This study examines the interplay between demonstrating professional and emotional support within teacher-mentor post-observation meetings in language teacher education. Attending to these two aspects of mentoring practice can help teachers learn to navigate the emotional practice of teaching and help mentors recognize emotion as an affordance for professional development.
Mentoring within language teacher education (LTE) aims to support the development of student teachers (STs), with more attention to interpersonal support than traditional models of supervision. Past research shows that STs expect mentors to be simultaneously willing and able to provide evaluation and constructive criticism, while also being trustworthy and supportive (Vásquez, 2004). Prior conversation analysis (CA) studies have examined the role of emotional displays in performing institutional tasks, specifically the managing of empathy by institutional representatives (Ruusuvuori, 2013). This study uses an applied conversation analytic framework to examine the challenging interplay between demonstrating professional and emotional support within one common mentoring context, the post-observation meeting. Drawing on video-recorded and transcribed post-observation meetings between graduate TESOL STs and their mentors, we explore how mentor empathy is initiated and managed in response to ST emotional displays and/or descriptions of problematic experiences. We also examine the interplay between such displays of empathy and the giving/uptake of advice or guidance. This analysis demonstrates how CA can inform professional competencies within LTE by explicating the interactional practices through which support--a generally-valued concept--can be realized. We highlight how attending to both professional and emotional aspects of mentoring practice can both help STs learn to make sense of the “emotional practice” of teaching (Meyer, 2009) and help mentors recognize emotion as an affordance for professional development (Ruusuvuori, 2013). References Meyer, D. K. (2009). Entering the emotional practices of teaching. In P. A. Schutz & M. Zembylas (Eds.), Advances in teacher emotion research: The impact on teachers’ lives (pp. 73–91). New York: Springer. Ruusuvuori, J. (2013). Emotion, affect and conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 330–349). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Vásquez, C. (2004). “Very carefully managed”: Advice and suggestions in post-observation meetings. Linguistics and Education, 15(1–2), 33–58.
