Teachers' Experiences of/with Trauma and Trauma-Sensitivity: A Narrative Inquiry into Trauma Stories and Stories of Trauma

• Main Author: Reid, Nathalie
• Other Authors: Huber, Janice (Elementary Education)
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Alberta. Department of Elementary Education. 2020
• Subjects: lang; edu; Fort McMurray; Greene
• Online Access: https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/99344f81-1b76-43dd-a6f5-2b93341054a2

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Abstract: May 5th, 2016, during conversation with a former colleague who had been evacuated from Fort McMurray, Alberta due to a devastating forest fire, I began to wonder more deeply about teachers’ experiences in the midst of trauma and trauma sensitivity, particularly as I sensed trauma sensitivity was increasingly becoming an added expectation that many teachers were experiencing. Following the fire and this conversation with a former colleague, I awakened to how frequently I was hearing the terms trauma and trauma sensitivity in multiple and diverse contexts, and yet I could not answer the question: What does it mean to be trauma sensitive? I thus engaged in a 2-year narrative inquiry alongside three teachers as coinquirers through which we inquired into a research puzzle focused on how teachers’ personal and professional contexts, knowledge, and identities (conceptualized narratively in this dissertation as stories to live by) are shaped by and shape their experiences of/with trauma. The coinquirers and I engaged in living, telling, retelling, and reliving stories (Clandinin & Connelly, 1998b) alongside each other through multiple face-to-face conversations and via digital communication. Through this dialogue we co-composed and inquired into diverse field texts that included the transcripts of our conversations, drawings, and memory box artifacts (Clandinin, 2013). Three narrative accounts, one for each co-inquirer, were co-composed, from which reverberating resonant threads emerged. As coinquirers, we came to understand that we compose our lives in the midst of experience. Slowly attending to the wholeness of lives, rather than trauma as an experience in isolation, surfaced tensions with the more dominant stories that homogenize and pathologize trauma as a single and defining story (Adichie, 2009). This wideawakeness (Greene, 1995) also drew us to wonder with the more dominant institutional narratives of the categorization of behaviours as identity markers (i.e. the ...