“LIKE BEING PECKED TO DEATH BY A CHICKEN” RESILIENCE AND WORK-FAMILY EQUILIBRIUM IN TEACHER/MOTHERS by Shirley Giroux B.Sc., University of British Columbia, 2003 B.Ed., University of British Columbia, 2004 M.Ed., University of Northern British Columbia, 2012 DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HEALTH SCIENCES UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA March 2019 ©Shirley Giroux, 2019 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS ii ABSTRACT Teachers are helping professionals for whom caring work is a significant aspect of the job. Conflicts between work and family demands arise from various antecedent work, home, and personal features and have been linked to negative effects on mental health and quality of life, as well as increased rates of burnout. This research investigated whether mothers and nonmothers differ in their reported experiences of wellness at work and home. Using teachers as a proxy for helping professionals, this research used mixed methods to explore whether there might be observable differences between the experiences of women who are parents with children at home, compared to those who are child-free. A sample of British Columbia teachers (n = 182) was surveyed to seek quantifiable within-profession differences in measures of stress, work/life conflicts, and/or resilience between groups of K–12 teachers, based on whether or not they had children at home. These surveys also provided opportunities for participants to share stories of challenging experiences and the resilience strategies they used to work through them. A subsample of the survey group of teacher/mothers analyzed and made sense of the collected stories in light of the quantitative results and their own experiences as part of the process of Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI), which comprised the qualitative portion of this research and resulted in suggestions of many strategies. Statistically, it appears parent and non-parent teachers may differ only in the greater extent to which the former report family demands to interfere with the time and effort they can spend at or on work. In general, teachers reported similar challenges regardless of whether they were mothers and may use similar resilience strategies (such as self-efficacy) to support them in their caring work. Formal elucidation of these strategies may facilitate the translation of this research into meaningful supports and strategies to facilitate equilibrium between work and home for all helping professionals. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iii List of Tables ix List of Figures x Acknowledgement xiv Dedication xv Chapter 1 Introduction Problem Statement Rationale and Theoretical Framework for the Study Significance of the Research: What is the Need? Delineating Measurable Differences Describing Shared Experiences Developing Collective Supports Background to the Research Researcher Location Research as an Insider/Outsider Potential for Transference and Countertransference Definitions of Transference and Countertransference Transference Countertransference Recognizing Transference and Countertransference Working with Transference and Countertransference Theoretical Orientation Emotional Labour Caring Labour Feminist Theory Feminist Research Rationale for Focus on a Single Gender Feminist Research Methods CBPR Complexity Theory Theories of Occupational Health Demand-Control-Social Support 1 1 3 5 6 7 7 8 8 9 10 11 11 12 13 15 18 19 20 21 21 21 23 24 25 27 28 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Chapter 2 iv Effort-Reward Imbalance Conservation of Resources Job Demands-Resources Person-Environment Fit Selecting a Specific Model for this Research Limitations and Delimiters Limitations Delimiters Ethical Considerations in Engaging with my Chosen Community Boundaries Gender Reciprocity Multicultural Considerations Chapter Summary 30 32 33 34 35 Literature Review Resilience Defining Resilience Resilience in Teaching Resilience in New Teachers Resilience in the Face of Poverty Resilience Amidst Structural Changes Student Benefits of Teachers’ Resilience Psychological Resilience Factors Contributing to Psychological Resilience Self-Efficacy Autonomy Collective Efficacy Attributional Style (Causal Analysis) and Optimism Attributional Style Appraisal Style Emotional Regulation, Empathy, and Impulse Control Emotional Regulation Empathy Impulse Control Relationships (Reaching Out) Vocation and a Sense of Significance The Importance of Resilience Burnout Compassion Fatigue Work-Family Equilibrium 48 49 50 53 58 66 71 73 75 75 36 36 38 40 41 42 45 45 46 76 77 79 80 80 81 82 82 89 90 90 93 95 96 102 105 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Chapter 3 v Defining Work-Family Balance Work-Family Balance Research with Teachers Cultural Considerations Structural Considerations Teaching-Specific Work Characteristics Social Supports and Teaching Dispositional Considerations Workplace Stress and Family Life Chapter Summary 108 112 112 114 116 Research Design Purpose Research Methodology and Population Methodology Mixed Methods Research (MMR) Benefits of MMR The Research Population Population Characteristics Recruitment and Characteristics of Participants for Phase 1 Recruitment and Characteristics of Participants for Phase 2 Instruments The Teacher Stress Inventory Validity of the TSI Reliability of the TSI Work-Family Conflict/Family-Work Conflict Scales Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale Demographic Questionnaire Survey Assembly Procedures Quantitative Data Collection Qualitative Data Collection Specific Design Core Components of Qualitative Research Natural Setting Researcher as Key Instrument Multiple Sources of Data Inductive and Deductive Data Analysis Participants’ Meanings Emergent Design Reflexivity Holistic Account 128 128 129 130 130 132 133 133 136 117 119 124 126 136 137 137 138 138 139 141 144 144 144 150 151 151 154 154 155 155 155 156 157 157 158 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Chapter 4 vi Data Analysis Quantitative Data Analysis Assumptions Research Hypotheses Qualitative Data Analysis Group One: Too Much Data Group Two: Not Enough Movement Group Three: Just About Right Group Four: A Different Setting with Similar Results Assumptions Combining the Quantitative and Qualitative Data Chapter Summary 159 159 160 162 165 170 171 172 172 Results Findings from the Quantitative Data Descriptive Statistics Differences Between Teacher/Mothers and NonMothers First Repeated Measures MANCOVA Second Repeated Measures MANCOVA Differences Based on Ages of Youngest Children Correlations Resilience Score Correlations Child Age Correlations Summary of the Quantitative Findings Findings from the Qualitative Data Sensemaking Group Sensemaking Individual Sensemaking Catalysis: Quantifying Relationships in the PNI Data Scale Question: Precipitating Events Scale Question: Sources of Resilience Patterns Based on Ages of the Youngest Children Patterns Based on WFC/FWC Scale Scores Patterns Based on TSI Scores Patterns Based on CD-RISC Scores Archetypal Patterns Theme 1: Emotion Theme 2: Working with People Theme 3: Perspective 177 178 179 180 173 174 175 180 180 181 182 182 183 183 184 184 184 187 190 190 191 197 199 199 199 200 201 204 208 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Chapter 5 Chapter 6 vii Theme 4: Staying Healthy Theme 5: Time Theme 6: Family Summary of Qualitative Findings Chapter Summary 211 215 218 222 223 Discussion Resilience and Teacher Stress Resilience and Work-Family Conflict/Family-Work Conflict Significance of Parent Status Suggested Patterns Regarding Resilience and Teaching/ Parenting Indications of Resilience Sources of Resilience Self-Efficacy Optimism and Attributional Style Emotion Relationships Vocation and Sense of Significance Summary of the Findings’ Significance Recommendations for Reinforcing Teacher Resilience The Need to Support Teachers’ Mental Health The Socioemotional Work of Teaching Psychological Strain in Teaching Psychological Strain in the Larger Context Why Use Groups to Support Teacher Mental Health? Benefits of a Peer-Supervision Model Increased Protective Resources Increased Reflective Capacity Increased Social Connection A “New” Model of Support Intervision The Question of Facilitation Challenges to the Establishment of Teacher Peer Supervision Groups Chapter Summary Revisiting the Feminist Framework A Best-Fit Model of Occupational Health Connections to Complexity Theory 224 225 231 234 238 Conclusion Research Strengths Mixed Methods Sample Diversity Community Connections Demonstrating Potential Applications 299 299 300 300 300 301 239 244 244 246 247 249 250 252 255 257 258 260 263 264 265 265 266 270 275 277 279 281 285 286 291 295 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Future Directions Developing Groups Based on the PNI Work Improving Generalizability Further Delineating the Emotional and Caring Work of Teachers Other Future Directions Summary References viii 301 302 302 304 306 308 311 Appendix A Collaborative Inquiry and Critical Analysis Framework (Cole and Knowles, 1993) 354 Appendix B Sample Survey Items 355 Appendix C PNI Work Plans 358 Appendix D Participant Confidentiality Agreement & Consent Form 361 Appendix E Summaries of PNI Sensemaking data 366 Appendix F Data from Scaling Question on Resilience-Precipitating Event 372 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS ix LIST OF TABLES Table 1 Other Sample Characteristics 135 Table 2 Characteristics of Teacher/Mothers’ Children 135 Table 3 Means and Standard Deviations for Teacher/Mothers’ and NonMothers’ Survey Scores 180 Table 4 Archetypes with Numbers of Constituent Stereotypes, Stereotype Evaluations, and Stories 186 Table 5 Overarching Themes (in Alphabetical Order) Showing Constituent Archetypes and Numbers of Stories 189 Table 6 Number of Records in Each Child Age Category per Half of the “Internal to External” Scale 192 Table 7 Mean Scores with 95% Confidence Intervals (CI) for Items on the “Internal to External” Scales 198 Table 8 Number of Records Above Each Assessment’s Sample Mean per Half of the “Internal to External” Scale 198 Table 9 First Major PNI Group Theme: Emotion 202 Table 10 Second Major PNI Group Theme: Working with People 205 Table 11 Third Major PNI Group Theme: Perspective 209 Table 12 Fourth Major PNI Group Theme: Staying Healthy 212 Table 13 Fifth Major PNI Group Theme: Time 216 Table 14 Sixth Major PNI Group Theme: Family 219 Table 15 Relationship References: Frequencies of Personal Lives Compared to Work 220 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Data transformation triangulation design (adapted from Creswell and Plano Clark, 2007). 149 Figure 2 Common elements of the PNI strategy used over the four group sessions. 168 Figure 3 Outline of PNI data sensemaking analysis showing individual and group contributions. 187 Figure 4 Scaling questions for PNI group participants to use in answering the question “What got the teacher off balance?” or “What is the nature of the complication in the story?” 191 Figure 5 Scaling questions for PNI group participants to use in answering the question “What resources did the teacher use?” or “What resources did the teacher use to manage the situation?” 192 Figure 6 Story summaries scaled according to resilience-supportive resources (i.e. internal to external moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated by its first letter and an arrow () indicating the midpoint. Each line represents one participant’s TSI score (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 192). 193 Figure 7 Story summaries scaled according to resilience-supportive resources (i.e. internal to external moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated by its first letter and an arrow () indicating the midpoint. Each line represents one participant’s WFC score on behaviour-based, strain-based, or time-based WFC as indicated by the labels above each column (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 192). 194 Figure 8 Story summaries scaled according to resilience-supportive resources (i.e. internal to external moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated by its first letter and an arrow () indicating the midpoint. Each line represents one participant’s FWC score on behaviour-based, strain-based, or time-based FWC as indicated by the labels above each column (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 192). 195 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS xi Figure 9 Story summaries scaled according to resilience-supportive resources (i.e. internal to external moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated by its first letter and an arrow () indicating the midpoint. Each line represents one participant’s CD-RISC (work) score (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 192). 196 Figure 10 CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Emotion" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CD-RISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. 203 Figure 11 Relationship between CD-RISC (home) scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation (r2 = - .0164, p = .0158) when grouped according to the “Emotion” theme. 203 Figure 12 Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing statistically-significant correlations for the “Emotion” theme on the FWC Behaviour scale (r2 = -.0172, p = .0134) and the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0354, p = .0004). 204 Figure 13 CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Working with People" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CD-RISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. 206 Figure 14 Relationship between WFC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing statistically-significant correlations for the “Working with People” theme on the WFC Strain scale (r2 = .0684, p < .0001) and the WFC Time scale (r2 = .0590, p < .0001). 206 Figure 15 Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing statistically-significant correlations for the “Working with People” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0475, p = .0002). 207 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS xii Figure 16 Relationship between TSI (total) scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Working with People” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = .0411, p = .0006). 208 Figure 17 CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Perspective" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CD-RISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. 210 Figure 18 Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Perspective” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0438, p = .0004). 210 Figure 19 CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Staying Healthy" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CD-RISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. 213 Figure 20 Relationship between WFC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Staying Healthy” theme on the WFC Time scale (r2 = .0222, p = .0308). 213 Figure 21 Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Staying Healthy” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0209, p = .0009). 214 Figure 22 Relationship between TSI (total) score and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Staying Healthy” theme (r2 = .0317, p = .0009). 214 Figure 23 CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Time" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CD-RISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. 216 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS xiii Figure 24 Relationship between CD-RISC (work) scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Time” theme (r2 = -.0221, p = .0307). 217 Figure 25 Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Time” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0299, p = .0121). 217 Figure 26 Relationship between TSI (total) scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Time” theme (r2 = .0612, p = .0003). 218 Figure 27 CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Family" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CD-RISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. 221 Figure 28 Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing statistically-significant correlation for the “Family” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0721, p = .0009). 221 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work would not have been possible had it not been for the generous and enthusiastic participation of the many women who shared their time, their stories, and their experiences. I am deeply indebted to all of the teachers—mothers and otherwise—who took part in this research. Whether providing the inspiration to undertake this work; helping to collect, analyze, and share the data; or providing support and encouragement throughout the entire process, I was the beneficiary of many people’s kindness and munificence—full schedules notwithstanding! I am also grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Andrew Kitchenham, and the rest of my committee: Dr. Shannon Wagner, Dr. Kathryn Banks, and Dr. John Sherry for their support, their excellent questions, and their invaluable help in broadening my academic perspective. I particularly appreciated Dr. Kitchenham being able to take the time to time talk about so much more than just methods, research strategies, and editing concerns—my taste for academia has been well and truly kindled. Thanks also to Dr. Charlie Naylor for serving as both an inspiration as a researcher and my external examiner. Thank you especially to my husband Don and my children, Rozlyn and Remi, for the unwavering love and support, the extra help whenever and wherever needed, and the muchneeded distraction that was frequently responsible for helping me to maintain my own equilibrium as I completed this research. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS xv DEDICATION To my family: especially my parents Arnold and Gloria Fortowsky who have always been my role models for teaching and parenting, my children Rozlyn and Remi who are the catalyst for my work, and my husband Don who is possibly the most patient and generous man in the world. I love you all so much; thank you for (almost literally) everything. