The Racial Melancholia of Un-grieved Endings
A Felt Understanding of Teachers of Color Who Leave the Classroom
Keywords:
grief, racial melacholia, teacher attrition, trauma, education, ethnographyAbstract
Educational researchers are quick to intellectualize solutions to teacher attrition without feeling what is in front of us and within us: overwhelming, unmetabolized grief. Blending online ethnography with somatic and critical understandings of grief and trauma, this study seeks to understand teacher attrition as a felt sense of loss. Focusing on the stories of four teachers of color, I use the concept of racial melancholia to describe a liminal stage of grief and a distinct form of racialized trauma, as participants wrestle with their internal landscapes, administrative responses to their departure, and decisions to bid farewell, or not, to their students. I conclude with ways for educators, researchers, and leaders to affirm the grief of teachers of color and speculate how doing so can disrupt teacher attrition and compounded racialized grief in schools.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Journal of Trauma Studies in Education
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Upon publication articles are immediately and freely available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. All published articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License. All articles are permanently available online. The final version of articles may be posted to an institutional repository or to the author's own website as long as the article includes a link back to the original article posted on JTSE.