Speaker
Description
This presentation examines burnout among university English teachers in Japan, focusing on both Japanese and non-Japanese faculty members. Based on interviews with 12 full-time teachers, we explored how burnout may affect teachers’ professional performance, relationships, and personal lives. Our findings suggest that burnout involves more than physical exhaustion, including reduced motivation, creativity, and cognitive engagement. In addition to heavy workloads, our participants identified limited involvement in decision making and feelings of marginalization within universities as important contributing factors. The presenter will also discuss implications for institutional support, teacher wellbeing, and professional agency in higher education.
This presentation was funded by a JALT research grant
Abstract section 4: Outcomes/results
Our findings indicate that our participants experienced burnout not simply as exhaustion, but as a numbing of higher-order cognitive processes, resulting in reduced creativity and professional inefficiency. Burnout was also found to have had a multiscalar detrimental effect on teachers, damaging professional relationships, impairing classroom efficacy, and causing lifestyle changes outside of the workplace. Although workload was unsurprisingly identified as a key contributor to burnout, many teachers also emphasized structural constraints on their professional agency, such as lack of involvement in decision making and perceived marginalization within the university, as burnout risks and threats to their professional identity and wellbeing.
Abstract section 3: Content/method
We conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 full-time university teachers and subsequently analyzed the data inductively utilizing reflective thematic analysis.
Abstract section 2: Contribution/research questions
In this qualitative study, we explore how both Japanese and non-Japanese university English teachers understand and experience burnout, while also examining the various factors that contribute to its emergence.
Abstract section 1: Relevance
Teacher burnout has become a widely-discussed and pervasive issue globally in recent years due to its role in teacher attrition and its harmful effects on teacher wellbeing and student achievement. Despite the critical importance of this issue, however, there remain limited accounts of the impact of burnout on language teachers in Japanese higher education.
| Title | University English Teachers' Experiences of Burnout |
|---|---|
| Teaching Context | College and university education |