2019 Annual Conference

Workforce Development, Continuing Education, and Professional Development

Concurrent Session (45 minutes)

Referring to emotional labor as “unpaid work”, leaves true emotional labor unrecognized and unaddressed. Feminist pedagogies can help educators subvert the effects of actual emotional labor on women’s self-understanding.

Our target audiences for this session are those working in professional development, workforce development, and higher education as adult educators. Specifically, we intend for educators who are interested in developing a better understanding of emotional labor and feminist pedagogies to attend this session. We welcome educators who have limited knowledge regarding emotional labor or who have been involved in similar conversations to contribute to this session as well.

As a result of attending this session, attendees will:
-Be able to understand the difference between Hochschild’s (1983) definition of emotional labor and how this conceptualization differs from that of recent authors;
-Develop a deeper understanding of how patriarchal and misogynistic assumptions are embedded in the teaching-learning process;
-Apply the feminist pedagogies discussed in formal, non-formal, and informal learning settings, such as human resource development and professional development.

Arlie Hochschild’s theory of emotional labor (1983) has become a staple framework for understanding the tension that exists between outward emotional expression and inward emotional realities (Gonzales & Ayers, 2018). Recently, however, several articles in popular media have redefined emotional labor in a way that deviates from Hochschild’s (1983) original definition. For instance, Hartley (2017) suggests that emotional labor is an “unpaid job that men still don’t understand.”  The purpose of this session is to suggest that as the idea of emotional labor as simply “unpaid work” gains ground in popular culture, true emotional labor (as defined by Hochschild) goes unrecognized or unaddressed in educational spaces. We argue that adult educators must embrace feminist pedagogies as a means of disrupting the unjust personal and professional expectations placed on women. Specifically, we use women’s ways of knowing (WWK, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1997) and poststructuralist feminist pedagogies (Tisdell, 1996) in order to propose practices that will enable adult educators to subvert the detrimental effects of actual emotional labor on the lives of women.

We will utilize the following types of learning designs to make this session both informative and engaging:

• Small group discussions on Emotional Labor (EL)
• Whole group share outs of perceived EL experiences, based on original definition
• Introduction to common uses of EL in popular media + potential impacts on female adult learning by facilitators
• Rotating flip charts on ways to consider, combat, and be compassionate toward EL with female adult learners
• Whole group share out of key takeaways
• Suggestions for future work by facilitators