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Teachers' Experiences of/with Trauma and Trauma-Sensitivity: A Narrative Inquiry into Trauma Stories and Stories of Trauma
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- Author / Creator
- Reid, Nathalie
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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 practice of
assessing and assigning codes to children and youth). We also wondered with the
professional pressures to be often resulting from one-time professional development that
travels to teachers through the metaphorical conduit (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995; Craig,
2001). We wondered if and how programs of trauma sensitivity bump against, smooth out,
and/or silence the multilayered and complex experiences that are shaped by and shaping
teachers’ making of their lives in and outside of schools. By ‘world’-travelling to others’
worlds with a loving perception (Lugones, 1987), through living, telling, retelling and
reliving our stories, we came to a narrative understanding of trauma as shaping, but also as
being shaped by, our knowledge, contexts, and identities, that is, our stories to live by
(Connelly & Clandinin, 1999). Together, we called attention to how we were continually
composing our lives as searches for, or as struggles with, narrative coherence (Carr, 1986).
We saw this understanding as opening possibilities for more narrative conceptualizations
of trauma, trauma stories, and stories of trauma as we, as teachers, continue to come
alongside each other, children and youth, colleagues, families, curriculum makers, policy
developers, and others on school landscapes. -
- Graduation date
- Spring 2020
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.