As art teachers engage with big ideas such as identity, relationships, power, and conflict in art lessons, students may share experiences of trauma with teachers. Especially if teachers have strong relationships with students, meaningful and personally relevant art lessons can lead to students sharing stories such as struggle with bisexual identity, battles with anorexia, stories of poverty, discrimination and fear of police. Art teachers are not being taught the skills to take care of themselves and cope with student trauma, leading to compassion fatigue, burnout, and dropout. Teacher self-care is essential with the increase in trauma-informed education. This research argues for caring pedagogies, where teachers are attentive to students’ holistic selves, including trauma, along with advocating for meaningful art lessons that connect to students lives, creating a transformative, healing, and empowering space for students. There is a need for more professional development, support, resources, counselors, time, and structure to support and sustain empathetic teachers. It brings to light the challenges of being an empathetic art teacher, starting dialogue on how teachers cope with student trauma.
I studied with a middle school art teacher in Columbus, Ohio who was experiencing compassion fatigue. Through a critical pedagogy and post-structuralist lens, I exchanged stories with her. To represent the teacher’s voice, I turned each interview question response into a participant-voiced poem, and responded with a researcher-voiced poem to share my own stance. I created short stories written from a student perspective to demonstrate student trauma and resonate with teacher readers by combining true stories of the students, my experiences, experiences of colleagues, and fiction to conceal the students’ identities. Themes included poverty/unsafe circumstances; homelessness and parents with disabilities; bullying, suicide, and family death; and single-parent homes. The teacher and I created a collaborative artwork, a hanging wire mobile, demonstrating compassion fatigue solutions. Student artworks in which students shared a secret challenge in their life hang on one side of the mobile, for example “My mom won’t let me play outside because of violence and police in my neighborhood” and “My mom cries at night when she thinks we are asleep because she can’t pay the bills.” The other side showcases artwork made from myself and the teacher illustrating strategies of coping with student trauma, commenting on the act of balancing student trauma with teacher self-care to avoid teacher dropout.
This research helps sustain teachers with: empathetic pedagogies, compassion fatigue who might be considering dropout, and a high population of students with trauma. Compassion fatigue may be part of why teachers quit, so this might help solve the teacher shortage. Teacher preparation programs benefit from this research, preventing compassion fatigue of future teachers by discussing teacher self-care and spreading awareness of compassion fatigue. This research benefits students with trauma as teachers can reach students through relationships, support student’s mental wellbeing, and mitigate trauma’s effects. With resources and training, art teachers can become powerful agents in changing students’ traumatic circumstances and instilling student resilience.