Purpose : This aim of this study was to investigate physical education teachers’ genuine expression of positive and negative emotions during critical incidents in French compensatory education. Method : Adopting a situational approach to emotional labor, we conducted interviews with 22 teachers in which they retold the five critical incidents they had described in writing during the school year. Results : According to the systematic analysis conducted, teachers genuinely expressed their emotions 78/110 times (70.9%), combining genuine expression with active strategies of emotional labor in certain situations. Statistical analysis revealed that the teachers tended to adopt the strategy of genuine expression only when they felt positive emotions and to combine it with active strategies of emotional labor when they felt negative ones. Four portrait vignettes are presented to illustrate the complex enacted forms of genuine expression in critical classroom situations. Discussion/Conclusion : These results provide a new understanding of the complexity of genuine expression in physical education teaching in the field of compensatory education.
Petiot et al. (Wed,) studied this question.