ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on secondary school teachers’ experiences of the way in which they are affected by the emotional labour involved in their profession. It is widely accepted that teaching involves a great deal of emotion and is an emotionally demanding job. The chapter explores the emotional labour associated with other aspects of teaching as well as classroom work, such as relationships with peers and managers, workload, and the impact of educational reform. The emotional labour involved in teaching is largely seen by researchers through the nature of interactions with pupils, and the image of the teacher as a caring professional is a major aspect of the job. What Hochschild and other researchers found is that sustained emotional labour can have the effect that workers start to experience exhaustion and/or burn-out, suppress the real self, and suffer from a distorted emotional reality.
