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This chapter reviews the ongoing processes of marketisation in secondary school teaching and its further embedment through commodification of teachers’ performance. We track developments through documentary evidence from Government statements and other agency reports and unstructured interviews with teachers’ union representatives in the South West of England. Following Carter and Stevenson (2012) we begin by introducing the labour process debate concerning teachers’ productive labour to provide the backdrop for the argument that teachers’ work is increasingly commodified and judged along neoliberalised requirements. Commodification has taken place through measurement of abstract standards constructed by associating individual teachers with their pupils’ achievements, as well as subjective assessment of teacher behaviour judged against newly introduced ‘Teacher Standards’. We argue that this attempted quantification of teacher output is constructed, in Marxist terms, to accommodate to the ‘socially necessary labour time’ and to indirectly maximise work ‘output’ for individual teachers through a process of standardisation of processes involved in task completion. We attempt to define new ways of measuring teachers’ work through the lens of abstract labour and link such processes to workplace alienation. In such fashion, teachers are subject to work intensification, increased monitoring and surveillance, further standardisation of work and weakening of creative autonomy leading to intensified alienation from the professional nature of the job.

Teachers' expressing candid and natural emotions during teaching and learning processes is of vital importance for the quality and content of education. Because of that reason, it is necessary to explore factors that have a role in teachers' emotional labour. Therefore, the current study aims to test a novel model developed to explore the direct and indirect relations among distributed leadership, teacher autonomy and emotional labour.

The study data came from 1,007 teachers working at 81 state high schools located in 12 different regions in Turkey. To test the proposed model, the authors conducted a mediation analysis of structural equation modelling.

The analysis confirms that teacher autonomy is a prominent mediator in the relationship between distributed leadership and emotional labour.

This study is expected to contribute to the body of research focusing on the effects of leadership on teachers' emotional labour.

Emotions are an important aspect of work performance but are often overlooked, especially amongst preschool teachers whose work environment is laden with emotional job demands. The present study aims to examine the mediating role of emotional exhaustion in the relationship between emotional labour and contextual performance.

Using a cross-sectional design, data were obtained from 288 preschool teachers in the Tema Metropolis in the Greater Accra region of Ghana. The study's hypotheses were tested using structural equation modelling with maximum likelihood estimation in AMOS 21.0.

The structural equation modelling analyses revealed that deep acting had a direct positive relationship with contextual performance, whereas the direct relationship between surface acting and contextual performance was not statistically significant. Furthermore, deep acting and surface acting were indirectly related to contextual performance via emotional exhaustion.

The study's findings underscore the need for educational institutions and managers to create a supportive environment for teachers engaging in emotional labour, and to ensure that emotional labour is not overburdening teachers.

The study contributes to the literature on teachers' engagement in discretionary behaviours by elucidating emotional exhaustion as a linking mechanism between emotional labour and contextual performance in a non-Western context. This is one of the few studies to link emotional labour to contextual performance in the educational context.

This study builds on previous theoretical work that considered artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential for creating “teacher-centaurs” whose labor could be accelerated through the use of generative AI (Fassbender, in review). The purpose of this paper is to use empirical methods to study centaur teachers and the division of labor (Durkheim, 1893/2013) that arise from outsourcing teaching tasks to AI.

Multiple case study (Stake, 2006) was used to collect data on two secondary English teachers who were early adopters of generative AI. Data included semi-structured interviews as well as ChatGPT chat logs, which helped in describing how teaching approaches evolved using AI technology.

Results showed that teachers used AI for planning, instruction and assessment. AI-augmented teaching practices allowed teachers to complete tasks with greater speed, which in turn increased stamina and short-term work–life balance. Given the novelty of AI, concerns about data privacy and academic integrity raised ethical questions.

ChatGPT’s rise to popularity in 2023 brought with it significant discussions about education, specifically how students would use AI primarily as a tool for plagiarism. This study takes a different focus, considering how early adoption of AI has begun changing teacher labor, offering implications for the future of the teaching profession.

Emotional labour is an important area of research in organizational psychology especially in the context of service industry. Past research in this area has primarily focused on the negative consequences of emotional labour. The present study is carried out to explore whether professors working in higher educational institutes experience emotional labour and how does it impact them.

