Grieving Disembodiment: A Radical Feminist Analysis of the Burnout and Pushout of Teachers of Color

• In Event: Grief as Truth-Telling: Uprooting the Violence of Schooling

Abstract

... beginning to understand the centrality of the body in the classroom came from realizing somewhere along the line in my academic [and teacher] training that I had left my body. And I wanted it back...
- Thompson, 2017, p. 12

In what ways do we silence our bodies’ wisdom as educators of color? How might that silencing contribute to the burnout and push-out of classroom teachers? At a time when 62% of Black and 59% Latinx educators are considering leaving the profession (Walker, 2022), this study hopes to explore these questions to better understand educator dissatisfaction and exploitation amidst an ongoing pandemic. Pre-pandemic studies demonstrated how teachers of color disproportionately experience burnout, push-out, secondary trauma, and racial battle fatigue (Kohli, 2019; Navarro et al, 2020) and leave the field at a rate 24% higher than white educators (Ingersoll & May, 2011). With educational leaders concerned about the impact of burnout and grief on educators during the pandemic (Carver-Thomas et al, 2021; Everett & Dunn, 2021), this study focuses on the particular grief of educators of color who face the emotional weight of having left, or are considering leaving, the classroom.

Theoretically, this study focuses on an under-researched phenomenon in the field – the body – which includes the sensations, emotions, pain, and desires of teachers that can be critically engaged in humanizing educational spaces (Author, 2021). While interventions in psychology and neuroscience underscore the body’s role in healing trauma (Van der Kolk, 2014) and mitigating burnout in caring professions (van Dernoot Lipsky, 2010), this study hones its analysis on disembodiment – the practices, policies, and ideologies of schools designed to reject and delegitimize embodied ways of knowing that help young people and critical educators make sense of the world and advocate for justice (Reynolds, Botts, & Pour-Khorshid, 2021). Drawing from radical Black (Taylor, 2017), Chicana (Anzaldúa, 2015) and Pinay (Author, 2022) feminist theory, this study explores how disembodiment is not incidental to schooling, but rather a function of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal colonial ideologies that feed on, while also obscure, worker burnout and push-out.

This study uses a plática methodology (Preuss & Saavedra, 2014) that engages five participants in a semi-structured dialogue that allow for the fluidity of informal conversation, humor, and emotionality. Participants include Black, Chicana, and Asian women and non-binary people who have either completely left teaching, are considering leaving, or have transferred to different school sites during the COVID-19 pandemic. To triangulate data, each participant was individually interviewed once before and after the collective plática.

By focusing on embodied epistemologies, the pláticas illuminated internal narratives of anger, guilt, and a reclamation of agency associated with leaving the profession, in addition to punitive and extractive institutional policies that stifled participants’ passions for and purpose in teaching. The collective dialogue allowed for participants to rewrite narratives of internalized shame into ones of empowered refusal. The study concludes with implications for educational leaders to disrupt the burnout and push-out of educators and provide necessary spaces to honor the ongoing multifaceted grief of educators, particularly for the most marginalized.

Author

• Stephanie Cariaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills
  Presenting Author