“This Feeling Did Not Pass”: The Emotional Labor of Multilingual Undergraduate Peer Tutors

Abstract

Writing center tutors constantly engage in emotional labor by listening to students’ concerns and providing reassurance and motivation while managing their own emotions. Nevertheless, this aspect of tutors’ work has been long overlooked and only recently began receiving more attention in writing center scholarship. This qualitative project, the first study on this topic conducted outside the Anglophone world, aims to add to this growing body of research by examining the emotional labor of multilingual writing fellows—course-embedded peer tutors—and undergraduate writing center tutors at an English-Medium Instruction institution in a Central Asian country. The results of 14 semi-structured interviews reveal how external stressors constitute tutors’ emotional labor before consultations even begin, how consulting passive or resistant students induces feelings of guilt and demotivation during sessions, and how these negative feelings can linger, affecting tutors even after the consultations are over. The results suggest that recognizing and integrating the concept of emotional labor into tutor training programs will allow tutors to provide care for their tutees without exhausting their own emotional resources.