Browsing by Subject "Teacher Support"

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    “The Word that Comes to Mind is Incompatible”: A Narrative Exploration of the Embodied and Emotional Experience of Pregnancy Loss Among K–12 Teachers
    (2024-05) Pinkham-Brown, Amanda
    This arts-based, narrative study explores the emotional and embodied experience of K–12 teachers who have endured pregnancy and infant loss. While studies have been conducted on teacher grief (Luong, 2021; Oliver, 2019), pregnancy and infant loss in the workplace (Brierley-Jones et al., 2014; Gagnon & Beaudry, 2014; Hazen, 2003, 2006; Keep et al., 2021; Lyon, 2021; Macdonald et al., 2015; Maitlis & Petriglieri, 2019; Malacrida, 1999; Meunier et al., 2021; Murphy & Cacciatore, 2017; Schoonover et al., 2022) and pregnancy and infant loss among professors, midwives and other obstetric healthcare professionals (Musodza et al., 2021; Porschitz & Siler, 2017), the specific experience of pregnancy loss in educators is likely an under-researched phenomenon. One out of every four pregnancies ends in loss (Malacrida, 1999) and is likely common in a profession that is seventy-seven percent female-identifying with an average age of 43 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). This research is timely because of evolving and, frankly, dire circumstances for teachers and people who can get pregnant in the United States, who face simultaneous coordinated right-wing attacks on the teaching profession and the bodily autonomy of pregnant people. Using Arts-Based, Narrative, and Feminist research methods, I collected stories from forty-three teachers who experienced a loss in the last ten years. I found that in US K–12 schools, there is a systemic lack of space for emotional and physical healing after loss unless there is intentional intervention into these systems by agents operating within them. While this lack of physical and emotional space is common, I found no clear themes or correlations between participant experiences and variables such as school type, school culture, or state and local policies. Rather, each participant shared a heartbreakingly unique story. What follows here, then, is an attempt to share these stories, both artistically and analytically, in all their complexity. I begin by situating these stories in the research on pregnancy and infant loss, both generally and in the workplace. I then ground my research in complexity theory as a theoretical framework, which offers a template to consider the myriad open systems from which my participants' experiences emerged. I then offer two artistic renderings of the data—one ethnodrama and one narrative—to share the often heartbreaking and sometimes uplifting details of loss. Next, I analyze these stories through the concepts of disenfranchised and stifled grief (Doka, 1989; Eyetsemitan, 1998), related terms for when grief is not acknowledged or allowed to run its course, and of misfit and the situation of misfitting, a “feminist materialist disability concept” that highlights moments when bodies and material realities are in disjunction (Garland-Thomson, 2011, p. 591). I use these concepts to highlight the lack of physical and emotional space for maternal bodies in schools and to show the ways individual agency can intervene to create space and offer support. I conclude with participant suggestions for how to better support loss parents but emphasize that no single support will guarantee safe passage through this devastating event. Throughout, I use complexity theory to argue that the only way to truly understand this experience is to consider the individual stories in their original context; to not look to single variables that may produce positive or negative workplace experiences, but rather to consider the complex systems that converge in the lives of these parents and teachers that are, in many ways, out of their control. While this can leave us, as loss parents and their supporters, feeling powerless, I argue that these moments of agency, of simply recognizing and making space for tired bodies and broken hearts, make an incredible difference.