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 1 Chapter 1 – Introduction The use of emotion is a regular and important part of the work of helping professionals (heretofore referred to as, HPs) such as teachers; being a caregiver (e.g., a parent) also requires considerable emotional investment. As a teacher and a mother myself, I wondered: are there are particular psychological traits that mothers who work as teachers find useful in maintaining their day-to-day equanimity despite overlapping or conflicting expectations at work and home? I was also interested in whether there were differences in the experiences of teachers who had children of their own at home and those who did not have children. Problem Statement For this research, I investigated if similar sources of resilience appeared to underlie teachers’ abilities to sustain their effectiveness as classroom teachers and their abilities to negotiate their work and family responsibilities in such ways that their mental health was preserved. While much of the extant literature in this area referred to maintaining a balance between work and home, I believed that it was important to distinguish between the commonly used term “balance” and my own conceptualization of what successfully maintaining family and work responsibilities could be: equilibrium. Whereas having a balance requires that all parts of a system are carefully and continuously adjusted and readjusted around a fulcrum in order to avoid having the entire system collapse, equilibrium allows for some flexibility. For a system at equilibrium, the introduction of new or additional stressors means that the system might shift, but not that it will necessarily collapse completely. While this is still an imperfect analogy, I am confident that it provides a more realistic impression of the flexibility that is inherent to many people’s lives (whether or not they recognize it), particularly when one considers that it is possible to add stressors to a system at equilibrium and not cause any shift at all. Through the introduction of buffers, a system at equilibrium becomes able to absorb a RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 2 certain number of stressors without any appreciable shifts to the system as a whole; I imagine resilience and resilience-enhancing supports to be examples of such buffers. When working with children all day and then coming home to one’s own children, it seemed likely that teacher/mothers might be particularly vulnerable to what Hochschild (1997/2000) described as the enmeshed yet competing emotional cultures of work and home that characterize much of modern professional life—even when children are not a common factor. In taking a salutogenic orientation, wherein I investigated factors that helped people attain or sustain their good health, I positioned this work in alignment with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 1986 Ottawa Charter of Health Promotion, which focused on describing ways through which good health might be supported and promoted (Antonovsky, 1996; Eriksson & Lindström, 2008; WHO, 1986). I approached my research from a feminist research stance that incorporated many of the principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR), but not so many that this research might truly be considered community-based. Although it was driven by a communityidentified need (i.e., the anecdotal reports of challenges as a teacher/mother) and is work that I intend will contribute to social change, I was not able to engage with participants to the extent that would have been necessary for this work to merit a CBPR label. This dearth of engagement was due largely to participants’ schedules, which did not permit additional participation for more than the generous amount of time that they had already shared. Although it does not meet the criteria for CBPR, I chose to approach this work from that orientation to ensure that I maintained a consistently feminist approach to my work. Key to both a CBPR and a more general feminist approach, I intended that the results of this research would be meaningful for all participants and potentially useful as an impetus and/or starting point for RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 3 “organizational development, community benefit, best practice improvement, policy development, health promotion, emancipation and empowerment” (Worthington, IbáñezCarrasco, Rourke, & Bacon, 2014, p. 188). These goals, while indicative of best practices in community-based and feminist research, were also aligned with a salutogenic orientation, wherein health is conceptualized as being on a continuum along which one will generally move towards a health promoting direction via gains in personal resources accumulated in part through viewing life as structured, manageable, and coherent (Antonovsky, 1996; Lindström & Eriksson, 2005). I proposed that this research would help teachers identify their sources of resilience and recognize and understand how resilience contributes to increased structure, manageability, and coherence in their lives—supporting mental health in the process. As I was interested in connections between resilience and wellness, this work entailed a consideration of conflicts between participants’ work and family situations and measurements of work stress. Rationale and Theoretical Framework for the Study Conflicts between work and family demands arise from a variety of antecedent work, home, and personal features (Michel, Kotrba, Mitchelson, Clark, & Baltes, 2010) and have been linked to increased rates of teacher burnout (Cinamon, Rich, & Westman, 2007; Noor & Zainuddin, 2011), and negative effects on teachers’ mental health and life satisfaction (Panatik, Badri, Rajab, Rahman, & Shah, 2011). Despite suggestions that the roles of teacher and parent may complement each other and augment strengths in each (Cinamon & Rich, 2010; Claesson & Brice, 1989), it is unclear what factors might contribute to this phenomenon or how prevalent it might be. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 4 I proposed that, if it were indeed the case that the roles of teacher and parent were complementary, it was likely that resilience was partly responsible. Keeping these points in mind, the purposes of this study were fourfold: • to assess indications of teaching-related stress, work-family conflict/family-work conflict (WFC/FWC), and resilience in female teachers and examine differences in teacher/mothers’ and non-mothers’ scores on these self-reports; • to compare teacher/mothers’ self-reports of teaching-related stress, WFC/FWC, and resilience to determine if there were differences based on the age of each’s youngest child or connections between pairs of factors (i.e., stress, WFC, FWC, resilience, and/or children’s ages); • to explore what resources teacher/mothers perceived as supporting their resilience in negotiating work and home demands; and • to develop recommendations in support of sustaining and/or increasing teachers’ resilience and their abilities to maintain their wellness while undertaking both work and family commitments. I addressed these purposes via a series of related research questions (outlined in the Research Design and Results chapters) that I explored through quantitative and qualitative methods (outlined in the Methodology section of the Research Design) using a data transformation triangulation mixed methods strategy as described by Creswell and Plano Clark (2007). Before I further describe these questions and methods in the Methodology, I will provide an outline of the need for this research; some background on me and my interest in the topic; and limitations and ethical considerations in conducting this research. I will also provide an extensive Literature Review in which I will position this work within the extant body of related research. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 5 Significance of the Research: What is the Need? In line with the CBPR practice of conducting research to address a communityidentified need (Strand, Marullo, Cutforth, Stoecker, & Donohue, 2003), I determined the need to delineate factors that may contribute to teachers’ wellness related to their workplace resilience and work-family equilibrium through a combination of personal experience and informal conversations with other mothers who are teachers. To begin addressing this need, I was interested in examining if teacher/mothers’ continued well-being and effectiveness at work as teachers and at home as parents might be connected through the mediating construct of resilience. As I began my formal data collection, I intended to engage with my colleagues as empowered participants in collaborative inquiry and critical analysis at all stages of my research as per the example developed by Cole and Knowles (1993), who delineated suggestions for shared participation at each stage of research (see Appendix A). However, given the constraints of their schedules during the busy school year, I was unable to involve participants to this extent during any stage other than the qualitative analyses. Still, in engaging with my colleagues in this way for even this limited amount of time, I am confident that we contributed to the building of a culture of healthy learning, which Lindström and Eriksson (2011) described as: a lifelong process where people and systems increase the control over, and improve health, wellbeing, and quality of life through creation of learning environments characterised by clear structures and meaningful empowering conditions where one becomes an active participant subject in reciprocal interactions with others (p. 90). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 6 As I will describe further in the Discussion, by engaging in this process, the participants and I made inroads to enabling each other and, ultimately, our respective communities, to fulfill the Ottawa Charter’s vision of health promotion as a process that increases individual and community control over determinants of health (WHO, 1986), particularly regarding mental health promotion, which is still one of the biggest challenges in contemporary public health (Lindström & Eriksson, 2005; WHO, 2005). Based on informal conversations with my colleagues and my familiarity with the extant literature, I anticipated that the data that I collected for this research would affiliate within three themes, which I will now describe. Delineating measurable differences. In considering common factors underlying staying well at teaching and parenting, this work focused on individual aspects—aspects that could potentially be developed to enhance abilities to manage work and home domains effectually while sustaining good health and effectiveness (one way that wellness might be evinced) in both. I was not interested in what might keep teachers from leaving the profession inasmuch as I was curious about what traits or abilities were useful for teachers who are parents to maintain and nourish their psychological wellness while being continually called upon to act as a role model for children. As such, I utilized the health-based conceptualization of resilience described by Reivich and Shatté (2002), rather than one that focused more on occupational outcomes. I used quantitative survey data to explore ways in which indications of work-related stress, WFC/FWC, and resilience differed between parent and non-parent female teachers, and then also tested if there were measurable differences based on the ages of the teacher/mothers’ youngest children. I also collected qualitative data on these surveys, the significance of which I will describe in more detail below. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 7 Describing shared experiences. For the qualitative portion of my research, I focused solely on teachers who self-identified as mothers with school-aged children at home (to whom I am referring as teacher/mothers). Teachers are typically required to manage multiple caregiving, instructional, assessment, and organizational demands while under time pressures for each. In doing so, they are “frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes, and interests” (Schön, 1991, p. 17) with no set, safe place to share or collectively examine their experiences—a lack that may negatively impact their resilience (Beltman, Mansfield, & Price, 2011). Consistent with a CBPR stance, all participants were supported as we engaged in a bidirectional educational process of empowerment and critical consciousness by sharing our stories (Muhammad, et al., 2014) in Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) groups modelled after Kurtz (2014)—the methods of which are described in the Methodology in Chapter 3. Developing collective supports. The benefit of a strong support group for teachers to be resilient at work is quite clear (Compton, 2010; Gu & Day, 2013; Howard & Johnson, 2004; Le Cornu, 2013; Mansfield, Beltman, Broadley, & Weatherby-Fell, 2016). In the education literature, teacher resilience is typically conceptualized as a dynamic process that is contextually and interpersonally mediated (Day, et al., 2006; Ebersöhn, 2014; Gu & Day, 2013). As such, there was potential for participation in the PNI groups to contribute to my and my participants’ ultimate resilience by influencing our shared contexts and building interpersonal connections. By building capacity for further change in this way, this research was again in line with CBPR practice (Muhammad, et al., 2014; Worthington, et al., 2014). As I will explore at length in the Discussion, participants’ perceptions of the potential benefits of these types of group meetings indicated that their continuation in an alternate, non-researchfocused form could be one way for educational systems to actively build teachers’ resilience. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 8 Background to the Research Resilience is relevant to many different fields of study and has been researched from a variety of perspectives, two of which are psychological and organizational. Although my research may strike some as indicative of neoliberal values due to its focus on the individual and her characteristics, my decision to examine resilience from a psychological orientation was not because I expected to position teachers as individually responsible for their wellness regardless of systemic and situational factors. Rather, I selected this focus as I suspected that it was individual, psychological resilience skills that already underlay many teachers’ abilities to enact their multiple, overlapping roles in spite of a dearth of systemic support. As help from extended family is lacking for many North American teacher/mothers, it is likely that these individual resilience characteristics are also helpful in coping with that lack of support. Researcher Location As a parent and a teacher as well as a researcher, I was inextricably connected to and enmeshed in my research. At the time of this writing I remain a teacher (now principal) and a mother with a young family. As my first maternity leave ended, I chose to return to work as a teacher in an alternate classroom setting. This change was my answer to dealing with sentiments since expressed by many of my teacher colleagues regarding how they might remain effective as teachers while also mothering young families—sentiments expressed mainly in terms of how they typically felt as if they were doing neither job well. Because I shared so many attributes with the group with whom I wished to conduct my research, I was an insider to this research; however, my position as a researcher also made me an outsider. As I was both a part of and apart from my research, I was an insider/outsider. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 9 Research as an insider/outsider. As highlighted by Kerstetter (2012), my status as insider/outsider was linked to my specific research context. In general, the community within which I intended to conduct my research was that of women teachers who had dependent children and lived and worked in British Columbia (BC). I was an insider because I shared so many features with the group members amongst whom I wished to conduct my research: female, mid-career teacher/mothers with children at home who were, according to Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010), from backgrounds that were largely (but not entirely) WEIRD [white, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic]. While I was an insider, I was also an outsider as I had not worked in a “typical” classroom for many years and because I had held positions of special responsibility at work (first as a union representative and then as an administrator) in the years immediately preceding and during this work. Being also a Registered Clinical Counsellor and a university student/researcher positioned me even further outside the standard teaching milieu. By being aware of my identities and the ways in which I was located both inside and outside my research, I self-reflected as I worked to build identity as a CBPRinformed researcher (the limited capacity to which I was able to work from this paradigm notwithstanding). I anticipated that these reflections would help ensure that I maintained cultural humility in my research engagements (Minkler, 2005; Muhammad, et al., 2014) and, subsequently, high ethical standards throughout the research process. Harding (2012) argued that beyond locating herself within her research, a researcher must strategize about how to use [her] expertise and resources to conceptualize and articulate social relations in both the categories articulated by the groups studied and also in, paradoxically, the kinds of disciplinary and institutional languages RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 10 that can be heard by public policy makers and the disciplines and institutions upon which they depend (p. 54). By being so familiar with the roles of researcher and researched (as an insider/outsider), I was able to somewhat bridge this gap that Harding pointed out and acted as a sort of knowledge translator for the other teachers involved. In doing so, however, there was a definite possibility that I could have been prone to experiences of transference and countertransference as a researcher and/or as a participant. As non-researcher teachers may also experience transference and countertransference, I will include a brief discussion of such potential reactions in this section on researcher location although it also applies to teaching work in general. Potential for transference and countertransference. According to Weiss (2002), all interpersonal relationships are subject to transference-related distortions; regardless of the specifics of a relationship or a setting, transference and countertransference reactions are universal and ubiquitous. These types of reactions are particularly relevant in the context of helping relationships wherein, based on assumptions made in anticipation of an HP and her/his work, a transference reaction may begin even before initial contact is made (Gelso & Carter, 1985; Krause & Merten, 1999). In this work examining the maintenance of an equilibrium between female teachers’ home and work responsibilities, I expected that transference and countertransference could be factors that influenced the extent to which teachers were able to maintain a satisfactory equilibrium so that they were flexible enough to meet obligations at work and at home without requiring either sphere to remain static. Presumably, when transference and/or countertransference is more prevalent, it is likely more difficult for teachers to sustain clear divisions between work and home. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 11 For this research, I conceptualized teachers as one example of HPs. As explained by Robertson (2000), teaching becomes an educational helping relationship when it is construed as a relationship based on facilitating learning rather than imparting knowledge and that, in this light, teaching can be understood to share important characteristics with other helping professions, such as counselling and psychotherapy. From this perspective, I will describe how transference and countertransference may manifest for teacher/mothers and other HPs and how said manifestations may influence those HPs’ abilities to maintain equilibrium between work and home. Before these descriptions though, I will define transference and countertransference. Definitions of transference and countertransference. Transference and countertransference affect all aspects of teaching. Based on Sigmund and Anna Freud’s writings on the relationships between teachers and students, Weiss (2002) posited that “teachers’ assessment of pupils, classroom interactions, choice of behavioral interventions, predilections for educational theory, and even their decisions about the teaching and learning of all curriculum content areas in school may be shaped by transference and countertransference” (p. 111). To understand why this might be the case, it is important to understand the characteristics of transference and countertransference. Transference. Transference is a person’s experience of feelings, behaviours and/or attitudes towards someone who has no actual connection to the experience; it is a repetition of past conflicts with significant others wherein reactions that rightfully belong to those past relationships are displaced onto [usually] unrelated relationships in the present (Gelso & Carter, 1985). This phenomenon leads people to approach each other, not as blank slates, but as reenactments of past relationships wherein experiences from the past are “transferred” into the present (Storr, 1980). Krause and Merten (1999) emphasized the power that these transferences RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 12 may have because of their basis in real relationships and their utilization of emotion; they conceptualized the experience as one in which scenes are created in which the object of the transference is obligated to take over a part in a real relationship. Emotions are doubly involved in this process as “they change the internal perception of the world and they exert an incredible power to create scenes and scripts for the outside world” (Krause & Merten, 1999, p. 112). Britzman (2015) supported Krause and Merten’s (1999) assertions with her conviction that the information contained within and transferred via transference is related to both the emotional and the pedagogical aspects of teaching, and that transference does not stop at the psychoanalyst’s door but, rather, influences teachers’ pedagogical relations, theories of learning, viewpoints, arguments, learning constructs, procedures, and curricular goals. Britzman conceived of teachers as characters in their students’ transference reactions where—in interacting with students—teachers’ passion, knowledge, and authority, as well as their ignorance, mistakes and indifference are “oddly familiar and so [animate] the [students’] and [teachers’] transference of love and hate onto the presence of pedagogy” (Britzman, 2015, p. 34). Although the complicity of pedagogy is specific to teaching, these other aspects brought up by Britzman are equally applicable to HPs in fields outside education as they are more to do with the beliefs and demeanours of the HPs themselves, rather than their ideas about the art and science of education. Countertransference too is relevant to teachers specifically and to HPs as a group. Countertransference. Just as students react to their teachers based on past experiences, so too might teachers and other HPs react to their students or clients based on historical events; these reactions from HPs to clients are countertransference, wherein something about a helpee serves as a trigger that activates an HP’s conflicts (Gelso & Carter, 1985). Countertransference RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 13 may occur in response to a specific child or to children in general. As Slater, Veach, and Li (2013) described it, “teacher countertransference refers to conscious and unconscious, negative or positive emotional reactions to certain students that arise from the teacher’s own areas of personal conflict” (p. 3). In education, it is particularly valuable to be cognizant of the possibility that teachers’ countertransference reactions might lead to misunderstandings and may contribute to children’s problems (Weiss, 2002). Because of the potential for countertransference and transference to influence the benefit of a helping relationship, it is important that HPs are aware of the existence and potential effects of these phenomena so that they can control for them. Recognizing transference and countertransference. In transference and countertransference, attitudes linked to more than one person can shift from one relationship to another. Countertransference may be a response to a transference or it may manifest independently in an HP’s inclination to treat someone a certain way based on the feelings that that person engenders in them—feelings that are unconsciously connected to past relationships and experiences. Countertransference is of particular importance for HPs to recognize as destructive countertransference patterns can easily lead to negative behaviours towards others, including one’s own children (Watkins Jr., 1985). Identifying transference and countertransference can be difficult but typically involves feelings that seem otherwise out of place in their valence or intensity. According to Jones (2005), these may include: • strong feelings of affection or disaffection; • difficulties setting limits or else fixing rigid boundaries; • a desire to please or avoid; RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS • feeling either special or insignificant; • over- or under-involvement with a person; • feelings of marked comfort or discomfort with another; • preoccupation with another and/or power struggles. 