Currently reading Peterson (2026) on “Addressing emotional labour in higher education teaching: institutional solutions for effective teaching, workloads and wellbeing”

Teaching involves a lot of emotional labor — handling of our own and others’ emotions — especially when dealing with controversial or emotionally difficult course content, but also just in general because teaching is all about dealing with other humans. Emotional labor is also unequally distributed, with women, younger teachers, and minorities carrying most of the work (in addition to carrying most of the other work already…), and also experienced differently by different people. If there are high loads of emotional labor, that comes with a toll on instructor wellbeing, up to and including burnout. Often, this is only addressed with a focus on helping individual educators “managing their emotions“. However Peterson (2026), summarized below, explores institutional solutions.

First, “when thinking about [emotional labor], it is important to understand that it involves the labour of reacting in ways that employers, clients and in the case of higher education teaching, students expect teaching staff to respond“. This makes it part of the job, and not a private problem, so as part of their role teachers should receive support from their university as part of ensuring good working conditions.

Caring for teachers and supporting them in their emotional labor is then also not just about supporting them as individual teachers, but also also about supporting them in their capacity to do their job well: “As academic staff become burnt out and emotionally taxed, their pedagogy may suffer. Instructors might avoid teaching on difficult but important cases, which they know will cause classroom controversy – such as climate misinformation. They might also start to avoid or diminish their use of pedagogically impactful teaching techniques such as informal class debates (which will require managing emotion-fuelled discussions) or reflective writing (which often requires academic staff to engage with students’ lived experiences and related emotions). Likewise, burnout from supporting students outside of the classroom can also lead to academic staff distancing themselves from students and not volunteering for formal or informal mentoring roles.”

Peterson (2026) explores both the wellbeing impact and the unequal workload impact, while stressing that emotional labor is an important part of learning relationships, “necessary to effective education“. They call for three actions:

1. “to ensure that it is valued and recognized through an equity lens“,
2. “creating structures and procedures that protect teaching staff from the potential dangers that can emerge from engaging in such labour“
3. “facilitating opportunities for [emotional labor] to inform pedagogical practices in productive ways“

If emotional labor is seen and addressed as a structural problem, Peterson (2026) suggests three approaches:

“Institutional flexibility to facilitate self-efficacy: increasing flexibility in high emotional labour settings“

This is about teachers knowing that they have institutional support in acting in authentic ways, even if that might look different from what a “typical” teacher might be expected to do: “a lack of flexibility regarding teaching practices prevents instructors from doing what they feel is necessary to manage their emotions, and those of their students, in ways that are pedagogically sound and context-appropriate“.

Peterson (2026) suggest two ways how institutions can practically support instructor self-efficacy:

• keeping classes at mangeable sizes (either by cramming fewer students, or by adding more teachers and TAs), especially for topics where a lot of emotional labor is needed, so that teachers can have the chance to build real and authentic relationships with all students, to give tasks that they know will elicit emotions in students and then in turn require emotional labor from the teacher, to use teaching methods where emotions are likely to surface
• allowing a wide range of assessments that can help with emotional labour, like reflective journalling (“providing students a cognitive outlet to self-mediate their emotional responses to materials through scholarly frame“) or, as in the author’s case, political art

So in a nutshell, trusting teachers to be professionals and giving them working conditions under which they can actually teach.

“Assessing and accounting for emotional labour in workload and reporting“

Emotional labor is invisible labor when it comes to accounting for workload, and, as mentioned before, distributed unequally between colleagues. Therefore, Peterson (2026) argues, “one must be able to not only name it but also measure, adjust and acknowledge it“. So one step would be doing an audit to discover where emotional labor is concentrated. Not to measure it individually, necessarily, because of course it is problematic if emotional labor becomes something that you earn points for; but to discover what type of courses or activities are typically emotional labor-intensive and in what ways, so that adjustments can be done on a more general level.

Such responses could, for example, be

• extra support in form of TAs or consultants
• administrative support (organization of field trips etc)
• instructional support (someone else taking on specific sessions)

Another outcome of an audit can be that spaces are created where emotional labor is recognized, for example in the reporting and feedback conversations about tasks and activities, where it could be made visible as legitimate work and become an explicit point on the agenda. Or it could be formalized, for example by assigning mentees, where mentoring then counts as a task with an associated, acknowledged workload.

“Increasing perceived and real organizational support through well-resourced programming“

This is very interesting: “Research on managing emotional labour notes the importance of staff believing that if
threats to one’s wellbeing or safety spiral, the institution will support them“, as is “staff feeling like
they ‘aren’t in this alone’.” But how to do this?

• Increased training — ideally in how to deal with emotional labor, but also just teacher training and opportunities to discuss and share experiences
• Peer support — for example in mentorship programs that focus on emotional labor, or in communities of practice: “A critical mass of colleagues can help shift cultural norms together as opposed to in isolation. It can also encourage those who want to engage in this work to find community, guidance and pedagogical professional development“. Participating in either should be part of work and not an add-on, though

I think this article is so interesting! In a post on Byrom et al. (2026)’s article “Responsibility and other dangerous ideas: who cares, who can, and who should in higher education”, I already mentioned that I have been explicitly told before that emotional support for teachers (so emotional labor!) is not part of my job as and therefore I cannot ask for time for it. So it is encouraging to read this article where the author is very clear about a) the importance of emotional labor, and b) that it should be valued and recognized as part of a teacher’s job. And in my work, there is so much emotional labor! Teachers deal with difficult situations in their teaching on a daily basis, and I am lucky to have a lot of colleagues who trust me enough to come to me for emotional — and academic development — support when such situations have happened. And my personal experience totally confirms the “hotspots” identified in the article — women, especially from minorities, and teachers teaching difficult topics that are confronting students with inconvenient truths, for example in the context of sustainability.

Another, less dramatic but still taxing, example of emotional labor that I am doing myself is that I am constantly out of my comfort zone when it comes to teaching sustainability. Today — see featured image — we were in the studio all day long to film for our MOOC. I HATE being in front of cameras and knowing that I will put that stuff on youtube for the whole world to see! I am not an expert, either, so who am I to tell teachers how to do this? I am doing the best I can, but I am also making myself vulnerable on many fronts. While I think that it is my responsibility to do and I also really want to do it, it is also stressful before, and then exhausting during and after. But of course that is something that I am dealing with the nights before events that I don’t sleep well because my mind is on the job, or now after work hours, and probably over the long midsummer weekend. There is no mechanism to compensate, or even recognition for that part of my job. And this is just the example that is on my mind right now after a day of filming (and thanks Frankie and Terese for making it a great day anyway!), of course this is a super common occurrence for so many teachers!

One suggestion in the article that I really liked, and that I think is a good first step in the right direction, is to make emotional labor visible by providing explicit space to describe the work when reporting on our job. I would be so happy if it was recognized, both for me personally and for teachers in general, that this is actual, and demanding work! I wonder how to make that happen. Any ideas?

Peterson, J. H. (2026). Addressing emotional labour in higher education teaching: institutional solutions for effective teaching, workloads and wellbeing. Teaching in Higher Education, 1-16.