Teaching as Embodied, Contextualized Practice: One Story of a Teacher in a Time of Cancer

• In Event: Teacher Stories and Experiences: Insights From English Teachers Across Multiple U.S. States

Abstract

Studies of teachers typically focus on practices and experiences of able-bodied persons working in schools. Feminist researchers (hooks, 1994; Johnson 2004, 2005, 2006; Mallozzi, 2011) contend that teachers are persons who think, feel, and act from positions located within bodies that matter. This study presented Cherie’s (a pseudonym) experience when she became ill and could no longer rely on her body, mind, and emotions as in/visible supports for her teaching—specifically surgery and subsequent diagnosis of cancer during the second year of her career.

Across fields of medicine, human resources, journalism, and education there is a paucity of empirical studies of teachers with illness as they struggle, recover, and continue to teach. We used a social constructionist position to understand the shifting, provisional meanings that Cherie made about her teaching (Cole, 1996; Smagorinsky, 2001; Vygotsky, 1925/1971, 1978). As Cherie considered and reconsidered her teaching through interviews and conversations, the meaning of her teaching experience became a provisional text (Smagorinsky, 2001; Smagorinsky & O’Donnell-Allen, 1998) that she used to make decisions about the quality of her past, present, and future teaching. Her utterances (Bakhtin, 1986) functioned as placeholders for the current ideas she had about what teaching meant. Cherie’s meanings for teaching were created in interactions and relations with her students, with texts she taught, and her own actions and thinking—all within the sociocultural context of her school.

Data included eight hours of recorded, transcribed interviews and conversations, observation data and artifacts for 56 of 88 class sessions. We used an inductive approach to open and axial coding to understand what teaching meant to Cherie in this particular year. Four major coding groups included looking backward, looking forward; malaise; mind/body/emotions; and, persistence.

Findings showed Cherie had complex interconnections among her body/mind/emotions and the context in which she taught. Her body was not separate from mind or emotions; rather she experienced her recovery from cancer as something that could not be extricated from the context of her school and her life outside of school. She used the study interviews to imagine different social futures for herself and her relationships with students. Within these imagined futures, which shifted as her recovery waxed and waned with different levels of energy, she evaluated her teaching and compared her performance to experiences in her first year of teaching and the opening weeks of school—prior to the cancer diagnosis. Remarkably, Cherie’s talk throughout the year, while marked with several moments of despondency and impulses to quit her job, she remained persistent and hopeful in the face of ongoing feelings of malaise about teaching.

For teachers facing illness and slowed or changed paces for work due to recovery, this study sheds light on the importance of supporting mind, body, and emotions in teachers’ practices. While Cherie’s story may be just one teacher facing a brief and successful treatment, hers is a story worth sharing. Moreover, any teacher who has faced the prospect of illness and recovery could potentially relate to and learn from this study.

Authors

• Michelle Zoss, Georgia State University

• Alisha White, Western Illinois University