The study adopted a qualitative approach. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted.

Three broad themes emerged from the study: (1) work environment leading to emotional labour (2) factors facilitating emotional regulation and (3) consequences of emotional labour. The findings revealed that the consequences of emotional labour are context specific and in the context of educational setting, it has interesting positive outcomes.

The findings of the study provide critical insights regarding how to deal with employees who experience emotional labour at work.

The study adopts an inductive approach to explore the experiences of emotional labour of professors in higher educational institutes.

Purpose – This chapter discusses an education law recently enacted in India – The Right of Children to Free and Compulsary Education – its implementation plan and potential implications, focusing on the teacher labor force composition and the teacher education system. The Right to Education Act specifies acceptable pupil–teacher ratios, levels of teacher vacancy in the school, qualifications required for teacher appointments, and terms and conditions for teacher hiring, among other things.Methodology – This study draws on government documents and reports to conduct a systematic analysis of existing data and historical trends. It generates an understanding of how this policy shapes the demand for teachers, the quality of the existing system, and its ability to respond to these increased demands.Findings – These policy changes intended to increase equity in teacher distribution may in the near future exacerbate inequities in access to quality teachers and teaching across India. The policy creates important and urgent changes in the Indian teacher labor force, and by extension, it demands changes in the Indian teacher education system. But that system may be unprepared to meet these goals. Therefore, the chapter underscores the need for reform in India's teacher education system, if this policy's mandate to provide equal access to quality education to all Indian children is to be fulfilled.Value – This chapter explains and analyzes a recent, large-scale teacher policy reform in a regionally diverse, developing nation with an urgent need to improve the quality of education received by its children.

This chapter reviews the empirical research on the supply of teachers in Latin America. The first part stresses the importance of teacher labor market perspectives for understanding the supply of high-quality teachers, one challenge that most countries in the region face. The second part introduces the teacher labor market framework that guides the search, while the third section describes the goal of the review and the methodology. It follows a mapping, description, and classification of the empirical research on the teacher supply and a discussion of the main findings. The chapter ends with a summary and a brief discussion of the implications for teacher policies.

This study seeks to explore the union perspective of a group of unionized young Canadian teachers to understand their belief system about trade unionism.

The methodology used herein consists of collecting and examining the interview data of participants (n = 37) through the theoretical lens of radical perspective.

The findings suggest that participants positively associate unionism with bargaining for their special interests, providing professional development services and opportunities for professional socialization. But this pluralist perspective has not translated into an engagement in the union life.

So far, the findings of this study cannot be generalized to the whole population of Canadian young teachers because the participants’ sample size is not large enough. In consideration of this limitation, unions need to survey the union opinions of their young rank and file members at a large scale to draw a clear understanding of the needs of these members to adequately adjust their renewal and revitalization strategies to those needs.

The findings of this study are significant because the intersection between young teachers and organized labor is underresearched in Canada.

Charter schools have the potential to enhance competition in the public education sector. As such, they could have a particularly significant impact in the labor market for teachers. This study uses data on more than 312,000 teachers from 483 urban Texas school districts to explore the impact of charter school competition on the compensation of teachers at traditional public schools. The analysis suggests that once charter enrollments reach critical mass, increasing competition from charter schools increases salaries for all but the most experienced teachers.

The burnout, stress, and work-life balance challenges faced by teachers have received renewed interest due to the myriad disruptions and changes to K-12 schooling brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even prior to the pandemic, relatively little was known about teachers' time use outside of the classroom, the blurring of work and home boundaries, and how teachers compare to similar professionals in these regards. We use daily time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for 3,168 teachers and 1,886 professionals in similarly prosocial occupations from 2003 to 2019 to examine occupational differences in time use. Compared to observationally similar non-teachers, teachers spend significantly more time volunteering at their workplace and completing work outside the workplace during the school year. On average, teachers spend 19 more minutes working outside of the workplace on weekdays than observably similar non-teachers and 38 more minutes on weekends. The weekend disparity is particularly large among secondary school teachers. This suggests that before the widespread switch to online and hybrid learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were already navigating blurrier work-life boundaries than their counterparts in similar professions. This has important implications for teacher turnover and for the effectiveness and wellness of teachers who remain in the profession.