14 While Jones’ (2005) list is not exhaustive, it does provide some indications for which it might benefit HPs to be on guard. With this list, Jones also provided a word of caution, reminding us that prudence is essential in interpreting these types of reactions since transference and countertransference are ubiquitous and can be part of genuine human interest and caring, not just conflict. Gelso and Carter (1985) suggested that training be provided to help HPs develop awareness of the specific types of transferences that they might trigger in others. They contended that a person’s personality and professional stance will always create an image that affects the kind and intensity of the transference projections that they engender. By being aware of these potential projections, HPs might be able to determine which aspects of a relationship are real and which are “unreal,” i.e., based on transference or countertransference (Gelso & Carter, 1985; Slater, et al., 2013). These unreal aspects include any of those feelings, behaviours, and attitudes that arise in present relationships, but are based on past relationships with significant others. By being aware of these two aspects of relationships, HPs can better control for misinterpretations and misattributions that stem from the unreal. Understanding the existence and potential effects of countertransference and transference in helping professions has clear implications for assisting HPs to structure safe professional relationships: understanding can contribute to HPs making constructive, thoughtful, and appropriate responses to transference and countertransference reactions (Jones, 2005). By nature, HPs tend not to be emotionally neutral, rather, they are typically employed in RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 15 fields where they are invested in caring for others because they value the work. By understanding how transference and countertransference may unconsciously influence reactions from and to the people in their care, HPs may be able to better manage their responses and more easily maintain professional boundaries, just as it may help with self-regulation in parenting. When transference or countertransference occurs, responses can be inappropriate to the actual context in which they are happening; if the dynamics are recognized and understood, however, reactions can then be used as sources of information, empathy, and understanding for the helpee(s) in question. When teachers and other HPs become more aware (especially selfaware), they develop greater understanding of their own and others’ behaviours. With increased awareness of the ways in which their own histories and inner lives affect their work, they can better empathize with the children entrusted to their professional care and to their own children as they learn to react to these children in consistently compassionate ways, rather than via habitual responses. Being aware of the potential for transference and countertransference might also assist HPs to “understand aspects of their unresolved struggles and perhaps gain a better understanding of ways in which others experience difficulties in human relationships” (Jones, 2005, p. 1182), which may in turn help them work more effectively with others, including their own children. In the context of parent-child relationships, this enhanced understanding of unresolved struggle has particularly salient implications for parents’ modelling of selfregulation for their children. When parents recognize that their past experiences unconsciously colour their interpretations of their children’s behaviours, they may find it easier to exercise self-control and, again, be more compassionate towards their children. Working with transference and countertransference. Besides acting as a source of information, transference and countertransference reactions can directly influence the work of RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 16 HPs. As summarized by Weiss (2002) in his work with teachers, “working to understand the meaning and function of behavior from a child’s point of view allows the teacher to select intervention strategies more likely to influence that child’s life in positive and lasting ways” (p. 125). Learning how to use reflective strategies might be particularly beneficial for HPs if they could practice applying them in “real-time” as potential transferences arose during a work day (e.g., as teachers interacted with pupils); this work would likely necessitate increased comfort with the critical and reflexive use of emotion. As described by Elfer and Dearnley (2007), the critical and reflexive use of emotion must be about more than just feeling good or bad about emergent relational issues such as transference: simply having and acknowledging a feeling does not mean injustice is removed or resolved, the important work is in how emotion pushes or motivates an HP to examine inequalities in her or his workplace (or family) and take action. When engendered emotions are used reflexively and consciously versus reactively, HPs can develop awareness that can help them to use these emotions in empowering ways, which could then also help prevent others from controlling their professional subjectivity. With increasing facility and comfort in working with and through transference and countertransference reactions, HPs can learn to use their discomfort with particular emotions to become more attentive, rather than turning away from emotional discomfort (Elfer & Dearnley, 2007). Britzman (2015) viewed education as a recapitulation of the human condition and posited that it is transference that forces teachers and students to deal with uncomfortable conflicts that, in their negotiation, help build the social relationships upon which teaching and learning rely. Once again, this applies to parenting as well as teaching and other helping professions. Increasing one’s ability to tolerate discomfort as a parent is essential if one is going to keep separation between work and home; typically, this RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 17 will mean working to prevent reactions from one sphere influencing interpretations of interactions in the other, which means remembering that while transference components of relationships are intensely experienced via emotions, they are never actually real but are always distortions projected upon an HP based on past experiences (Gelso & Carter, 1985). It is probable that teachers and other HPs regularly deal with issues related to transference and countertransference without any awareness of those phenomena, especially since they may not be as readily recognized in teaching and other helping professions outside of those directly concerned with counselling psychology and psychotherapy. Although research on these phenomena outside of psychology is still scarce, there is definite overlap between that field and others of the helping professions. Robertson (2000) viewed the skills and goals of teaching, counselling, and psychotherapy as having particularly robust overlaps, wherein the two latter fields are nested within each other and also within teaching. While the teleologies (or primary foci) of teaching and psychotherapy are different, they are related via this nested relationship wherein the skills “taught” become more individualized and narrow of focus as one moves from teaching, through counselling, into psychology. Because of the overlap between these fields, it is possible that at least some of the research from the counselling psychology and psychotherapy fields may also be applicable to HPs in other fields. If more HPs were familiar with information and strategies from these different but connected literatures, more of them might become aware of transference and countertransference, which would allow them to be proactive in minimizing the extent to which these phenomena might lead to disequilibrium in their home/work separations. However prevalent they may be, transference and countertransference reactions are not the sole ways in which impressions about reality influence one’s interpretations of it. In the next RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 18 section, I will describe the main theoretical bearings that shaped my own interpretations and underlie this research. Theoretical Orientation As described by Dickson-Smith, James, and Liamputtong (2008), I explored the ways in which people—including myself—interpret and make sense of the world, and how these interpretations have been informed by our social settings. In line with this exploration (and a feminist paradigm), I drew from constructivist and ecological perspectives in that I assumed that resilience and identity were informed and formed by context at multiple levels (Bronfenbrenner, 1977) and through multiple socially-mediated processes, both inter- and intrapersonally (Vygotsky, 1978). This theoretical model has been widely used in teacher resilience research (e.g., Gu, 2018; Mansfield, Beltman, Price, & McConney, 2012; Schwarze & Wosnitza, 2018). Gu (2018) advocated for this socio-ecological approach to studying teachers’ resilience as a means of emphasizing the “impact of multilevel contexts on the growth and development of teachers over the course of their professional lives, especially in terms of their capacity to maintain a sense of commitment and agency in the everyday worlds in which they teach” (p. 19). As I will explore in later sections, Gu perceives this to be a particularly useful conceptual lens as it enables teachers’ resilience to be recognized as a complex system of workrelated interactions that influence and are influenced by teachers’ professional worlds. In this research, I looked beyond the professional lives of teachers to examine the influences of their work and home contexts on their resilience based on the assumption that roles in each were similarly reliant on care. For this particular research, I perceived that for teachers at work, these sociallymediated processes occurred within a framework of “caring labour” (Erickson & Stacey, 2013), RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 19 a concept related to but not identical to Hochschild’s (1983/2003) conceptualization of emotional labour. To describe what caring labour does and does not entail, I will first describe the concept of emotional labour as the two are closely related. I will follow this with a description of the distinctions that mark caring labour as different from emotional labour. After exploring the links between this work and its feminist underpinnings (as feminist theory was key to my methodology and to a caring labour framework), I will finish this section by elucidating my work’s connections to complexity theory before providing an overview of some major theories of occupational health to also position this work within that literature. Emotional labour. Emotional labour was described by Hochschild (1983/2003) as a way of relating the ways that emotions are essentially commodified in service-oriented jobs. Hochschild posited that suppressing and faking emotions led to depletion of mental resources through pathways similar to those observed with other self-regulatory processes. To illustrate her ideas about these effects, Hochschild drew from three main sources: questionnaires from university students, ethnographic research with airline staff (particularly flight attendants), and interviews with bill collectors. In collecting her data from these disparate sources, she illustrated a myriad of ways in which emotion is controlled and commodified in the workplace. Definitions of emotional labour tend to focus on the ways that employees manipulate their emotions to comply with organizational expectations regarding emotional displays. This manipulation may be via surface acting (where felt emotions are superficially supressed in favour of displaying those deemed work-appropriate) or deep acting (where felt emotions are consciously altered so that they are congruent with those displayed as work-appropriate). Due to the depletion of mental resources that may result from these emotional manipulations (Hochschild, 1983/2003), this type of labour may contribute to burnout. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 20 Since Hochschild’s initial descriptions, an emotional labour lens has informed much of the research on resilience at work in industries and professions that include substantial numbers of interpersonal interactions—teaching is one such profession. By positioning my research within a framework that assumes its participants are [likely unknowingly] engaging in emotional labour techniques, I have moved beyond descriptions of work and home and how they might be connected to an exploration of what might support and systematically perpetuate teacher/mothers’ abilities to continue on in both their work and family roles, even as they report feelings of overwhelm and exhaustion. As described by Garey and Hansen (2011), I wished to “[focus] attention on how people manage their feelings in order to negotiate tensions that arise within and between the linked spheres of work and family” (p. 2). However, even though there is mention of teaching as emotional labour in parts of the education literature, I believe that a caring labour paradigm is more appropriate to research conducted with teachers. Caring labour. A caring labour (also known as carework) framework is a better fit for this research as teachers and other HPs are generally performing work that involves caring for others, rather than putting specific emotions on display as a requirement of their work. As differentiated by Himmelweit (1999) and Erickson and Stacey (2013), caring labour is incompletely commodified compared to emotional labour. Whereas emotional labour entails full commodification of service industry workers’ emotional expressions with the aim of reproducing specific feelings in others (i.e., in customers), caring labour “emphasizes the combined physical and affective characteristics of the work and the importance of attending to another individual’s personal needs or well-being” (Erickson & Stacey, 2013, p. 178). This definition of caring labour draws in part from the work of the philosopher Mayeroff (1971), who defined caring as being when one experiences an “other” (whether a person or an idea) as RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 21 having potentialities and the need to grow—an apt encapsulation of much of the rationale for teaching as an act and as a profession. Across professions, rather than talking about “balancing” work and family responsibilities, it might be more apt to consider how caregiving in all its iterations might be better supported and more openly valued, whether at work or at home (Slaughter, 2015). Along these same lines, it is important to distinguish between emotional labour and care work in order to emphasize the professional skills involved in the latter. As much of teaching involves caring about and for children, I used this paradigm of teaching as care work as the main theoretical framework for this research. Feminist theory. As part of my constructivist orientation, I recognized that, as the researcher, I subjectively constructed and conducted the research through my active involvement in it; this awareness also connected me to feminist theory, which provided the philosophical perspective that underlay the entirety of my research. Feminist research. Feminist research is that which “applies theoretical perspectives that focus on women’s lives—their concerns and experiences” (Hesse-Biber, 2010a, p. 172) and helps take account of the kinds of inequalities and oppression that affect women (Harding, 2012). Feminist principles provided an epistemological foundation for this research: they were the link that connected my beliefs regarding the socially constructed nature of knowledge and the need for such knowledge production to include the active involvement of research participants in as many stages of research as possible. Rationale for focus on a single gender. There are suggestions that women and men differ on numerous health-linked factors when the research controls for confounding factors. When they are closely matched based on employment status and occupational prestige, differences between women’s and men’s stress outcomes become nonexistent (Davis, et al., RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 22 2011). Davis et al. assert that the most pronounced and consistent differences between consequences of women’s and men’s stress tend to arise in response to highly stressful and traumatic events, wherein women are at higher risk of post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression—especially if they have experienced childhood sexual abuse. Fortunately, there is a strong body of research that indicates that even people dealing with PTSD benefit from relationship-focused work such as that which I am proposing in this work (e.g., van der Kolk, 2014), although a significant individual psychotherapy component would likely be recommended for anyone thus affected. In their exploration of the research on relationships between gender and stress response, Davis, et al. (2011) summarized differences in the ways men and women alleviated their experiences of stress, reporting that women tended to seek out social supports and to use more emotion-focused strategies wherein they directed their efforts towards altering their emotional responses to stressors. This was compared to men’s primary strategy of focusing on ways to alter the situation itself— a problem-focused strategy. Women did not only use emotionfocused strategies: “regardless of whether they faced relationship or achievement stress, women reported significantly greater use of problem-focused (e.g., active coping) and emotion-focused strategies (e.g., rumination), as well as social support seeking than did men” (p. 251). Noting that diary-style research into potential gender-related coping differences did not reveal these same differences (or any differences at all), the authors supposed that global reports of coping may be reflective of heuristics that guide how people recall their coping efforts rather than being accurately reflective of the actual strategies used. According