A Meditation on Caritas and Teaching the Dramatic Arts: A Re(act)ion to Teacher Wellness

Abstract

Teaching is a high stress occupation that requires much from the personal and professional resources of a teacher. Strategies for coping with workplace stress challenge educators to shift away from habitual and entrenched ways of being, while opening a space for re-designing how the job of teaching may be approached. Current research in teacher stress suggests that both teachers and the educational system could benefit from taking ownership of the sources of workplace stress. Performative autoethnography is a form of critical self-reflection research. Combining arts-based research with autoethnography challenged me, as an educator, to explore varied and creative research methods. Through theatre arts-based research, I staged the need to live, write, and research personal and embodied experiences of teacher wellness. The re-telling of these life experiences, at the intersecting sites in my life story, became interruptions that expand understanding. Theatre, as political action, can disturb our habits of engagement and inspire change. A Catholic teacher’s creed of caritas breaks open a space for my arts-based performative autoethnographic study, to address emerging interconnections, within an educational culture of possibility. Caritas, in education, is offered as a disruption to current discourse on teacher wellness and joins a growing chorus encouraging transformation in the ways students learn and the redesigning of a healthy and sustainable workplace for professional teachers who facilitate that learning. The film version (of my arts-based research performative autoethnographic: Meditation on Caritas and Teaching the Dramatic Arts: A Re(act)ion to Teacher Wellness) can be found on Aviary: https://ualberta.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1778/collection_resources/136749