographic methodology, exploring the consequences and possibilities of the various discourses that underpinned the cultivation of their emotional practices and the formation of teacher identity. Their narratives were generated through conversations, emotion diaries, participant observation, and documents over two months. I examined how power relations constituted and were constituted by the three teachers’ emotional geographies and how teachers accepted or resisted dominant emotional rules through engaging with emotion labor. The study shows how power comes to operate in rural English teachers’ lives, producing teachers’ emotion labor manifested as their multiple,