Emotion labor in response to supervisor feedback: is feedback a burden or a blessing?

In recent years, research on the emotional side of language teachers’ work has grown exponentially. One progressively-developing subset of this line of inquiry concerns how institutional discourses/expectations interact with teachers’ internal feelings, which bears on how they manage their emotions in response to such an interaction and is known as emotion labor. One type of institutional expectation of concern to the present study is the feedback that institutional supervisors provided for the teachers and could be a source of emotion labor. Motivated by this consideration, this study explored 12 Iranian EFL teachers’ emotion labor in relation to supervisor feedback on their classroom instruction. The context of the study was a language school governed by mostly top-down policies, especially those of classroom observation, realized mainly through providing post-class feedback by school supervisors, with little interaction between them and the teachers. Drawing on data from interviews and narrative frames, we report on how supervisor feedback on the teachers’ classroom instruction functioned as a source of emotional tension for the teachers and how they engaged in surface- and deep-acting management of their emotions to navigate the supervisory feedback. Based on the findings, we provide implications for teacher educators and school supervisors to reconsider their post-class supervisory feedback so that teachers experience less emotional tension.