Teacher Resilience Through Grief: Regaining Agency After Student Deaths

• In Event: Humanizing Praxis: Enacting Restorative, Transformative, and Healing Pedagogies

Abstract

This study brings to light the importance of violence-related deaths, with a particular focus on the implications and aftermath of these deaths for teachers. Teachers themselves facilitate the welfare of their students who experience the death of a classmate, sibling, or friend. Balk, Zaengle, and Corr (2011) note that teachers are in “the unique position to model expressions of grief, encouraging and assuring students that adults and students alike are struggling to understand the unexpected death” (p.154). Other research argues that a lack of clarity exists as to whom specifically is responsible for caring for students experiencing loss and the trauma it creates, resulting in the teacher defaulting as the care provider (Mahon, Goldberg, and Washington, 1999). To support students and model positive coping, teachers must first make sense of and then cope with the death event for themselves. Two theories frame this paper: 1) Secondary Trauma theory—what the teacher experiences after a violent death; and 2) Constructivist Self-Determination Theory—how a teacher copes and bounces back after a student’s violent death.

This paper presents data gleaned from my sequential transformative mixed methods study and was guided by the following question: What factors influence urban high school teachers’ cognitive appraisal process and becoming resilient following the violent death of a student? The study combined surveys (n= 146) and interviews (n = 16) based in narrative analysis.

Findings reveal that teachers’ cognitive appraisal process is impacted by whether or not they understand a student death to be threatening or challenging. Teachers’ cognitive appraisal is highly impacted by how they construct what is in and out of their personal or professional control. Second, teachers’ meaning making is interrelated with how they perceive or understand their students’ environments, their own personal narrative or experience with violent death, and or latent beliefs about their students. Third, teachers exhibit resilience by reconstructing the traumatic event (student violent death) as one that offers opportunity to grow professionally and personally, to regain agency in their role at the school. Specific findings implicate the impact on teacher identity:
Teachers reported that student violent deaths created a sense of threat to their own personal safety.
The violent death of a student caused female teachers to imagine what it would be like if their own children were killed.
Teachers’ perceptions of a killed student’s circumstances, social conditions, and behaviors mitigated how they placed accountability for the homicide.
Teachers took on new roles after death events, and these new roles promoted their autonomy and competency.
Teachers built their own resilience through inspiration and support from current students.

Every teacher interviewed for this study reassessed his or her own competency in light of emotional stress. This stress was not a zero-sum experience: it was not adaptive or maladaptive, but rather a process defined by resources and belief systems (Lazarus & Folkman, 1987). Student gun/gang-related deaths triggered other traumas that teachers were living with and confronting on a daily basis, and they became part of their complex relationships with the teaching profession.

Author

• Leora Wolf-Prusan, Center for Applied Research Solutions