Healing From Critical Teacher Pushout: Embracing the Body as Protection and Knowledge Amid Institutional Violence

• In Event: Critical Professional Development as a Tool for Teacher-of-Color Healing, Retention, and Resistance

Abstract

Objectives
The concept of Racial Realism (Bell, 1991) admonishes that racial oppression is a permanent feature of American society. This thesis shines a light that violence, and therefore trauma, may be a permanent part of teaching in institutions that center whiteness. Moreover, race scholars (Coates, 2015) underscore disembodiment – the inability to feel, control, and employ the power of one’s body – as essential to understanding and dismantling racial oppression. Informed by this analysis, this study discusses the need to reflect on the role of trauma and disembodiment for critical teachers of color, and to carve out spaces for critical teacher healing. The following questions are explored: What structural factors influence critical educators to leave the teaching profession? How can embodied wisdom protect, heal, and guide critical educators as they navigate schooling institutions?

Theoretical frameworks
This study expands upon the literature about teacher burnout (Hydon et al, 2014) by integrating scholarship from trauma-informed care (Ko, et. al., 2008) and critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) to contextualize the ways critical educators of color face specific forms of violence as they navigate schools. The study also synthesizes frameworks about embodied wisdom that can combat stress (Mate, 2003), heal from complex trauma (Van der Kolk, 2014), and racial trauma (Kohli, 2016).

Methods and Data Sources
Drawing from my experience as a teacher/researcher, I utilize an auto-ethnographic approach (Ellis & Adams, 2014) that uses personal experience to critique cultural experiences and reclaim the voices of critical teachers..The study pulls from auto-ethnographic field notes, document analysis, and interviews from a two-year period where I completed my last year as an English teacher in a public charter high school and transitioned into founding a grassroots critical teacher organization. Data describe the ways in which I and other members of the organization experienced several stressors as social justice-oriented educators and strived to create an autonomous space to reflect and heal from such stressors.

Conclusions
Results include the need to contextualize the literature on teacher burnout for critical teachers of color, specifically in the way teachers not only experience compassion fatigue (Hydon, et al 2014) for their students, but also racial battle fatigue (Kohli, 2016) as they navigate hostile working environments. The study concludes that critical teachers of color protect and heal from such violence through embodied wisdom, in which so-called maladaptive coping strategies were actually protective strategies within a hostile working environment. The study demonstrates how emotions can be powerful reflection tools to restore connection, competence, and understanding for critical teachers of color.

Scholarly significance
While it is difficult to admit that trauma is perhaps endemic to working with and teaching in disenfranchised communities, this realistic stance frees educators to develop radically focused strategies in the classroom and beyond that have important implications for teacher education programs and professional development spaces. Informed by an intersectional and interdisciplinary analysis, this study demonstrates that the healing process is crucial to the preservation of teachers of color and to their ability to continue to serve their students’ needs.

Author

• Stephanie Cariaga, University of California, Los Angeles