Rest as Protest: Testing the Framework of Compassion, Community, and Accountability in a K-12 Educators’ Retreat

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Toward a quantum model of activism: Creating educational change through retreat, meditation, healing, and consciousness evolution

Proposal

Relevance

This paper looks at the impact of using retreats for educators as a form of protest. Responding to the 2024 Annual Meeting call for research that reflects CIES’s commitment to address educational challenges by bringing to light “a declaration that all is not well in the world, and that the status quo must be challenged and changed,” this study widens the research berth of past dialogue to include forms of protest perhaps not part and privy to the greater educational reform conversation, namely: rest as a radical remonstration utilized by teachers in overly-taxed elementary and secondary educational systems.

Theory/Context

Teaching is a profession long characterized by high levels of stress, burnout, and emotional exhaustion (Harmsen et al., 2018; Newberry & Allsop, 2017; Steiner & Woo, 2021). K-12 teachers often experience an insular focus on daily events, isolation from other adults, and limited opportunities for reflection (Chang, 2009), elements which take a significant toll. Similarly, due to the secluded nature of the profession, teachers are at a risk of feeling unsatisfied and depleted as they privately struggle with anxieties (Sahai et al., 2020). Often, teacher-specific stressors are often compounded over the course of one school day, resulting in an increasingly troublesome modern-day teaching workplace. Greenberg et al. (2016) note that policy and teacher training programs currently allocate limited attention to teacher stress and burnout.

The difficulties faced by teachers impact the wider educational workforce. The dangers of stress on the teaching workforce is measurable through teacher attrition and teacher shortage statistics. In the United States, for example, 25% of beginner teachers leave the profession before their third year of experience, and over 40% leave within the first five years of teaching (National Center for Education Statistics, 2004). Further, following the COVID-19 pandemic, these numbers have significantly increased. Nearly one in four teachers said that they were likely to leave their jobs by the end of the 2020–2021 school year, compared with, on average, the one in six teachers who were likely to leave prior to the pandemic. In addition, a staggering 55% of U.S. educators have revealed they now consider leaving the profession earlier than they had planned (National Educational Association, 2022). Alarmingly, an even higher proportion of teachers presented regular job-related stress and indications of depression than the general adult population (Steiner & Woo, 2021). Furthermore, according to Harmsen et al. (2018), stress consistently ranks as the primary reason for teacher dissatisfaction and leaving the profession. For those teachers who choose to remain, stress may lead to classroom ineffectiveness and eventual burnout (Bottiani et al., 2019; Herman et al., 2020).

In previous research, Author (2023) examined the use of Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) as an element of teacher professional development and identified future research on how MBIs might further influence teacher performance in the classroom and beyond. The Mindful Educators Intervention Framework (Author, 2023) revealed the importance of compassion, community, and adaptability. Specifically, compassion presented as participants “focusing on others.” Moreover, the ability for participants to sustain a mindfulness practice required two components: community support and the ability to adapt mindfulness protocols to one’s specific circumstances. As such, the purpose of this current research is to evaluate the efficacy of a flourishing-focused MBI that uses the Mindful Educators Intervention Framework (compassion, community, and adaptability) as its foundation for development. Moreover, the researcher tested (and refined) the components of this theoretical framework as it relates to participants learning about and practicing flourishing (VanderWeele, 2017).

Inquiry

Qualitative data on participant perceptions were analyzed using phenomenological content analysis (Bengtsson, 2016; Starks & Brown Trinidad, 2007; Stemler, 2000) to identify, cluster, and describe themes across participants' experiences. The researcher used qualitative data to supplement, validate, explain, illuminate, and reinterpret quantitative data gathered from the same subjects (Miles & Huberman, 1994). The goal was to better understand participants’ experiences and to grasp the processes by which people construct meaning and to describe what those meanings are (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997). This “teasing out” of data related to compassion, community, and adaptability allowed for a nuanced understanding of the complicated and perhaps contentious use of rest as protest.

Findings

Based on findings from the phenomenological content analysis, the researcher derived a set of conclusions in response to the study’s main research questions. The full paper details each finding and includes support and excerpts from the data sources. The study’s main research questions were as follows:
1. How does compassion impact a teacher’s flourishing?
2. What community support structures does a teacher need to flourish?
3. How do teachers adapt mindfulness and flourishing practices to fit their individual lives?

Contribution

K-12 educators are tasked with creating classrooms that nurture student curiosity and school success. However, those same classrooms also bring stressors that impact the teacher and student. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), and specifically Educator Retreats, may be one way to combat the stressors inherent in the profession and tackle the “burnout cascade” that can lead to costly teacher turnover. However, even with recent growing interest in MBIs, researchers do not have a firm grasp on the ways in which mindfulness professional development (PD) measures may or may not work for individual teachers. This research shows a nuanced picture of what MBI facilitators and PD specialists must work with as they attempt to address teacher stress and burnout in the future with the aid of mindfulness and flourishing protocols. Additionally, this study reflects on an existing conceptual framework for analyzing mindfulness in PD programs, along with factors that facilitate or inhibit it. Regardless of its feasibility as a long-term practice, Educator Retreats are a novel PD strategy for managing stress and burnout in the workplace. Understanding teachers’ perceptions and the factors that shape these perceptions will help researchers document best practices moving forward and perhaps lean in to this form of passive resistance and peaceful protest.

Author

• Molly Dunn, Notre Dame of Maryland University