Becoming a Teacher in an Era of School Shootings
Year: 2019

This article addresses the importance of highlighting teachers' emotional labor within teacher education programs. Given the changing landscape of schools in the 21st century, teachers' emotional labor now includes participating in annual safety drills and lockdown trainings, in addition to responses to violence (threatened or actual) This study emerges out of a need to explore how this national context shapes teacher candidates' identity development and to consider how teacher education programs might better address this context. Employing Berry's (2007) framework of tensions within teaching practice, the paper offers a discourse analysis of a reflective journal entry written by a teacher candidate in response to the 2017 school shooting in Parkland,  Arguing for the use of narrative inquiry within field experiences, the authors propose that teacher educators can help candidates develop more responsive and productive emotional practices by linking emotions to roles and relationships, using negative emotions to articulate purposes for teaching, and highlighting the emotional practices of experienced teachers. Emily Wender is an associate professor of English in the Department of English of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania. Alicia DeMille is an English and English as a second language teacher at Reading Senior High School, Reading, Pennsylvania. Their email addresses are: ewender@iup.edu demillealicia@gmail.com (c) 2019 by Caddo Gap Press Emily Wender Alicia DeMille 9 Volume 28, Number 2, Fall 2019  When I think about Parkland, or the other schools that this nightmare has happened to, my heart sinks immediately. As a teacher, you truly do form a strong bond with each of your students we do spend more than half of our day together. The welfare and safety of my students causes almost a parental instinct within me, and no textbook can teach that to a preservice teacher. Alicia DeMille, student teacher On February 14, 201 seventeen students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were killed by a nineteen year old former student with a semi automatic rifle. Two teacher candidates were at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that day (Travis, 201 and across the country, thousands of other teacher candidates faced the news of the massacre. For one of them, Alicia DeMille, a teacher candidate in a combined middle and high school in rural Pennsylvania, it proved to be "the most difficult week of [her] college career." In a reflective journal entry written that week, DeMille shared how she helped her mentor teacher distribute and read aloud a letter from the school administration to the students and their families. The letter aimed to reassure students, while asking families for their input about how to keep their school safe. Unsure of her own safety or how well her teacher education program prepared her for such a traumatizing event, in distributing the letter DeMille realized she did feel sure of one thing: her responsibility to keep her students safe, a major step in her development as a teacher. DeMille's resolved commitment to her students demonstrates the growing confidence John Dewey (1933) identifies as the "personal attitudes of open mindedness, wholeheartedness, and responsibility" in teaching and learning (as cited in Berry, 2007, p. 64) Yet the emotional labor of teaching is also evident in DeMille's description of the week as the "most difficult," her frustration with her lack of teacher preparation, and her uncertainty about how to respond in the event of a school shooting. Even in this brief excerpt, DeMille is describing the tension between confidence and certainty, an essential component of learning to teach (Berry, 2007; Britzman, 2003; Loughran, 2005; Tillema KremerHayon, 2005) Being open to new ways of seeing herself as a teacher, and with a new outlook on her relationships with students, her journal entry reveals her vacillation between newfound feelings of confidence and profound uncertainty. These varied sensations prompted DeMille to ask how might she have been better prepared for this moment. DeMille and her university Becoming a Teacher in the Era of School Shootings 10 Issues in Teacher Education supervisor, Emily Wender, then extended this question to consider how teacher preparation programs can better prepare teacher candidates for the emotional labor of teaching, including the ways in which teaching today intersects with school violence and shootings. In this qualitative study, the authors consider DeMille's reflective journal as a means to interrogate the threat of school shootings in an examination of how uncertainty shapes preservice teachers' development, and an investigation into the role narrative inquiry and emotional awareness might play in teachers' identity formation. This study thus brings together multiple areas of