to research, men tend to experience depression based on more specifically personal losses, like losing a spouse (either through death or separation/divorce) or a job RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 23 (Brown, 2002; Davis, et al., 2011). There may also be differences in the ways in which women and men work through negative emotion: cognitive reappraisal appears to be more automatic and less effortful for men than women, meaning that men tend to use reframing techniques more readily to help them process and get through challenging events that might otherwise contribute to the development of PTSD (Davis et al., 2011). Women are more likely to try and cope with demanding circumstances and trauma exposures by attempting to disengage from and suppress their feelings, often also reaching out for social support, which—if is found to be insufficient—has a deleterious effect on their abilities to cope (moreso than for men). Although it was not assessed as part of this research, family interference with work may contribute to serious health concerns. While there is no conclusive evidence that work stress is connected to higher rates of coronary heart disease in either women or men, there are suggestions that homerelated stress may contribute to this condition in women, but not men (Davis et al., 2011). Besides stress-related health differences, there have also been suggestions that women and men may differ in their experiences in WFC/FWC (Grönlund & Öun, 2018; Gutek, Searle, & Klepa, 1991), which provides further justification for focusing on women separately from men. Besides being interested in factors that are specific to women’s health, a feminist research orientation is also relevant because of its focus on equity and social justice. Feminist research methods. An important part of my feminist approach to this research was an awareness of how my values, attitudes, and biases influenced the decisions and interpretations that I made in carrying out this work—what Hesse-Biber (2010a) termed axiological practice. Part of this practice was evident in my cognizance of potential power differentials and my desire to minimize them; this awareness guided my work as per best practices in both CBPR and other feminist approaches to research. By being aware of power RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 24 relations and deliberately looking for ways to access all participants’ unconscious assumptions about what was important and what we shared, I aspired to avoid privileging any one voice or group of voices over another as I collected data. Feminist researchers such as Cole and Stewart (2012) might also include my decision to undertake this research using mixed methods as an indication of feminist research values. By collecting both quantitative and qualitative data, I increased the chances that my work presents a broad and more inclusive picture of what might be actually happening in the lives of my research participants. My decision to incorporate principles of CBPR also enhanced the feminist nature of my research as the theory behind CBPR is itself informed by feminist pedagogies (Wallerstein & Duran, 2010). CBPR. Characterized more accurately as a research stance or perspective than a theoretical orientation, CBPR is based on feminist theory in that it emphasizes the importance of inclusive research practices, it entails the decentralization of power from one person or group to all those involved in the research, and it positions social and/or systemic change as the ultimate goal in any research activity (Wallerstein & Duran, 2010). To incorporate each of these considerations into my research, I used the three central features of CBPR identified by Strand, Marullo, Cutforth, Stoecker, and Donohue (2003) to evaluate the extent to which I was able to maintain a CBPR stance. As I sought direction from participants before starting my research and during the planning, data collection, and data analysis stages, my work was collaborative. As I utilized multiple techniques to collect a variety of data that I am sharing widely, my work democratizes knowledge. As I will be using my findings to advocate for more and better social supports for all teachers—and especially those with young children—my work will support social action. Finally, by providing food and drink and space for participants to interact RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 25 socially, I engaged in community-building exercises with the group participants so that we were able to share our respective worldviews and agendas before we engaged in our collective research (Strand, et al., 2003; Wallerstein & Duran, 2010). Even given these practices, it was impossible to develop a truly complete picture of people’s experiences. To this end, it is necessary to be aware of potential limitations and delimiters to this work, which are described after this section outlining my theoretical orientation. It is also helpful to recognize the inherent complexity of both resilience and the work of teaching and parenting, which is why I will now provide a brief overview of complexity theory as it applied to this work. Complexity theory. Complexity theory was developed in recognition that biological and social systems often seem to operate poised on the edge of chaos and that this appears to be the natural state of adaptive systems in particular (Kauffman, 1990). Due to the myriad contextual considerations that determine how a resilient response will occur, I consider it to be one example of a complex system. In other words, it is neither practical nor realistic to work from an expectation that phenomena explaining teachers’ resilience would be simple or straightforward; according to Gu (2018), it is necessary to focus on “the reciprocal interaction between the capacity of the individual and the quality of multiple reciprocating systems… to understand why many teachers are able to sustain their commitment, resilience, and effectiveness in a place called school” (p. 20; emphasis in original). Although not a lens through which I originally intended to conceptualize my research, the goodness of fit between complexity theory and the mechanisms through which I saw resilience being enacted by my research participants was too valuable to ignore, especially given that this same theory underlies PNI. Describing the premises and practices of PNI, Kurtz (2014) defined complexity theory as the study of self-organization or “the formation of emergent patterns in situations where RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 26 elements interact repeatedly without central coordination” (p. 639), which aligns with Miller and Page’s (2007) definitive explanation. In light of the various themes and connections that arose during my research, it was clear to me that complexity theory provided a useful lens through which my work might be interpreted. Besides its links to PNI, this research connected to complexity theory via my conceptualization of teachers’ abilities to meet many sets of needs simultaneously through equilibrium, rather than balance. Such an equilibrium might be characterized as a “robust system:” one that is able to alter itself in response to feedback from multiple and varied perturbations and maintain numerous stable interactions, resulting in high levels of resilience. Robustness also refers to a system’s ability to switch among multiple strategic options effectively (Jen, 2003), which aligns with definitions of resilience. This work is further linked to complexity theory through the idea that schools and education systems are examples of complex adaptive systems (CAS). A CAS is a system that has a wide variety of elements (i.e., complexity), has capacity to alter in response to experience (i.e., adaptivity), and is comprised of a set of interdependent and connected components (i.e., a system). Writing about health care and hospitals—another type of CAS—Begun, Zimmerman and Dooley (2003) explained that the components in these types of systems are people: people who act based on local or surrounding knowledge and/or conditions, adjust their behaviours and beliefs in response to others in the system, extensively communicate these communallymediated adjustments, and give rise to norms that then spread via social networks to create selforder. Schools and education systems are recognized as behaving in similar ways (Fullan, 2007). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 27 Given the number of stakeholders and the range of needs that comprise a system of education, it seems desirable for education to be characterized as what complexity theorists deem a “poised” system, wherein ability to evolve is high via successive minor variations (Kauffman, 1990; Schneider & Somers, 2006). Of course, it is not always the case that this mutability is recognized as ideal, which can lead to alterations that affect the rigidity of a system and result in its becoming either chaotic or [usually temporarily] highly ordered instead. As described by Schneider and Somers (2006), “highly chaotic systems cannot maintain their behaviors… [as] they have too few stable or ‘frozen’ components and tend to fail due to too little buffering and low adaptability and evolability (sic)… [while] highly ordered systems are too rigid to coordinate new behaviours and likewise tend to fail” (p. 355). As I will explore further in the Discussion, I propose that it is beneficial for teachers as individuals and as groups of interested collaborators to adopt a complexity orientation in their own lives by embracing “synergistic interactions between individual agents, emergence of novelty, ‘the whole is greater than the parts,’ nonreductionism, and ‘artful’ processes” (Begun & Thygeson, 2014) in service of sustaining their equilibria and in pursuit of the development of similarly poised systems on the larger scale systems of schools, school districts, and education as a whole. Although resilience and education are CASs, the interactions between individuals’ resilience and their education-related work environments may still operate in semi-predictable ways based on a theory of occupational health. I will provide a summary of some of these theories in the next section. In the Discussion, I will consider which of these theories might best fit the observed relationships (i.e., between teachers and their work environments) in this current research. Theories of occupational health. Work related-psychosocial conditions may affect health by at least two different causal pathways: through direct effects on health caused by the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 28 psychosocial stress induced by particular workplace conditions, and through work-related psychosocial impingements on participation in health-related behaviours (Lindström, 2006). In teaching, both of these factors contribute to making teaching a high-stress job, particularly since “many of the conditions that determine teacher effectiveness lie outside of their control and a high level of alertness is required” (Haberman, 2005, p. 153). These conditions include systemic factors to do with the organizational structures of schools and school districts, jobspecific factors related to the work of teaching, and individual factors connected to teachers’ distinctive characteristics and vulnerabilities (Larrivee, 2012). In their research with a group of 563 BC teachers, Naylor and White (2010) found that about half of participants reported their workloads as teachers stressful or found it difficult to disengage themselves from thoughts and concerns about work in their personal lives. Explaining the interactions of these factors with an individual’s eventual health and wellness is the purview of the occupational health literature. There are a few main theories of occupational health regarding the mechanism(s) through which stress may arise and increase: foremost among these are the Demand-ControlSocial support (DCS) model and the Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) model. Besides these two examples, there are other models such as the Conservation of Resources (COR) model, the Person-Environment (P-E) Fit model, and the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model that aspire to help explain specific aspects of occupational health. In this section, I will explore the potential uses of each of these five prospective explanations for the development of occupational stress. Demand-Control-Social Support. The DCS model (sometimes called the Job DemandsControl-Support or JDCS model) was developed and refined by Karasek and Theorell (1990); it was further refined to include social support after the importance of that factor to the model was RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 29 demonstrated by Johnson and Hall (1988). Based on research conducted in Sweden and the United States, the DCS model of job stress posits that a person will experience work stress when her/his job has high demands coupled with limited opportunities to make decisions and/or exercise control. Karasek and Theorell referred to this combination of low control and high demands as “jobstrain,” one of four possible work-related psychosocial conditions. Besides jobstrain, the other three potential conditions elucidated by Karasek and Theorell are “relaxed” (high control and low demands), “active” (high control and high demands), and “passive” (low control and low demands). For each of these potential configurations, “demands” include any skills or requirements of a job that must be met in order for a worker to be able to complete her/his work and keep pace with colleagues, while “control” (also known as decision latitude) refers how empowered a worker is to decide what to do and when to do it. There are two theoretically distinct components to job decision latitude: autonomy, which is essentially an indication of a worker’s authority to make decisions; and skill discretion—the breadth of skills a worker uses to do her or his work. From a strengths-based perspective, the restated central tenet of this theory is known as the “buffer” hypothesis, which “posits that job control and social support interact with job stressors to reduce levels of employee strain” (Dawson, O'Brien, & Beehr, 2016, p. 397). This hypothesis is considered a central aspect of the DCS model. While it appears to make sense intuitively and has been the subject of much research, the DCS model’s central “buffer” hypothesis is not well-supported empirically; one metaanalysis reported fewer than 15% of studies reviewed supported it (Häusser, Mojzisch, Niesel, & Schulz-Hardt, 2010). Beehr, Glaser, Canali, and Walley (2001) attributed this lack to use of overly broad definitions of support, control, and demand, warning that researchers should be careful not to consider distinct constructs such as job satisfaction and turnover intentions as RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 30 interchangeable outcome variables. Dawson et al. (2016) further refined Beehr et al.’s call for specificity and posited that the lack of support may be due to a failure to distinguish between two types of stressors: “hindrance” stressors that thwart potential work progress, and “challenge” stressors that potentially promote growth and achievement. This distinction may be key to measuring buffer effects in the DCS model; Dawson et al. observed that “high levels of job control and supervisor support were found to buffer the strain associated with job demands classified as hindrance stressors (e.g., role conflict and skill underutilization), but not with demands classified as challenge stressors” (p. 409)—a possibility supported by my own research (as I will explain in the Discussion). Based on this result, Dawson et al. proposed renaming the model the Job Hindrance-Control-Support (JHCS) model to keep the importance of distinguishing between types of stressors front and centre. Effort-Reward Imbalance. Besides the DCS model, the ERI model (Siegrist, 1996) is another dominant theory in the field of occupational stress. Originally developed to help explain conditions that contribute to cardiovascular disease, the ERI model conceptualizes stress as resulting from imbalances between high efforts and low rewards at work. In this model, efforts comprise all demands and obligations imposed upon an employee due to her/his position; rewards include those that are tangible (e.g., financial benefits) and intangible (e.g., esteem and opportunities for advancement). Basing his theory on the idea that the beneficial effects of employment depend on fairness in the relationship between employee and employer, Siegrist conjectured that a lack of acceptable reciprocity between a worker’s efforts and her/his rewards at work can contribute to sustained strain, which then may eventually result in cardiovascular disease. Longitudinal research has suggested that ERI-related stress may “impact on work ability independent of and above that of other known explanatory variables” (Bethge & RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 31 Radoschewski, 2012, p. 797). In illustration of its main premises, the ERI model centers on three core hypotheses: 1. high efforts combined with low rewards will increase risk of poor health, 2. high levels of “overcommitment” (a personality characteristic typified by ambition and high need for the approval of others) may increase risk of poor health, and, 3. workers who experience both of the first two conditions simultaneously will have the highest risks of impaired health. A review by van Vegchel, de Jonge, Bosma, and Schaufeli (2005) found that, as of the time of their review, there were substantial empirical data to support the first of these three hypotheses (sometimes called the “extrinsic ERI hypothesis”), but inconsistent results for the second and a lack of research on the third. An important consideration for the use of this model, which assumes that ERI at one point in time influences health at a later point in time, is that perceived ERI and employee health appear to influence each other in a reciprocal rather than linear relationship (Shimazu & de Jonge, 2009). The ERI and the DCS models are typically viewed as complementary as they measure different and independent aspects of occupational stress (Tsutsumi & Kawakami, 2004). Differences between these two stem primarily from their different foci: the ERI was developed based on principles of social exchange (fairness and reciprocity) and includes situational components and a personal component—overcommitment; the DCS, on the other hand, focuses solely on workers’ job task profiles and their potential to support or impair workers’ health. Based on findings that a model combining these two models better predicted self-reports of health status and the existence of chronic conditions than either model alone, Ostry, Kelly, Demers, Mustard, and Hertzman (2003) suggested that future research further explore RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 32 combining the two. This proposition is one to which at least some researchers have voiced opposition due to the perceived potential for the ERI to dominate the results (Calnan, Wadsworth, May, Smith, & Wainwright, 2004). Potential domination by the ERI model notwithstanding (and of particular interest to the population of HPs such as those with whom I conducted my research), de Jonge and Dormann (2003) created just such a combined measure. The Demand-Induced Strain Compensation (DISC) measure was developed as an alternative to using the DCS and ERI models individually and is tailored specifically for research with service sector employees. It was “particularly designed to explain what aspects of jobs might activate psychological compensation processes of job-related strain, or balance challenging job demands” (de Jonge & Dormann, 2003, p. 97). Further research on this measure is still required before it might be considered a model in its own right. Conservation of Resources. According to the COR model of occupational health, workers will act in ways to obtain, build, and preserve resources that they value for their navigation of life challenges (Hobfoll, 2001). These resources can include anything that is important to a person and makes positive contributions to a person’s well-being and ability to adjust. Hobfoll identified 74 different resources that have been established by research: these can be generally grouped into those that are personal (e.g., values and personality traits) and those that are environmental (e.g., social support and autonomy). Whereas personal traits are fairly consistent from place to place, environmental resources—as they are external to a person—will vary depending on the workplace. According to this model, stress occurs when resources are threatened; diminished or lost; or—upon investment—inadequately increased compared to the expected level of return. