Skip to content
2018
Volume 54, Issue 4
  • ISSN: 0007-8204
  • E-ISSN: 1943-2216

Abstract

English language arts scholarship has suggested literacy classrooms should be inclusive of both teachers’ and students’ grief and loss experiences; however, teachers’ grieving experiences remain understudied. This article analyzes seven in-depth interviews in order to understand ELA teachers’ experiences of teaching while grieving a death, finding that ELA teachers navigating personal loss perceived particular rules for fulfilling relational work in teaching: hiding certain negative emotions, navigating the teacher role, and foregrounding students’ learning needs. Creating ELA classrooms inclusive of trauma and loss experiences requires teacher educators to attend to the interplay of teachers’ conceptions of relational work and their experiences and emotions related to loss.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.58680/ee202231981
2022-07-01
2024-12-13
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Ahmed S. (2004) The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Ayers R. (2015) An empty seat in class: Teaching and learning after the death of a student. Teachers College Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Clandinin D. J. Connelly F. M. (2000) Narrative inquiry. Jossey-Bass.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Cohen D. (2011) Teaching and its predicaments. Harvard University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Crenshaw K. (2016) The urgency of intersectionality. TedXWomen https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Dunn M. B. (2021) When teachers hurt: Supporting preservice teacher well-being.. English Education, 53(2), 145–151.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Dunn M. B. Johnson R. A. (2020) Loss in the English classroom: A study of English teachers’ emotion management during literature instruction.. The Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 16(2), 1–21.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Dutro E. (2008) “That’s why I was crying on this book”: Trauma as testimony in responses to literature.. Changing English, 15(4), 423–434.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Dutro E. (2011) Writing wounded: Trauma, testimony, and critical witness in literacy classrooms.. English Education, 43(2), 193–211.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Dutro E. (2019) The vulnerable heart of literacy: Centering trauma as powerful pedagogy. Teachers College Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Evans L. Moore W. (2015) Impossible burdens: White institutions, emotional labor, and micro-resistance.. Social Problems, 62(3), 439–454.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Everett S. Dunn M. B. (2021) Creating space for grief: Cultivating an intersectional grief-informed systemic pathway for teacher leaders.. English Leadership Quarterly, 43(4), 2–6.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Falter M. M. Bickmore S. Eds 2018) When loss gets personal: Discussing death through literature in the secondary ELA classroom. Rowman and Littlefield.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Garcia A. (2019) A call for healing teachers: Loss, ideological unraveling, and the healing gap.. Schools: Studies in Education, 16(1), 64–83.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Gorlewski J. (2017) Death in the English classroom.. English Journal, 107(2), 8.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Granek L. (2009) “The cracks are where the light shines in”: Grief in the classroom.. Feminist Teacher, 20(1), 42–49.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Grinage J. (2019) Reopening racial wounds: Whiteness, melancholia, and affect in the English classroom.. English Education, 51(2), 126–150.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Hochschild A. R. (1983) The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Kinloch V. San Pedro T. (2014) The space between listening and storying. InParis D. Winn M. Eds Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities. Sage.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Lai T. (2013) Inside out and back again. Harper Collins.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Neville M. (2018) “Sites of control and resistance”: Outlaw emotions in an out-ofschool book club.. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 17(4), 310–327.
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Parker B. A. (2009) Losing Jay: A meditation on teaching while grieving.. Feminist Teacher, 20(1), 71–80.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Patton M. Q. (2002) Qualitative research & evaluation methods. (3rd ed Sage.
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Rowling L. (1995) The disenfranchised grief of teachers.. OMEGA, 31(4), 317–329.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Saldaña J. (2016) The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Sage.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Thein A. Guise M. Sloan D. (2015) Examining emotional rules in the English classroom: A critical discourse analysis of one student’s literary responses in two academic contexts.. Research in the Teaching of English, 49(3), 200–223.
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Van Manen M. (2001) Researching lived experience. Transcontinental Printing Inc.
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Venet A. S. (2021) Equity-centered trauma-informed education. W. W. Norton & Company.
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Whitney A. E. (2009) Writer, teacher, person: Tensions between personal and professional writing in a National Writing Project summer institute.. English Education, 41(3), 235–258.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Zembylas M. (2002) “Structures of feeling” in curriculum and teaching: Theorizing the emotional rules.. Educational Theory, 52(2), 187–208.
    [Google Scholar]
http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.58680/ee202231981
Loading
/content/journals/10.58680/ee202231981
Loading

Data & Media loading...

  • Article Type: Research Article
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error