Did You Hear? Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry Into Teachers Responding to a Student's Sexual Violence

• In Event: Making Sense of Experience Through Autobiography and the Arts

Abstract

In this paper, I draw on data from semi-structured interviews with three secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teacher participants to craft a short story that depicts two teachers talking about a student’s arrest for sexual violence. I frame an excerpt from my longer fictional piece with a brief discussion of purpose, my narrative method and data set, and end with a discussion of the scholarly significance of this work. I seek to answer the following research questions: 1) How do teachers describe the emotional experiences of learning that one of their students has been arrested for sexual assault? 2) How do teachers respond to news of these critical incidents in their professional relationships within and beyond their classroom?

Author

• Stacia L. Long, University of Georgia - Athens