research: the theorizing of emotions and the emotional labor of teaching, the identity development of teacher candidates, and the use of narrative inquiry and the framework of tensions in teacher education. Ultimately, our aim is to identify ways to better prepare teacher candidates for the emotional practices of teaching today. The Emotional Labor of Teaching and Gun Violence in the United States Emotional practices include managing complex social interactions, building relationships, reappraising situations, and at times, suppressing feelings (Keller, et al. 2014; Nias, 1996; Sutton, 2007) experiences that occur every day in classrooms. Indeed, few would argue that teaching is not an emotional profession, even without the additional work of imagining, fearing, or anticipating school shootings (Hargreaves, 199 Nias, 1996; Meyer, 2009) For example, Britzman's (2003) foundational text on learning to teach emphasizes "the surprising forces of uncertainty, discontentment, helplessness, and disorganization that are also education" (p. 5) and Kelchtermans (2016) puts it even more soberly, "vulnerability is rooted in the teaching profession," and "there is no escape from it" (p. 3 Osborn (1996) further connects the potency of teachers' feelings to the intensely relational nature of the work: emotion is created and mediated through relationships, and for teachers, creating relationships with students is not simply a byproduct of time spent together, but one of the ultimate goals of a teacher's work, a goal that cannot be achieved without emotional labor (as cited in Nias, 1996) Meyer (2009) also argues that the emotional practices of teachers encompass the processes teachers use to "understand themselves" and "their relationships with others" (p. 75) Teacher candidates who have yet to fully enter the profession are just learning how to apply these practices, yet do so today within a changing context that includes the threat of school shootings. The grim statistics are unavoidable: since 1999, gun violence has claimed the Emily Wender Alicia DeMille 11 Volume 28, Number 2, Fall 2019 lives of more than 26,000 children and teens in a variety of settings (Ingraham, 201 And, with a national average of 10 school shootings a year (Cox Rich, 201 many people perceive U.S. schools to be unsafe spaces that present physical risks to teachers (Cox Rich, 201 Ingraham, 201 University of Virginia, 2015) Indeed, a majority of schools now operate safety drills for teachers and students (some, as young as kindergarten) to prepare for the threat of gun violence (United States Government Accountability Office, 2016) Within the context of these statistics, therefore, it is not surprising that DeMille's ideas of what it means to be a teacher have been shaped by school shootings. In fact, teacher educators should probably assume that teacher candidates' ideas of teaching will increasingly include ideas related to violence. This changing picture adds urgency to existing calls for attention to teacher candidates' identity formation (Hong, 2010; Karlsson, 2013; Lu Curwood, 2014; Teng, 2017; Timostsuk Ugaste, 2012) as well as to growing concerns for teachers' stress and mental health (Day Qing, 2009; Keller, Chang, Becker, Goetz, Frenzel, 2014) Emotional Labor and Identity Formation First introduced by Hothschild (19 3) to describe work that requires employees to create particular feelings while suppressing others, the term "emotional labor" has been used to discuss the many emotional components of teaching (Hargreaves, 199 Keller, Chang, Becker, Goetz, Frenzel, 2014; Liljestrom, Rouston, deMarrais, 2007; Meyer, 2009) Teachers' emotions vary in quality and intensity, are both positive and negative, are often captured through statements of identity or roles (e.g. as "protector" or "confidante" and are deeply linked to their "moral purposes" for teaching (Hargreaves, 199 For teacher candidates, emotional labor can be a "labor of love" (Hargreaves, 199 an act of suppression, or a painful occurrence. Indeed, when teachers perceive their moral purposes are being thwarted, they experience more intensely negative, even "painful" emotions (Liljestrom, Roulston, deMarrais, 2007) Yet, absent efforts on the part of teacher educators, the emotional labor experienced by teacher candidates may stay in the background, given that "emotions" are not part of traditional curricula. The reflective journaling required by many teacher education programs during student teaching renders the emotions of teacher candidates more "visible" (Meyer, 2009, p. 5) however, thus providing a prime curricular moment to foreground emotional labor. Student teaching is also a time of tremendous identity change, which in and of itself is a highly emotional process (Rodgers Scott, 200 Becoming a Teacher in the Era of School Shootings 12 Issues in Teacher Education Zembylas, 2003) As Zembylas (2003) explains, the "constant construction,