This chapter focuses on the experience of three educators in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. As much as possible, the researcher has worked to maintain the voices of the teachers and highlights concepts of self-expression, editing, and processing of emotions and trauma through traditional and multimodal texts. Findings from the study have implications for the ways that teachers experience traumatic events, the ways that writing can be used for classroom instruction across a variety of modes, and the ways that major political and social events are processed by educators.
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Much emotion and uncertainty has punctuated the 2020-2021 school year, as well as the fall 2020 semester. In response to the context of working and living in a pandemic, while also noting concerns of social justice and notions of personal safety and financial stability, the creative and ideological work of three educators is highlighted in this chapter. This piece of research highlights the power of creating texts for processing traumatic times, on the part teachers and then, in turn, in the participation of students.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore and document the instructional moves made by middle school teachers in the 2020-2021 school year as they worked to continue instruction through digital multimodal texts with young adolescents in a rural community, with particular attention to the ways these teachers used visual texts to foster empathy, hope, and personal healing. This sense of empathy began with teachers in their creative work and presentation of identity in digital and artistic forms, but extended to classroom practices, as well. Part of these reflections stem from interviews conducted during spring 2020 instruction, with an additional layer of responses attending to concerns and responses for the early parts of the fall 2020 semester. Analysis continued into the fall 2020 semester when uncertainty continued and instruction delivery vacillated among diverse formats. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated the digital divide that some students face, and has added a layer of trauma to daily lived experiences, and particular attention is given to the emotional weight of traumatic events, and the ways in which educators invite students into a style of visual bibliotherapy, and practice these approaches themselves. As an additional thread from professional literature, due to the attention in this project to use of film, social media, illustrations, and other visual texts as a space for exploring identity work, the researcher traced voices in professional literature who address this topic
Each educator shared elements of their individual experience, and case study methodology informed the collection of these data, as well as analysis to move to larger themes that could be generalized across contexts. Stake (1995) wrote about two strands of case study methodology, citing the possibility of an intrinsic or instrumental case study methodology. An intrinsic case study focuses on individuals and groups who are already part of a research investigation in process, while an instrumental case is sought more purposively because of relationship to a particular area of inquiry. In the composition of this chapter, an initial interest in the multimodal and digital literacy work of teachers formed an introductory thread of instrumental inquiry, and served to spark an interest in building conversations and sharing experiences. The first steps in this work began before the pandemic, but were subsequently reframed by the challenges that teachers experienced in this new context. An additional layer of intrinsic inquiry formed as educators shared further details of their lives and feelings, as well as their sense of how to process trauma and uncertainty, in the midst of their work at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.