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 33 Although I have not included it in this overview as it was not specifically a model of occupational health, the transactional model of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) underlies much of the work in this area as it “described how our interactions with the environment may generate emotions that lead to bodily stress responses” (Lovallo, 2005, p. 84). Hobfoll (2001) developed the COR model in response to his perception that a transactional model did not sufficiently incorporate the potential for environmental factors to have direct effects, rather than just act as cues for personal appraisals. It is the COR model’s simultaneous consideration of environmental and individual factors that is its key feature and that, according to Hobfoll, gives it greater potential for practical application. Part of this practicality may be due to the COR model’s principles of resource spirals and resource caravans: resource spiral referring to the phenomenon of resource loss leading to further loss; resource caravan describing the aggregation and mutual enhancement of resources upon and of each other. Both these phenomena, along with the underlying theory of the COR model, have been empirically supported (Dewe, O'Driscoll, & Cooper, 2012). Job Demands-Resources. Again considering both personal and environmental aspects of employment, the JD-R model was developed to integrate the fields of stress research and motivational research and is unique in that it focuses on both negative and positive indicators of employee well-being (Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, & Schaufeli, 2001). Whereas the basic assumptions of the DCS, ERI, and COR models are that job demands lead to strain when resources are lacking, the JD-R model incorporates a consideration of employee motivation: job resources are perceived to not only help employees physically meet demands, but to also provide the wherewithal behind employees’ desires to do so (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). As Demerouti and Bakker (2011) described it, resources are important in their own right (rather RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 34 than as a just a means to an end) and, as such, employees will act in ways to maintain and accumulate them as is suggested by the COR model (Hobfoll, 2001). There is evidence to suggest that the ERI and the JD-R models measure different and independent aspects of occupational stress for employees regardless of gender or age (de Jonge, Bosma, Peter, & Siegrist, 2000). This may be partially due to the motivational aspects of the JD-R. The developers of this model have also developed a model of burnout for use in professions other than those concerned with human service; the JD-R model has been found to be predictive of the aspects of burnout delineated by this model (Bakker, Demerouti, & Euwena, 2005; Bakker, Demerouti, & Verbeke, 2004). Person-Environment Fit. Predating many of the models already described, the P-E Fit model posits that mismatches between a person and her/his environment results in a stressbased process that depletes a person’s personal resources and may culminate in burnout (French, Caplan, & Harrison, 1982). This model is intended to provide a means to conceptualize the fit (or misfit) between a person’s needs and/or abilities and the resources and/or demands of her/his environment. A fundamental aspect of this theory is that a person’s adjustment is connected to the goodness of fit between the person’s characteristics and the environment’s properties (French et al., 1982). As described by Conway, Vickers Jr., and French Jr. (1992), there is an assumption that the demands upon a person and the supplies they have to meet those demands have interdependent effects and that it is the discrepancy between these factors that predicts a person's adjustment—even after the independent effects of the demands and supplies are taken into account. Essentially, too much or too little control compared to an individual’s desired amount results in strain on that person (Conway et al., 1992). As I will explore in the Discussion, other researchers have also found a relationship RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 35 between role satisfaction and lower incidences of psychological strain outside of the constraints of the P-E Fit model (Kirchmeyer, 1993), which may then further support the suppositions of this model. According to the P-E Fit model, a good fit between an employee and her/his environment would be when work needs and means to meet those needs were either both high or both low. According to this theory, the condition that would cause the greatest amount of strain would be one in which a person strongly desired a particular feature, but was not supplied the means to meet it. The primary feature of the P-E fit theory is that “there needs to be a match between what people want and what they receive as well as a match between their abilities (knowledge, skills) and the demands placed upon them [because] lack of match…creates strain” (Dewe, O'Driscoll, & Cooper, 2012, p. 29). Although it would appear from its name to incorporate environmental considerations, the P-E fit model again focuses primarily upon a person’s appraisals of their environment, rather than including any real acknowledgement of the potentially direct effects of environmental factors. Selecting a specific model for this research. Specific applications notwithstanding, selection of a model for occupational health depends largely on a researcher’s goals and paradigms. Whatever the model used, it may be most useful and beneficial if it is specific to the profession or occupation under scrutiny, rather than a global measure, as the latter have been found to be less reliable than the former (Bacharach & Bamberger, 1992). For my own research, I was not interested in trying to use any one particular model of occupational health in a predictive capacity; I did, however, incorporate aspects of some of these models into my Discussion to help frame my findings. For example, the ERI and/or P-E Fit models have both been utilized for examining aspects of work-life balance (Edwards & Rothbard, 1999; Sperlich, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 36 Peter, & Geyer, 2012), while the JDS, COR, and JD-R models have clear applications to the work of teachers (Larrivee, 2012). As there are other examples of research that incorporates multiple models of occupational health into one study, I was comfortable employing this same tactic for my own research: a consideration of the potential mechanisms by which stress affects health being of some importance to my work. With potentially influential factors too numerous to fully study, there were many areas that I was unable or uninterested in including in this research. In the following section, Limitations and Delimiters, I will elucidate some of the more significant omissions from this work. Limitations and Delimiters While I hoped to provide a rich picture of my research group and I did collect a variety of data, I was not be able to control for all potentially confounding factors, nor was I able to collect data to confirm even their existence as potential confounds. As such, there are numerous limitations to this work, as well as some delimiters. The remainder of this section will outline what these limitations and delimiters might be. Limitations. Limitations to this work’s data collection procedures included my use of self-report survey items and personal remembrances rather than first-hand observations of participants’ practices. As memory is notoriously unreliable, it is possible that some of the survey answers or PNI group stories were not entirely accurate. Besides issues of memory, I was also not able to control for any incidences wherein participants changed their behaviours because they were being observed (i.e., the Hawthorne effect) or out of a desire to respond in socially acceptable/desirable ways in front of their peers; whether any participants “faked good” or “faked bad” was indiscernible to me. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 37 Given the narrow parameters within which I recruited study participants and collected my data, diversity (or lack thereof) could be considered a limitation to the generalizability of my quantitative results to participants working in roles other than that of teacher. In recent literature especially, there is growing recognition that much of the research on work-life balance or work-family balance focuses on a very narrow sample of working people. Gatrell, Burnett, Cooper, and Sparrow (2013) suggested that the scope of the research on work-life balance needs to be broadened. Specifically, Gatrell et al. highlighted the need to include greater numbers of marginalized parents, rather than just predominately middle-class professionals, and to incorporate greater recognition of the potentially life-enriching aspects of parenting and employment, rather than only focusing on conceivable [and actual] conflicts. This shift is one that is supported by Slaughter (2015), who went a step further and proposed that the entire debate be refocused to feature the myriad aspects of caregiving and how they might be better supported for everyone, rather than just debating ways that specific populations might “balance” their particular work and family commitments. While I acknowledge the value of including the experiences of caregivers from a variety of economic and social backgrounds, for this particular research I only included female teachers. As a group, this population generally had at least an undergraduate degree and were typically (but not unfailingly) considered to be middle-class. While the family compositions of my participants varied, their gender and career information was very similar across the sample, which again, constitutes a limitation. One final, important limitation was the primarily cross-sectional nature of this study. As careers and lives tend to be dynamic rather than static, the data I collected is not a reflection of the entirety of any one group’s experiences but, rather, a snapshot of a particular time and place. I only met with each PNI group once and I did not collect follow-up data other than to RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 38 ask participants for an opinion on a conclusion that I drew—which I will describe in greater detail in the Discussion. The lack of longitudinal data collection again limits the generalizability of this work and thereby constitutes a limitation. Delimiters. Delimiters included my choice not to investigate how the data I collected were relevant to teacher participants’ decisions not to leave teaching; I was not interested in preventing attrition but in promoting sustainable and sustained wellness. I also chose not to collect data on burnout or any other pre-existing conditions that participants may have been experiencing. Although I was looking at sources of resilience, any participants that presented with clinical diagnoses of anxiety and/or depression (for example) were not excluded from the sample, primarily because potential participants were not assessed for nor asked about psychopathology. Neither did I collect data on specific teaching nor parenting practices; I recorded participants’ perceptions of their practices as they related to their own resilience (and my research questions) and that was all. I also did not look at effectiveness from an academic point of view (e.g., collecting data on student achievement); again, I was interested in participants’ experiences of effectiveness (if they shared any such experiences), not any comparative numerical data that may have supported or denied the connection between teachers’ work and students’ achievements. Largely from personal experience, I assumed that teaching and parenting comprised similar emotional and/or caring labour requirements, but that parenting-related recollections provided more latitude in potential responses. This assumption also remained unexamined in this work. This research focused solely on local, individual experiences and contexts, even though there is evidence to suggest that changes in macro-level factors that are in conflict with cultural values may also be implicit in WFC. For example, Joplin, Francesco, Shaffer, and Lau (2003) RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 39 identified influences of nation-level factors on the work-family interfaces of professionals in five countries. Via focus groups, Joplin et al. connected the work-family experiences of professionals in China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Singapore, and the United States with national changes to the economy, society, technologies, and legal frameworks (as assessed via archival data) of participants’ respective countries. Between 10 and 25 participants representing diverse work-family structures (e.g., single parent households, child and elder care responsibilities, etc.) were included in each locale. Although their exact methods of making comparisons were not clear, the researchers noted that there appeared to be differences in the participants’ experiences of WFC based on changing macro-environmental conditions. They posited that “more conflict between macro- and cultural factors will lead to greater stress and work-family conflict for families” (Joplin, et al., 2003, p. 325). Even given this potential influence, I did not include similar archival data in my own research; I was more interested in elucidating how teachers utilized their resilience to deal with potential and actual WFC/FWC, rather than investigating what the root causes of those conflicts might be. Technically speaking, I did not even explore what micro-level characteristics might have contributed to my participants’ experiences except in terms of how the participants managed to handle them when they presented challenges. It is important to note that, while some of the factors that arose during Joplin et al.’s focus group interviews would not be unexpected for families with more “blue collar” occupations (e.g., work on evenings and weekends), the sample utilized for that group’s research consisted solely of professionals. As such, it is comparable to the one that I used for my own research; teachers too are educated professionals and typically have work hours of 8:15-3:45 Monday to Friday during which they are required to be on-site at their schools. Given these similarities and the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 40 vulnerability of education to political vicissitudes, it is probable that teachers too are personally affected by national trends; however, I did not explore that possibility in this research. Ethical Considerations in Engaging with my Chosen Community Experienced CBPR insiders caution against blithely using one’s connections within a work community to find research participants; they emphasize the importance of being aware of potential power issues and of planning for potential repercussions stemming from one’s research (Cole & Knowles, 1993; Costley, Elliott, & Gibbs, 2010). As part of this planning and awareness, I incorporated some of Miller’s (2008) suggested strategies for researchers in work insider positions: • I had a designated project email (my institutional email address) to help reduce blurring of private/public boundaries. • In the informed consent letter, I described to participants how I might use their data (although I did not have examples available for participants to see how this might look). • I explained that my analyses and interpretations would mean that participants might recognize themselves but, because I altered identifying features, others would not. • I collected oral feedback on the processes (although I did not provide a short endof-study questionnaire to encourage participants or myself to reflect on the experience of participating). • I had regular contact with a supervisor with whom I could have discussed ethical concerns, had I had any. Although I had originally planned to keep a reflective journal to record my experiences and feelings, and to help me maintain self-awareness regarding potential ethical issues—particularly RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 41 around boundaries—I did not end up doing so. Based on my employment outside the school district in which my local participants resided, I found I was able to maintain boundaries between myself and even those teacher/mothers I knew quite well by virtue of the fact that we did not have much interaction outside of my research where my sole role (although not identity) was that of researcher. This is not to say that I did not engage in reflexivity, I just did not keep a formal journal; instead, I relied on conversations with supervisors as needed. Besides potential boundary issues, I anticipated that there may have been ethical concerns regarding my focus on a single gender, a general lack of diversity, and the question of reciprocity, all of which I will also address in this section. Boundaries. It can be difficult to maintain boundaries between the roles of researcher and professional, particularly when building rapport is so dependent on being personally open to other people and so vital to the success of qualitative data collection (Bell & Nutt, 2008; Dickson-Smith, et al., 2008). Ethical dilemmas in situations where professionals conduct research in their workplace are particularly salient when responsibilities and sensitivities overlap (Bell & Nutt, 2008; Costley, Elliott, & Gibbs, 2010). As I relied on friends and acquaintances to help me find research participants, it was possible that there could have been some such overlap in this work. Reflective practice was one way in which I negotiated these overlaps so that neither my research nor my professional relationships ended up compromised. Reflexivity has been linked to self-protective behaviours (Hamilton, 2008) and maintaining personal boundaries (Rothschild, 2006). Besides these protective functions, reflexivity was also actively helpful in my research as it assisted me in clarifying my responsibilities when gathering information and, subsequently, making sense/use of my findings to help ensure that I acted ethically (Starkey, Akar, Jerome, & Osler, 2014). According RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 42 to Muhammad et al. (2014), reflexivity is crucial to the effective sharing of power. To support the sustained sharing of power between the PNI group participants and me, I deliberately positioned myself in a position of service and gratitude (e.g., by taking and providing specific food orders, sending effusive messages of thanks, and not pressuring people to participate). I am confident that this intentional service-orientation helped ensure that the group of research participants were able to capably participate as equals. Finally, as participants shared some sensitive and highly emotional stories, reflective practice helped me process my feelings to avoid the emotional exhaustion that could have resulted from my roles as fellow teacher/parent and researcher becoming blurred (Dickson-Smith, et al., 2008). Gender. This research only included female participants (i.e, all participants identified as female). As Eichler (1988) cautioned against doing, I did not include only women on any presumption of sex appropriateness; I did not assume that women are solely responsible for home and childcare duties. Rather, I chose to focus on women because both childrearing and teaching are construed as gendered work, meaning that their roles are informed by particular social or cultural understandings about relationships between men and women wherein, frequently, the one is characterized in relation to the other. As pointed out by Fels (2004), the “mandates of femininity make it clear that certain occupations are more hospitable to women and more socially acceptable” (p. 57); these “more hospitable” occupations include those are service-oriented on the basis that they create minimal strain on culturally-defined femininity. Fels perceived a major part of women’s struggle in overcoming these cultural constraints to be a permeation of small events of nonrecognition in women’s lives and a continuous, often subtle undermining of their ambition. As I will expand upon in the Discussion, Fels’s suggestion for how women might work together to overcome RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 43 (and ideally overthrow) these barriers begins with specific social supports that provide them with the time and space to explore their personal ambitions—peer supervision groups may be one way in which this could begin to happen. In the cases of both childrearing and teaching (particularly of young children), women are