Teaching is often described as a profession of care. Yet much of the emotional work teachers do remains invisible and unsupported. This Learning Exchange explores how women teachers in Nepal experience and navigate emotional labor within schools shaped by gender norms, institutional constraints, and uneven educational resources across provinces. Drawing on interviews with teachers from Nepal’s seven provinces, the study examines how expectations of patience, caregiving, and moral responsibility create additional pressures for teachers, particularly women.
Participants will hear about the questions this research set out to explore, the stories teachers shared about their daily realities, and the ways they create informal support systems and strategies to sustain their well-being. The session will also invite participants to reflect on how emotional labor appears in their own education systems and what kinds of institutional support might better recognize and support teacher well-being. This session will be of interest to educators, researchers, and practitioners working in teacher development, education reform, and teacher well-being.
The session is hosted by Dr. Bhawana Shrestha (Echidna Global Scholar 2022) who is a Research Fellow at the Academy of Future Education at Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University in China and the co-founder of My Emotions Matter, a social entreprise in Nepal and Bisheshata Shrestha, emerging researcher and educator based in Nepal with experience across business, operations, and community-based work, and growing interests at the intersection of education, well-being, and social systems.
