Strategies for the Unequal Distribution of Emotional Labor in Graduate Student and Contingent Teaching

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on teaching and learning (SoTL) shows how caring for students proves crucial to effective college teaching. Providing mentorship to undergraduates in and outside the classroom can require ample emotional labor, especially for graduate-student and adjunct instructors. Even though graduate students and contingent faculty are at a structural disadvantage, they have profound influence over undergraduate students, particularly at large institutions where undergraduates may encounter them and look to them for emotional support and professional mentorship more than tenure-track faculty. For example, female and minority instructors disproportionately take on unpaid emotional labor in students’ personal and professional lives related to courses focusing on issues of structural inequality that may require them to mentor and manage student emotions more than those in more secure positions. This can amplify the stress, competition, and uncertainty of graduate study and employment. Consequently, this essay focuses on strategies—boundary maintenance, time strategies, and managed expectations—to mitigate the unequal impact of this emotional labor and create more equitable pedagogical practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Contingent faculty
• emotional labor
• student engagement
• teaching strategies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew H. McLeskey

Matthew H. McLeskey is an assistant professor of criminal justice in the Department of Criminal Justice at State University of New York at Oswego. His research interests include urban inequalities, green criminology, environmental justice, mass incarceration, deviant behavior, and social and criminological theory.

Laura Obernesser

Laura Obernesser is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research focuses on family ideals—the desires, fears, and expectations held by individuals within families related to family life and how inequalities have effects on how individuals understand their relationship to societal expectations in the context of changing families—and agency—the behaviors and thoughts families engage in to cope with, and sometimes change, their realities.