typically perceived to be more nurturing than men and, as such, better “suited” to work with children. This assumption may be because women do tend to respond to family demands to a proportionally larger extent than men do (Livingston & Judge, 2008) and often tend to be more emotionally invested in the lives of those around them (McGoldrick, 1991). Perhaps partly due to this greater burden of caretaking, more women than men (in Norway at least) are also prone to the exhaustion aspect of burnout (Innstrand, Langballe, Falkum, & Aasland, 2011). Although various aspects of health and coping appear to affect women and men differently (e.g., Brown, 2002; Davis, Burleson, & Kruszewski, 2011), I am certain that resilience would be enhanced for everyone were caregiving work to be better recognized and legitimized as work. A feminist stance is one that advocates for equality for all people, which still often means looking for ways to ensure that women are not unduly disadvantaged by roles and expectations that have traditionally been put upon them by their cultural milieux. As reported by Biklen (1995), early reviews of the teaching occupation and its female members seemed to suggest that commitment to work and commitment to family were oppositional desires, that “teachers who wanted families lacked work commitment” (p. 9). McGoldrick (1991) echoed this sentiment from the family perspective when she pointed out how women were seen as depriving their families by working and perceived to have little sense of the family as a “refuge.” Recently, there has been evidence that women and men have similar experiences of WFC and/or FWC when work characteristics are taken into account (Carvalho, Chambel, Neto, & Lopes, 2018; Koura, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 44 Sekine, Yamada, & Tatsuse, 2017; Marchand, et al., 2016) and that they use similar strategies to manage the overlaps, although their tendencies to use external versus internal coping strategies may vary (Kirchmeyer, 1993). Even so, it is still valuable to have sampled only women for this work given some Canadian statistics. In 2006, 65.2% of teachers at all levels of education in Canada were women (Turcotte, 2011) and, as of 2014, 75% of Canadian professional women with children admitted to struggling with WFC (Metcalfe, Vekved, & Tough, 2014)—WFC being another area in which gender differences may exist (Duxbury, Higgins, & Lee, 1994; van Daalen, Willemsen, & Sanders, 2006). As Cinamon and Rich (2002) proposed, “to understand more fully betweenand within-gender differences regarding WFC we [need] a research agenda that includes investigation of the personal meanings of life roles held by a variety of male and female workers” (p. 538). As part of my current research, I investigated some of these personal meanings for female teachers in particular. Given their significant numbers in the teaching profession, I saw it as important to elucidate what effects (if any) interactions between similarly gendered expectations at home and work might have on women’s mental health, both for the enlightenment of the actual research participants (so that they may become more proactive), and for the benefit of women in general. Vasquez and Eldridge (1994) suggested that research focused on groups [like women] that comprise the majority of mental health service users is an ethical responsibility if we are to avoid inappropriate generalizations that are based on the experiences of white, heterosexual men; I propose that my results will help to accomplish a small step in the direction of such equity. To ensure that potentially interesting or helpful information was not the only benefit gained by those teachers who participated in this research RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 45 (which would have been an ethical concern), I made sure that I provided all participants with at least a small token of appreciation to ensure reciprocity. Reciprocity. Because I benefitted from this work by being provided with data with which I have been able to complete a dissertation and a graduate degree, it was important that all other participants were also compensated in some way. To this end, I gave each potential participant a $5 gift card as part of the survey package and provided the PNI group participants with food and drinks at each PNI group meeting along with an additional $25 gift card. I also collected email addresses and document preferences (abstract or full dissertation) from each interested participant to send them copies of their requested material once this work was completed; everyone had the option of completing such a request as part of the informed consent process. Multicultural considerations. Besides my inclusion of a single gender, it was also important that I recognized the potential ethical implications of the lack of diversity in my sample. As pointed out by Gillies and Alldred (2012), there needs to be a balance between respecting difference (multiculturalism) and maintaining at least some of the assumed commonalities on which feminism was built, as “without a central, definable notion of the female subject, established theoretical and political distinctions seem to become redundant” (p. 46). As such, I collected neither too much detail regarding participants’ cultural contexts, nor did I assume that the population from which I drew my sample was a homogenous one. In the demographic survey that I used for the first phase of this research, I asked participants to identify their ethnic backgrounds by filling in a blank space as they saw fit; this was the sole juncture at which participants were asked about their cultural contexts beyond those of their work and family milieux. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 46 As I will describe in a later section, cultural context is connected to work-family balance (Benz, Bull, Mittelmark, & Vaandrager, 2014; Cinamon, 2009; Joplin, Francesco, Shaffer, & Lau, 2003; Korabik, Lero, & Ayman, 2003). Regarding resilience, I recognized that “it [was] important to identify what the benchmark for ‘success’ might be for different cultures, who might place different values on such criteria” (Windle, Bennett, & Noyes, 2011, p. 15). I expected that I would observe any influences of participants’ different backgrounds and identities during the qualitative data collection as there was greater opportunity for open-ended sharing; however, this was not a phenomenon of note. Since flexibility to incorporate cultural knowledge into data collection is a strength of MMR (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2010), I was prepared to integrate any such knowledge into my research results and discussion, but the opportunity did not arise. Chapter Summary This first chapter—the Introduction—provided an overview of my proposed research, including its objectives, its theoretical underpinnings and its limitations and delimiters. The driving purpose of this research was to provide a tentative link between the work and home lives of teachers who are mothers based on those factors that pose sources of resilience within and across contexts. As I was investigating the lived experiences of women and envisaging the creation and/or proliferation of social supports specific to their contexts, I approached this work primarily from a feminist theoretical orientation. Through mixed methods of data collection, I endeavoured to illuminate ways in which teacher/mothers engaged their resilience to sustain their effectiveness at work and at home; I will describe the instruments and procedures I used to do this in the third chapter—Research Design. I also investigated differences in the ways that teachers with and without children of their own at home quantitatively reported their stress, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 47 WFC/FWC, and resilience and whether these same factors differed for teacher/mothers based on the ages of their youngest children. The second half of this work—the Results, Discussion, and Conclusion chapters—will summarize findings from my research, discuss them in consideration of the extant literature, and provide conjecture regarding potentially fruitful future directions. In the impending chapter—the Literature Review—I will describe the existing work in the fields of resilience and work-family balance (the more common term for what I envision as equilibrium), with a focus on those fields’ relevance to teachers. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 48 Chapter 2 – Literature Review This chapter will provide an overview of current directions and ideas in the fields of resilience and work-family balance as they do or may apply to teachers. In recent years, resilience—loosely defined as those factors that contribute to sustained wellness in spite of challenging circumstances—has come to the attention of researchers and HPs across disciplines. These deliberations on resilience are a reflection of the positive psychology movement wherein the focus is on sources of strength and health rather than pathology and/or dysfunction. In education, researchers have explored resilience largely in terms of its relationship to teacher retention; rather than focusing on what leads to attrition, some researchers are now elucidating what factors might enable so many teachers to stay in the profession despite ever-increasing challenges. This perspective is one espoused by researchers at the BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) who suggested that examining teachers’ well-being and satisfaction—and their health-maintaining coping strategies and gender-age-health interactions in particular—are valuable areas for future research (Naylor & Schaefer, 2003; Naylor & White, 2010). Again, this interest is largely due to concerns around teacher attrition since “teachers who are physically and emotionally healthy are more likely to remain in the teaching profession, thus enhancing teacher retention in a time of potential teacher shortages” (Naylor & Schaefer, 2003, p. 116). Education researchers have focused not only on the effects of teacher resilience on teachers themselves, but on the relevance of resilience to student outcomes. Bobek (2002) posited that it is necessary for teachers to be resilient for them to support their students’ efforts in becoming resilient (as well as for its own sake). This relationship between adults’ resilience and children’s outcomes is likely also significant for teachers’ own children at home. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 49 Research investigating the interconnections of work as a teacher and life as a parent is, like resilience in teaching, an area in which the findings have the potential to influence multiple generations. Considering the suggestion that some teachers perceive their roles as mothers and teachers to be complementary (Claesson & Brice, 1989), it seems probable that skills and/or attributes related to resilience—wherein teachers are able to sustain careers in teaching without burning out or suffering other stress-related ailments—also underlie teachers’ abilities to keep work and family obligations in equilibrium. In this literature review, I will describe how the extant research provided clues to possible links between these constructs [sustained work output and successfully managing home and work simultaneously] in order to illustrate how resilience might similarly underlie both. Ultimately, this chapter will provide justification for my exploration of resilience as a common factor underlying teachers’ abilities to be effective teachers and parents. Resilience This section will provide an overview of current directions and ideas in resilience research, including ways in which it applies to the teaching profession in particular. To start, I will define my preferred conceptualization of resilience. I will then summarize the body of research that specifically examines the construct of resilience as it applies to teachers. Finally, I will provide a justification for my decision to focus on one specific model of resilience. While there is a small but growing body of research that examines the role of resilience and other “positive organizational behaviours” (Youssef & Luthans, 2007) in employee outcomes, much of the writing about resilience has to do with its role in helping individuals to cope effectively with stress. Substantial portions of the extant literature revolve around primary and secondary prevention, wherein the respective foci are on changing and/or eliminating RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 50 stressors (or perceptions of stress) and enhancing individuals’ responses to stress (Nelson & Simmons, 2003). Regardless of the prevention level, it is valuable to research resilience on an occupation-specific basis because work-related stressors vary by occupational field. Depending on the specific occupation, work-related stress will stem from different psychosocial factors (Pousette & Johansson Hanse, 2002) and socio-demographic/occupational factors (Marinaccio, et al., 2013; Spielberger, Vagg, & Wasala, 2003) that frequently generate different patterns of stress. Identifying these patterns of stress provides valuable information as, presumably, different patterns might require different resilient responses to help remediate their effects (Pretsch, Flunger, & Schmitt, 2012). There are suggestions that certain stressors specific to the work of teaching may explain more variance in teachers’ WFC than other non-specific workrelated factors (Cinamon, Rich, & Westman, 2007). Partly due to this specificity, it is reasonable for this work to focus solely on resilience (and work-family equilibrium) in K – 12 teachers. Defining Resilience Resilience is relevant to many different fields of research and tends to have a slightly different emphasis in each; the definition varies depending on the literature that one reads. In psychology, resilience is a concept that refers to resistance to psychological strain; in education, it refers largely to factors that enable teachers to continue teaching despite challenging conditions. Whatever the source, researchers’ conceptualizations of resilience typically include three factors: personal, contextual, and interactional. Personal factors that contribute to resilience are largely the purview of the psychology literature and include individual skills/abilities and aspects of personality. Contextual factors consist of environmental aspects such as the influence of people’s workplace demands on their capabilities to stay healthy while RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 51 working there. Interactional aspects of resilience (also sometimes called interpersonal aspects) are those that address the stress that stems from dealing with other people. Regardless of the specific elements, resilience is generally regarded as a phenomenon that develops via interactions between stressors and protective factors. These interactions stimulate increases in a person’s capacity for resilient responses and, ultimately, enable her/him to counteract later stresses more effectively. Davydov, Stewart, Ritchie, and Chaudieu (2010) conceptualized this stimulation/response model as being akin to immune function. In an attempt to unify the various concepts that comprise mental resilience research, they collected the various definitions and measurements of resilience and fit them into a biopsychosocial model based on that used to describe host immunity to infectious disease. The conceptual fit between the two systems is a good one as both are describable in terms of external and internal factors that confer defense, each of which can be partitioned into non-specific and adaptive barriers, which can then each be further differentiated into natural and artificial factors. Besides these levels of individual defense, the authors also incorporated group resilience into their ultimate model. Using these nested categorizations, the researchers organized and integrated the extant research on mental resilience from a variety of perspectives including behavioural, genetic, and neurobiological—each of which is a personal factor in resilience. Through their analogy of resilience as a sort of immune response, Davydov et al. highlighted the variety of ways in which systems might interact to either promote or hamper resilience (depending on context). Their idea of synergistic and reciprocal interactions is reminiscent of the COR model of occupational health’s idea of “resource caravans” wherein resources are conceptualized as aggregating and mutually enhancing each other (Hobfoll, 2001). This concept (of synergistic and reciprocal interactions) is one to which I will return in the Discussion as it is particularly useful in further RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 52 contemplating the interfaces of resilience and mental health given that it provides two approaches to considering how various resilience and risk factors might interact within the larger model proposed in this work and also suggests a more robust connection to complexity theory. This idea of resilience arising from interactions comes up again in the particularly comprehensive definition of resilience (with clear connections to the idea of resilience as a type of immune response) developed by Mansfield, et al., (2012), who organized their definition of the construct around three themes (emphasis in original): Firstly, researchers are for the most part agreed that resilience involves dynamic processes that are the result of interaction over time between a person and the environment and is evidenced by how individuals respond to challenging or adverse situations. Secondly, there is evidence that protective and risk factors (both individual and contextual) play a critical role in the resilience process. Finally, the literature indicates that resilient individuals possess personal strengths, including particular characteristics, attributes, assets or competencies (p. 358). In considering a common factor underlying staying well at teaching and parenting, my current research focused on Mansfield et al.’s individual aspects: aspects that one might be able to develop in order to enhance the ability to manage the work and home domains effectually while sustaining good health and effectiveness in both; I considered evidence of teachers’ abilities to maintain effectiveness to evince wellness. As mentioned in the delimiters, I was not interested in what might keep teachers from leaving the profession inasmuch as I was curious about what traits and/or abilities might be useful for teachers who are parents to maintain and nourish their RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 53 psychological wellness while being continually called upon to act as role models for children. As such, I utilized a health-based conceptualization of resilience rather than one that focused more on occupational outcomes, even though my work focused on one specific occupation: teaching. Resilience in Teaching Being resilient does not mean being unaffected by stress, nor is it the same as being low in neuroticism. To test the veracity of this latter difference in teachers, Pretsch, et al. (2012) assessed 170 teachers and 183 non-teachers using a variety of surveys to measure resilience, neuroticism, general health perspective, job satisfaction, physical illness, and exhaustion. Participants in the non-teacher group were from one of 15 occupations, one notable omission from which was nursing; the authors observed that the working conditions of nurses are similar to those of teachers in many ways and so consciously excluded that group from their group of non-teaching professionals. In order to compare it to the personality trait of neuroticism, the researchers focused on resilience as a psychological construct. In particular, they were interested in differences between those people who expressed low neuroticism (characterized by minimal negative affectivity and low vulnerability to stress) and those who demonstrated resilience (the capacity to deal with intense stressors). They hypothesized that, whereas in many occupations it is enough to have low neuroticism in order to stay healthy and engaged with one’s work, the nature of teaching requires teachers to develop persistence and behavioural flexibility and, in doing so, actively nurture their well-being. In their work comparing teachers and non-teachers, Pretsch et al. (2012) examined the extent to which either resilience or low neuroticism was related to indications of wellness and work satisfaction in each of the groups. Besides finding that resilience differed from low RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 54 neuroticism, Pretsch et al. determined that low neuroticism was sufficient for employees in nonteaching occupations to maintain their health and work engagement but was not enough