An area of research that may shed light on the pressing problem of FL teacher attrition is emotion labor. Emotion labor (or emotional labour), a construct stemming from research in the fields of communication and psychology and focusing mainly on service professionals, has recently been taken up in education literature. Although student emotions in language acquisition have been examined, the field of applied linguistics has not yet tapped the explanatory potential of teacher emotions. The current project explores the emotion work of 5 teachers in rural U.S. high school FL classrooms. Thematic analysis of interviews with teachers of Spanish, French, and Latin yielded 5 key insights: perceived lack of community and institutional support for FL teachers, an excessive burden for motivation felt by these teachers, the use of teacher emotion labor to motivate their students, emotional burnout of the teachers, and perceived lack of teacher efficacy. The last two, while not inevitable, seem to be mutually influencing, forming a downward spiral that can eventually impact the willingness or ability of some teachers to continue in their careers. Implications of this study include recognition of the significance of teacher emotion labor in FL pedagogy and its potential role in teacher attrition.
Silence and speech are often defined in relation to each other. In much scholarship, the two are perceived as polar opposites; speech enjoys primacy in this dichotomy, with silence negatively perceived as a lack of speech. As a consequence of this binary thinking, scholars remain unable to study the full range of the meanings and uses of silence in human interactions or even to fully recognize its communicative power. MerleauPonty described language as a gesture, made possible by the fact that we are bodies in a physical world. Language does not envelop or clothe thought; ideas materialize as embodied language, whether spoken or written. If silence is, as I argue here, as like speech as it is different, perhaps silence, too, can be a gesture. Rather than simply a background for expressed thought, if we considered silence to be embodied, to be a mating of the phenomenal and existential bodies, how might that affect current misconceptions of silence and subsequent limitations on the study of communicative silences?
Beginning with an overview of global education in the United States and a review of assessment instruments and approaches, this article presents 15 implications from the Forum-BEVI Project, a multi-year, multi-site assessment initiative that examined the processes and outcomes of international, multicultural, and transformative learning.
Transformative learning (TL) goals are becoming commonplace in higher education, continuing education, and other adult learning contexts; however, valid and reliable assessments of TL are not so common. This imbalance begs the development of assessment methods that allow for a deeper understanding of how, when, and why deep reshaping of self takes place. We believe the Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI) to be an effective quantitative measure of TL based on the alignment of its scales with constructs identified by Hoggan’s meta-analysis of TL research. In this article, we summarize the theoretical crosswalk between Hoggan and the BEVI, offer statistical evidence of construct validity for the BEVI as a measure of TL, and provide guidance for interpreting TL scores. We discuss implications of this methodology for higher education as well as other adult learning contexts such as mental health and wellness.
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