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

Back to Page Authors: Katharine Urmy

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Keywords: burnout, compassion fatigue, incivility, figurative language

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Abstract: This authoethnographical phenomenological participatory study examines the experience of compassion fatigue by the researcher and how this experience affects her life and work and ultimately her decision to leave or stay in the profession of teaching. This study is grounded in critical theory insofar that it seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces that contribute to compassion fatigue as experience by the researcher. 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 amongst teachers by purposefully commenting on/critiquing school culture in order to make contributions to 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 those doing the actual work of teaching students, teachers themselves, this critical participatory research is intended to emancipate those suffering from compassion fatigue if only by giving them a turn at the proverbial microphone to stand as witnesses and echo their voices down the long halls of policy makers, 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).

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