for teachers to do the same. Resilience, not low neuroticism, was predictive of teachers’ (but not non-teachers’) job satisfaction. The researchers posited that these differences might have something to do with the aforementioned requirements of teaching: maybe teachers need to take a more active stance in order to maintain their sense of wellness and their satisfaction with their work because teaching requires such persistence and behavioural flexibility in the face of ever-changing conditions. These findings are important to any exploration of resilience in the workplace because of the suggestion that different types of work generate different patterns of stress, which then require workers to develop and access different types of personal resources if their well-being is to remain unimpaired. This work is also relevant to my current research because of suggestions that resilience is especially important for teachers’ ongoing well-being. Besides differentiating between resilience and low neuroticism, it is also important to distinguish between resilience and lack of stress. Based on a two-year-long, interpretive case study approach, Doney (2013) made the distinction between resilience and low stress when she explored and analyzed the resilience-building processes of four female, early-career science teachers in the southeastern United States. To examine these processes and their links to teacher retention, Doney conducted multiple semi-structured interviews with each of the four participants over the two-year period; she also collected data via work shadowing and requests for specific written pieces from the teacher participants. Her results provide insight into specific behaviours and attitudes that can be helpful in fostering teachers’ resilience and continued commitment to teaching. Specifically, Doney’s results indicated that it is in the interactions between stressors and protective factors that resilience develops—mildly stressful interactions RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 55 are necessary to stimulate increases in a person’s capacity for resilience so that future responses to other stressors are increasingly effective. In this respect, Doney’s work is reminiscent of Davydov et al.’s (2010) comparison of resilience to an acquired immune defense and to the interactional focus of the definition given by Mansfield et al. (2012). Of particular interest is Doney’s assertion that “without stress, the resilience building process cannot occur” (p. 659) as this is not something that is necessarily intuitive. That stress can be beneficial for the opportunity that it provides to build resilience is something that could help teachers (new and experienced) to learn to reframe their inevitable work stresses as potential sources of growth. It was partly due to this finding that I included a measure of teacher stress in my own quantitative data collection, as will be described at length in later sections. Beyond its connections to wellness, there are implications that resilience is an important factor in teachers’ very sense of identity—one finding of the Variation in Teachers’ Work, Lives and Effectiveness (VITAE) research project summarized by Day, Stobart, et al. (2006). This four-year project (encompassing three years of fieldwork) consisted of a series of twiceyearly interviews conducted with 300 teachers at different stages in their careers, who taught a variety of grade levels at schools across England. The purpose of the study was to determine what factors contributed to teachers’ effectiveness, where the researchers conceptualized effectiveness as involving both the teacher participants’ perceptions of their own effectiveness and the participants’ pupils’ educational outcomes. Qualitative data collection (informed by grounded theory methods) included semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with teachers; supplementary interviews with school leaders and groups of pupils; and document analysis. To measure effectiveness as expressed by student results, researchers administered baseline tests to students at the beginning of each term and compared those results to national curriculum results RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 56 at the end of term. The researchers analyzed the collected data from multiple perspectives, all having to do with factors that might influence teachers’ effectiveness: amount of time teaching, the role(s) of identity, the influence(s) of leadership, and consistency across different pupil groups and school contexts. Long-term studies of teacher effectiveness are uncommon and, according to the VITAE researchers, no major research examining the relationship between teachers’ lives and their effectiveness was available before this work. The breadth of qualitative data especially represents a wealth of information on the ways that the lived experiences of teachers relate to teachers’ effectiveness and resilience, particularly in terms of what external factors might influence their development and maintenance. Identity formation was one angle that the researchers explored. The VITAE researchers first examined identity through a literature review that surveyed the ways that teachers’ knowledge of themselves influences and is influenced by their work as teachers (Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons, 2006). The literature reviewed consisted of research on identity—both in general and specifically regarding teachers—and largely included work that assessed the processes of identity formation and how they are informed by the discursive dynamics within one’s profession. (For example, how teachers adapted to new policies and, in doing so, contributed to the ways in which the policies themselves were interpreted and implemented, which led to further adaptation by teachers, and so on.) The researchers connected their review findings to the VITAE research via the suggestion (from the VITAE data) that a teacher’s capacity to maintain stability despite a plurality of roles and the appearance of a fragmented identity was “directly associated with a combination of positive factors to be found within personal life situations and school working contexts” (Day, Kington, et al., 2006, p. 614). It is in this idea that the appearance of fragmented, discontinuous RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 57 professional identities may not necessarily result in fragmentation of a teacher’s own personal identity that this paper makes the connection to resilience. The authors argued that it is resilience that enables teachers to maintain their motivation and effectiveness in the face of ever-changing educational landscapes, even as their experiences affect their very identities. Building on the work of Day, Kington, et al. (2006) and drawing on the data collected for the VITAE project, Day and Kington (2008) identified associations between the VITAE teacher participants’ commitment to and effectiveness at teaching and their identity characteristics as teachers. Based on these observations, they proposed that identity is composed of interactions between three factors: professional identity (based on social and policy expectations), situated or socially located identity (based on specific location and context), and personal identity (based on life outside work and linked to family and social roles). Each of these categories is made up of sub-identities that together form the dimensions of teacher identity. In order to explore ways in which these dimensions might interact and how these interactions might affect teachers, the researchers created models of four possible scenarios of identity balance and imbalance using Venn diagrams. Accompanying these models were excerpts from the interview data collected for the VITAE project, along with case studies of participants to illustrate how each model was extrapolated from real-life examples. The main focus of this work was the ways in which teachers’ identities interacted with each other and influenced individual teachers’ experiences, particularly as instabilities were introduced. According to the researchers, “instabilities… create stresses in the emotional fabric of identity. Teachers need to be resilient emotionally during these periods in order that these may be managed in ways that build or sustain positive identities and existing effectiveness” (p. 9). Based on the researchers’ models, a teacher’s resilience is tested when one of the dimensions of RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 58 identity becomes dominant in a teacher’s life (i.e., becomes unstable) as it then takes more energy to manage. In other words, the capacity to be resilient is influenced positively and negatively by personal, situated and professional factors: a finding that has clear connections to considerations of the role of resilience in teachers’ work-family equilibrium. Also related to workplace resilience are the three mediating influences that Day and Kington identified as providing either support for or pressure on teachers: their resilience and school socioeconomic contexts, their in-school and personal supports, and their professional life phases. These categories provide natural topics around which further research on resilience might be centered. Around the world, resilience is well-documented as a key factor in sustaining teachers’ personal wellness and their effectiveness in extremely challenging teaching contexts (Brunetti, 2006; Day & Kington, 2008; Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons, 2006; Day, Stobart, et al., 2006; Ebersöhn, 2014). In terms of teachers’ resilience, there are a few particularly wellresearched sets of circumstances: new teachers, teachers teaching in low socio-economic areas, and teachers teaching in systems undergoing structural changes. After providing an overview of the research in each of these areas, I will briefly describe how students might benefit from their teachers’ resilience and then describe how one might effectively conceptualize sources of resilience in teacher/mothers. Resilience in new teachers. In the resilience literature, new teachers are a particularly well-researched group. In 2011, Beltman, Mansfield, and Price completed a literature review that included 50 papers published in English between the years 2000 and 2010; it focused primarily on empirical research related to the resilience of pre-service and early career teachers. They included work involving experienced teachers only if the research incorporated an exploration of change over time or “shed light on teachers thriving in difficult situations” (p. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 59 187). Each of the 50 papers comprising this review was summarized according to a variety of criteria, after which the authors and their research assistants identified and categorized factors that represented supports or challenges to teachers’ resilience. By analyzing the literature in this way, Beltman and her colleagues were able to investigate five key questions about the state of the research on new teachers’ resilience: • What methodologies had been used to examine teacher resilience? • How was teacher resilience conceptualized in the literature? • What were the key risk factors for teacher resilience? • What were the key protective factors for teacher resilience? • What were the implications of this research for prospective and practicing teachers? In addition to providing a useful framework for considering teacher resilience, this work raised multiple questions regarding what best practices might be in conducting this type of research and how research in this domain might best be used. The authors highlighted the needs for greater clarity in defining resilience, more mixed-methods research (especially with large samples), and further consideration of how multiple contexts—especially those outside of teaching—may influence teacher resilience. To help prevent new teachers leaving teaching prematurely due to the myriad challenges that typify getting established as a teacher, there is a substantial interest in delineating ways in which new teachers’ resilience especially might be supported. One Australian multi-agency, critical inquiry research project investigated the ways in which 60 early-career teachers interpreted and made meaning from their lived experiences within the contexts in which they worked. As one part of this project, Le Cornu (2013) researched what relationships influenced the study participants’ resilience and the mechanisms through which that influence was exerted. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 60 Basing her research on the idea of relational resilience—that growth-fostering connections with other people are the core of resilience—Le Cornu interpreted her results in consideration of their connections to the themes of mutuality, empowerment, and the development of courage (all characteristics of the relational resilience model). All the research participants identified encouragement from their friends and family and mutuality (reciprocity) in their relationships with students and colleagues as being of particular significance to them and to their resilience as teachers. Empowerment and the development of courage were also reinforced through these supportive relationships as, when teacher participants “were able to establish trusting, respectful and reciprocal relationships, they perceived themselves as more confident and competent, which enabled them to feel more empowered” (p. 5). Le Cornu’s 2013 findings about the essentiality of reciprocity in creating resilience-supporting work communities built upon her earlier work within this same project. In 2009, Le Cornu used the results of three different studies (two consisting of surveys of graduating cohorts of pre-service teachers and one involving a two-person faculty “selfstudy”) to reflect upon how a learning community model might be used for pre-service teachers’ practical experience [practicum]. Le Cornu (2009) argued that the inclusion of strategies meant to enhance the formation of professional relationships between teachers during their year(s) of training also enhanced teachers’ resilience. While the specific sample sizes and demographics were largely undescribed, the author provided examples of evidence from each of the three studies to support the idea that a professional learning community model of practicum can help new teachers to form useful relationships with others in their cohort and with their mentor teachers. Based on her perceptions of the learning community model’s success, Le Cornu (2009) suggested that three factors in particular likely contributed to building RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 61 new teachers’ resilience: the opportunities for peer supervision, the explicit teaching of particular skills and attitudes to help students engage productively in professional relationships, and the deliberate delineation of specific roles for each person in the communities. By pinpointing some of the ways in which relationships are important to the development of teachers’ resilience, Le Cornu (2009) highlighted possible avenues through which early-career teachers’ self-esteem and identities (as teachers) might be enhanced. This model represents a way to support the development of resilience for both new and experienced teachers, particularly those who are involved in training new teachers. In many ways, this work has potential to act as an exemplar for the provision of relational support to new teachers. For example, Le Cornu (2009) noted that new teachers need affirmation that they are making a difference for their students; by looking for examples that provide evidence of this occurrence in new teachers’ practice, mentor teachers or others in supportive and/or evaluative positions might deliberately work to boost their less experienced colleagues’ eventual resilience. In general, this work supports the oft-cited need for supportive relationships in the development and maintenance of teachers’ resilience, the importance of which is a theme that arises throughout the resilience literature. The importance of supportive, collegial relationships in the development of resilience is particularly well-researched regarding retention of teachers in the profession. There is some question, however, if the act of seeking out these relationships is a potential source of resilience in and of itself, or if it is through some combination of recognizing a need for support and then fulfilling that need that resilience is developed. There are suggestions that the processes leading up to building supportive relationships are what might be actually beneficial in the development of resilience (rather than any actual relationships). In an effort to record the experiences of new RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 62 teachers from a variety of contexts (and maximize the generalizability of their results), Castro, Kelly, and Shih (2010) conducted a qualitative study of 15 first year teachers from a variety of subject areas and backgrounds, all of whom were working in high needs areas. Using semistructured interviews, the researchers asked participants to describe at least two challenges they had faced in their first year of teaching and what they had found useful in helping them to persist in their work. Strategies that emerged as helpful in the maintenance of these teachers’ resilience focused on individual skills that promoted good relationships rather than on any actual relationships: help-seeking, problem solving, seeking rejuvenation/renewal, and knowing how to manage difficult relationships. The researchers observed that the burden for success in these beginning teachers’ classrooms generally fell upon each individual to resolve on her/his own; resilience in these new educators typically stemmed from the willingness and ability of an individual to take and use her/his personal agency to enact change. Although the teachers in their study acted in agential ways, Castro et al. (2010) contended that it should not be left up to new teachers to struggle through the contextual issues of teaching while they are also learning the pedagogical aspects of their practice. They suggested that one way to help decrease attrition in challenging teaching contexts in particular would be to teach pre-service and/or new teachers problem solving techniques, including ways to manage co-workers and parents. These skills, in addition to workplace atmospheres that were welcoming for novice teachers in need of guidance and support, would allow new teachers the opportunity to focus more fully on their pedagogical practices without having to worry about how best to navigate the school and community cultures. These suggestions provide a promising avenue to consider in the development and maintenance of teachers’ workplace resilience, especially for new teachers. Considering the lessons gleaned from the new teachers RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 63 in Doney’s (2013) work with science specialists (who demonstrated that it was in the successful navigation of stressful situations that resilience is developed), it might also be beneficial to incorporate opportunities to practice reframing skills. By providing deliberate instruction in shifting their interpretations of a situation [reframing], teachers might learn to perceive inevitable work stresses as potential sources of growth rather than impediments to progress and wellness; this learning would be representative of a shift towards a more resilient response. Further supports might be provided through a recently-developed six-module face-toface workshop to support teachers’ resilience on an international scale. Based on five overarching themes identified by Mansfield et al. (2016), the ENhancing Teacher REsilience in Europe (ENTREE) project (Silva, Pipa, Renner, O'Donnell, & Cefai, 2018) provides participants with theoretical background and practical strategies to address six aspects intended to build classroom resilience: the themes of resilience (module 1), relationships in school settings (module 2), emotions and stress management (modules 3 and 4), and pedagogical skills for effective teaching and classroom management (modules 4 and 5). This learning is shared with groups of teachers via a face-to-face training program based on a set curriculum. Based on pilot project feedback from 260 participants in four European countries, Silva, et al., (2018) reported that participants generally found the workshops’ content to be important, useful, interesting and helpful to teachers. Some of the aspects recorded as most helpful were clarification of important concepts with explanations of their importance, opportunities for discussion in a group, and practical strategies—particularly regarding emotional regulation and classroom