- Volume 54, Issue 4, 2022

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.

Amid a time of social protest against systemic racism, the author recalls an experience of her own racism as a white literacy researcher and ELA educator. She acknowledges and describes her racism as both a means to redesign teaching practice and an invitation to other ELA educators to allow the discomfort that can come with reflection. Drawing on Bettina Love’s articulation of abolitionist teaching, as well as scholars in critical English pedagogy and critical literacies, the author focuses on the problem of segregated knowledge flows and shares ways in which she is disrupting this systematic tendency.