AN EDUCATOR’S EXPERIENCE OF INCIVILITY, BURNOUT, AND COMPASSION FATIGUE DESCRIBED THROUGH FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Abstract

ABSTRACT This autoethnographical phenomenological participatory study examines the researcher’s experience of compassion fatigue, burnout, and incivility and how this experience affects her life and work, and ultimately her decision to leave the profession of teaching. This study is grounded in critical theory insofar as it seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces that contribute to compassion fatigue, burnout, and incivility in the workplace as experienced by the researcher and other educators. A large part of the study relies on “collaborative witnessing, a form of relational autoethnography that works to evocatively tell the experiences of others in shared storytelling and conversation” (Rawicki & Ellis, 2011). Through an autoethnographic lens, the researcher uses personal experience to examine and critique a larger cultural experience among teachers by purposefully commenting on and critiquing school culture in order to make contributions to the existing research. This is done by taking an authentic inventory of personal experience and embracing vulnerability purposefully in hopes of creating a relationship between the researcher’s own experience and that of others (Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013). Illuminating the voices of teachers, this critical participatory research is intended to hear from those suffering from compassion fatigue, burnout, and incivility by giving them a turn at the proverbial microphone to stand as witnesses and echo their voices down the long halls of policymakers, oftentimes so far removed from the field, to affect future policy change regarding the proper care of teachers in the field (Greenhalgh & Russell, 2006; Martín-Baró, 1994; Nelson, 2013).