Managing Teacher Emotions to Meet Institutional Demands of Teaching During the Economic Crisis of Sri Lanka

Abstract This study entails an analysis of the autoethnographic records maintained by two teachers in the Sri Lankan higher education system during the economic crisis of Sri Lanka. As a consequence of years of political and economic mismanagement, and the global COVID‐19 pandemic, Sri Lanka faced an economic crisis and declared bankruptcy in April of 2022. This was a period of extreme uncertainty for most Sri Lankans. In this background, we (the authors) turned to each other for emotional support in sharing feelings of stress, anxiety, uncertainty, and self‐doubt that intensified because of the demand to work continuously amidst the crisis. We resorted to recording our feelings in digital formats. In this article, we analyze these records and establish that the economic crisis was a traumatic experience, and that our institutions' expectations on how to manage our emotions through the crisis caused secondary trauma. Employing Hochschild's (1983) theorisation of emotional labor, we analyzed the data and identified instances of deep and surface acting, involving projecting insincere feelings, changing inner feelings to match feelings displayed, and instances of mental detachment, in our attempt to retain our teacher identities and meet institutional demands of continuously working during the crisis. We record how these negative emotions nearly damaged our identities, but also how our companionship and the writing of this autoethnography offered some adaptive resources that were healing. We recommend that educational institutions be more sensitive to the emotional labor of teachers during crises and extend supportive resources such as developing teacher support groups and encouraging journal writing.