Significant Personal Disclosure: exploring the support and development needs of HE tutors engaged in the emotion work associated with supporting students

Abstract

This paper explores emotion work taking place in the private and personalised space of supportive encounters between individual students and tutors. An emotional labour framework is used to consider the effects on tutors of work intensification and performance requirements in learning relationships with students. The paper goes on to consider professional role boundaries and staff development, training and support. The paper concludes that institutions need to recognise the existence of emotion work as a pedagogy in the context of student support or learning development. Failure to do so will have detrimental effects on tutors and the service they provide to students.