Places of Learning/Places of Violence: Teaching in the Wake of a School Shooting

• In Event: Pedagogies Under Pressure: Navigating Constraint, Fear, and Resistance in Education

Abstract

This study explores the impact of a school shooting on teachers. To provide the field of teacher education with empirical research illuminating teachers’ experiences in this all-too-common feature of US schools, we draw on Britzman’s (1998) notion of difficult knowledge. Through an analysis of interviews of teachers and student teachers who survived a mass-casualty school shooting in 2024, we trace how the shooting: a) collapsed the common metaphor of teacher as martyr, b) transformed participants’ relationships to classroom spaces and objects therein, and c) revealed complicated feelings about staying or leaving—the school and the profession. This research has vital implications for the studies of teaching and teacher education and contributes teachers’ perspectives to literature on school shootings.

Authors

• H. James Garrett, University of Georgia

• Rebecca Cooper Geller, University of Georgia