management. Recommendations included smaller group sizes (pilot groups contained 20 – 25 participants each), more case studies—especially real-life experiences to RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 64 provide opportunity for practical learning—and more opportunities for sharing and discussion. Once again relationships featured prominently as a desired resilience support. Relationships are not the only common theme in the literature examining early career teachers’ resilience, nor are conceptualizations of resilience static: they appear to depend at least in part on a teacher’s experience. To ascertain how graduating and early-career teachers envisioned resilient teachers, Mansfield, Beltman, Price, and McConney (2012) asked 75 of the former and 125 of the latter to answer the question, “How would you describe a resilient teacher?” An analysis of the answers to that question comprised the research described in the resultant paper. Upon coding their participants’ various responses, Mansfield and her colleagues identified 23 interrelated aspects of teacher resilience, which they then grouped into four themes to form a four-dimensional framework of teacher resilience that included profession-related, social, motivational, and emotional dimensions. When the researchers grouped the responses according to the dimension into which they most closely fit, they found that the largest proportion of responses had to do with factors in the emotional dimension: just over 60% of both the graduating and the early-career teachers included some aspect of emotionrelated resilience in their descriptions of a resilient teacher. The emotional dimension included items reflective of emotional regulation and of skills related to maintaining one’s equilibrium (e.g., not taking things personally). Interestingly, while the graduating teachers did not have any other responses that included over half of the participants, almost the same percentage of earlycareer teachers that identified an emotional dimension of resilience identified characteristics indicative of a motivational dimension. This dimension included aspects that are strongly suggestive of Reivich and Shatté’s (2002) resilience skills and Carol Dweck’s (2006) growth mindset (e.g., optimism and a relish for challenge). As noted by the authors, this finding RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 65 suggests that ideas about teacher resilience may be fluid and informed by experience. As such, it is perhaps important to include conceptualizations from teachers at a variety of stages in their careers if one wants to develop a truly comprehensive understanding of what it means to be a resilient teacher. This suggestion is particularly salient when one considers that much of the teacher resilience literature focuses solely on early career teachers. Besides identifying ways in which pre- and early-career teachers conceptualized resilience in their more experienced colleagues, Mansfield et al. (2012) also theorized what implications these views might have for teacher education programs; their main suggestion was that it would be beneficial for teacher education programs and professional development opportunities to address each of the dimensions of resilience and revisit them regularly. Considering the importance of emotional management from a professional development perspective, it can be quite difficult to convince teachers to register for opportunities with that type of focus. Perhaps if pre-service training included an introduction to the importance of this skillset to teaching and teacher resilience, it would be normalized so that all teachers were then comfortable and willing to engage in professional learning targeted to supporting teacher resilience? In addition to emotion management, researchers have noted that a sense of self-efficacy is also important to new teachers’ resilience and (possibly) to their decisions to stay working as teachers. Hong (2012) interviewed seven current and seven former early-career teachers to see if she could discern any themes related to the participants’ decisions to stay with or leave teaching. Hong interviewed each of the fourteen participants individually using a semistructured interview protocol; follow-up emails provided subjects with opportunity to provide additional details to their interview answers. All the subjects were graduates of the same RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 66 secondary science teacher program and had five or fewer years of experience as teachers. Hong’s research focused on how the participants’ (largely unconscious) beliefs regarding their self-efficacy, their emotions, and the value of their work and content areas influenced their decisions to leave teaching (or not). She organized her research according to three questions: • How do teachers that leave the profession differ from those that stay in terms of beliefs regarding self-efficacy, emotions, and the value of their work? • How do these beliefs influence perceptions and interpretations of the external environment? • How are these beliefs related to teachers’ decision to leave the career? Underlying Hong’s work is her conviction that “decision-making and particular career practices are deeply intertwined with an individual’s meaning-making process and internal value system” (p. 418). Her main findings, that the “leavers” had weaker beliefs in their self-efficacy and tended to impose greater expectations upon themselves, appear congruent with this conviction. The first years of teaching are indisputably challenging for many (if not most or all) teachers. Although resilience is undoubtedly an important factor in new teachers’ success, it is also an essential resource for more experienced teachers if they are to maintain their equanimity and effectiveness as teachers over the long term; it is especially vital for those teachers teaching in marginalized or underprivileged schools/communities. Resilience in the face of poverty. Regardless of teaching experience or geographic locale, there are teachers teaching in contexts marked as challenging based on the sheer neediness of the students—not for academic or even socioemotional support, but for basic needs. Researching teachers’ sources of resilience in such settings, Ebersöhn (2014) undertook a ten-year-long ethnographic research project in 14 different “poverty-saturated” South African RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 67 schools in three different provinces. Forty-seven teachers acted as co-generators of the knowledge gained from this research by sharing their feelings and interpretations through interviews and informal conversations, by allowing the researcher to record their practices, and by participating in member checking of the research to enhance the credibility of the collected data. Recruitment was based on school principals’ recommendations of teachers who showed commitment to high performance and equitable access to education in their high-risk schools. In this work, Ebersöhn (2014) linked resilience outcomes with teacher affect. She noted that when teachers felt that their contributions in making their schools inclusive and supportive went unappreciated, they felt isolated and disconnected from their work and workplaces. This work supports the VITAE project’s research conclusions (Day, Stobart, et al., 2006) as it confirms the idea that teacher resilience is a dynamic process that is contextually and interpersonally mediated, perhaps especially in those settings where needs so greatly outstrip the resources to meet them. However, based on the overall resilience profile of the participants, the importance of resilience as a personal trait or an outcome is also clear. Ebersöhn’s skillful description of the interactional nature of these two sources of resilience (ecological and intrapersonal) provides an exemplar of ways in which other researchers might attempt to incorporate these two aspects into other, shorter-term explorations of teacher resilience. The importance of providing support and recognition for the work of teachers in challenging teaching placements was also a key finding from Brunetti (2006), who, amidst the staff of a single high school in a large, unnamed US city, researched the staying strategies of secondary teachers with 15 or more years of classroom experience. Using the self-developed Experienced Teacher Survey (ETS), Brunetti asked teachers at an inner-city high school in California to rate their satisfaction with their work and the extent to which various factors RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 68 contributed to their satisfaction and their decisions to stay with the profession. This survey also helped the researcher to identify teachers who were amenable to taking part in one-on-one interviews, which followed the completion of the survey portion of the data collection. In asking what motivated experienced inner-city high school teachers to remain in the classroom, Brunetti approached his research from a perspective of resilience. He did this using a life history approach wherein both he and the teachers sampled were led to “a fuller understanding of the context (i.e., the school) in which [each] teacher [was] operating and of her or his unique relationship to it” (p. 813). By uncovering these contextual understandings, Brunetti was able to elucidate what the nine teachers in his sample perceived to be supporting factors for their abilities to persist in their challenging teaching situations. Using the ETS survey data to support findings that emerged from the interviews, Brunetti (2006) explicated three major themes into which the teachers’ various motivations for remaining in the classroom seemed to fit: the students, professional and personal fulfillment, and support for their [the teachers’] work. From these data, Brunetti drew the conclusion that, whatever the specific contextual details of a teacher’s work and life circumstances, a crucial factor underlying a person’s ability for continued productive work in this particular school was her or his resilience. Brunetti considered the study participants’ stories of frustration and coping from the individuals’ and the collective’s perspectives. The examples shared demonstrate how both individual values and skills and institutional supports can factor into teachers’ willingness and abilities to embrace challenging teaching assignments. The picture of resilience in action provided by this work helps underscore the importance of both internal (individual) and external (systemic and/or institutional) attributes in the development and maintenance of teachers’ resilience. Specifically, it highlights the importance of teachers’ experience with and RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 69 commitment to their work contexts as they develop and increase their resilience, as well as their need for continued support from school and district administrations as they do so. Schwarze and Wosnitza (2018) noted a similarly important reliance on both internal and external processes for German vocational program apprentices’ resilience, identifying the process underlying the students’ resilience as an appraisal process that was shaped by external and internal resources. Brunetti’s (2006) findings echoed those of Howard and Johnson (2004), whose work was some of the first to focus on how teachers were able to cope with intense stressors rather than how those same stressors could lead to teacher attrition. To collect their data, Howard and Johnson (2004) interviewed 10 administrator-identified “resilient” teachers from three heavily disadvantaged Australian schools. From the interviews, the researchers identified sense of agency, a strong support group, pride in achievements, and competence in areas of personal importance as being key to the sample’s resilience. Concerning sense of agency particularly, Howard and Johnson noted that the majority of teachers interviewed chose to teach in disadvantaged schools and appeared to have a sense of moral purpose behind their work. Based on the themes detected across the teacher participants’ recollections of how they came to be resilient (primarily regarding reducing stress and avoiding burnout), Howard and Johnson (2004) proposed seven specific policies that individual schools, education bureaucracies, and/or teacher education programs could implement to help promote and support teachers’ resilience. Because the focus is on systemic change rather than individuals’ efforts, the proposed changes would take longer to achieve, but, even so, they represent a valuable addition to any consideration of teacher resilience because they represent changes happening at levels outside of the individual and so allow for the creation of a truly ecological model of RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 70 resilience. Even within an ecological model, however, there is still a benefit in individual teachers’ awareness of strategies to promote resilience on a personal scale. Investigating individual teachers’ perceptions of their strategies to cope with stress, Canadian researchers Leroux and Théorêt (2014) used a mixed-methods approach to probe the relationship between reflective practices and resilience in a sample of 23 elementary teachers, each of whom worked in one of seven underprivileged schools in Montreal. Participants kept daily stress diaries for four weeks, participated in semi-structured interviews, and completed an online questionnaire evaluating their satisfaction with various aspects of their professional quality of life (including workload), relationships, and work environments. In the stress diaries, teachers used a ten-point rating scale to evaluate and record their workday stress levels and then speculated on the motives behind the scores. Working from the assumption that resilience is only observable as adaptation despite adversity, Leroux and Théorêt (2014) dropped two teachers from the data analysis procedures when their stress levels were observed to be much lower than the moderately to extremely high levels reported by the other participants during the same four-week period. The researchers interpreted the minimal stress levels of the dropped teachers as being indicative of insufficient adversity for resilience to be required. Supported as it was by the work of other resilience researchers such as Doney (2013), this was a reasonable decision to make. Of the remaining participants, analysis of the interview transcripts yielded a predominance of protective over risk factors, although there was enough variation in the proportions of protective to risk factors that Leroux and Théorêt were able to develop four resilience profiles based on the sample’s survey scores and the frequency with which they referred to protective factors in their interviews. While the majority of teachers fit the “resilient” (n = 9) or “somewhat resilient” (n = 8) RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 71 profiles, a comparison of the “very resilient” and “non-resilient” profiles revealed that a significant difference between the foci of teachers in these categories was the latter’s tendency to focus more on external rather than internal factors. This finding ties into not only the importance of a sense of agency, but also the benefit of focusing on controllable aspects of one’s situation: another important resilience skill and an important supportive connection for further research on resilience, perhaps especially when amidst changes that are largely outside of one’s control. Resilience amidst structural changes. The connections between teachers’ resilience and their sense of control has been explored at some length in terms of teachers’ varying responses to external factors such as structural changes to an education system. In the United Kingdom in particular, there has been substantial research investigating the sustained wellness and effectiveness of teachers in the face of increasing regulatory requirements. Day, Stobart, et al.’s (2006) VITAE report provides participants’ descriptions of their myriad contexts and the ways in which they negotiated the various challenges of teaching in a system undergoing organizational upheaval. Drawing from the data collected for that project, Gu and Day (2007) explored teachers’ sources of resilience in times of change and the connections between teachers’ resilience and their classroom effectiveness. From the 300 teachers in the VITAE project’s sample, Gu and Day selected the stories of three teachers to illustrate different degrees of resilience during times of change and challenge in their schools and school systems. Each of the three teachers selected was from a different phase of her or his career: early, middle, or late. Gu and Day expected that as the teachers’ personal lives and working contexts became unstable, their experiences of resultant changes as adverse would be related to their individual characteristics. Specifically, the researchers expected these characteristics to include the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 72 teachers’ “scope of experience at the time of change, perceived competence and confidence in managing the emergent conditions, views on the meaning of engagement, and the availability of appropriate support within the context of change” (p. 1305). The stories selected served to illustrate and support this premise. Through the stories of three teachers with “typical” profiles, Gu and Day (2007) elucidated ways in which a variety of inner resources might be mobilized as part of a resilient response to a stressful situation. Each teacher demonstrated different ways of building upon favourable influences and positive opportunities in order to continue to be effective at work, even as the contexts within which that work was accomplished were in flux. The researchers pinpointed two internal motivations as being particularly significant in teachers’ personal accounts of resilience: the ability to sustain a sense of vocation and the development of a sense of efficacy. Each of these motivations is cited elsewhere in the teacher (and general) resilience literature and, as such, represent promising subjects for future research into teacher resilience. Drawing again from the data collected as part of the VITAE research project described in Day, Stobart, et al. (2006), Gu and Day (2013) next focused on the reported experiences of two teachers interviewed as part of the VITAE project. The two participants (one of whom was early in her career and one of whom was mid-career) acted as proxies for the experiences of the 218 teacher participants who reported high levels of resilience over the VITAE project’s threeyear fieldwork period. By exploring the narratives that emerged over the twice-yearly interviews with these two teachers, Gu and Day elucidated connections between teachers’ teaching contexts and their capacities for resilience at work. The findings supported the authors’ ongoing arguments that resilience is neither innate nor stable, that it is closely allied to everyday work as a teacher (rather than extraordinary events), and that it fluctuates based on the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 73 contexts within which a teacher is working—arguments that are supported by the resilience literature outside the VITAE project. Gu and Day’s work makes a particularly notable contribution to the literature on teachers’ workplace resilience through the insight it provides regarding ways in which the subjects maintained their resilience over the three years in which the research was conducted. Above all, the importance of social supports to sustained commitment to teaching is clear and clearly reflected in the themes that Gu and Day identified as being most important: teachers’ sense of belonging, ready support for teachers’ leadership and professional development initiatives, and good relationships between teachers and school stakeholders (students, colleagues, and administrators). Each of these themes represents a unique opportunity for the development of professional learning activities in support of teachers’ resilience, which may benefit both teachers and their students. Student benefits of teachers’ resilience. There are suggestions that teacher resilience may be beneficial not only for teachers, but for the students they teach as well (Bobek, 2002; Herman, Hickmon-Rosa, & Reinke, 2018; Klusmann, Kunter, Trautwein, Lüdtke, & Baumert, 2008; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). While some of the perceived relationship between teachers’ resilience and students’ outcomes is based on anecdotal evidence, there is at least one study that investigated the phenomenon directly. Combining the concepts of balanced commitment and conservation of resources theory, Max Planck Institute researchers Klusmann, et al., (2008) investigated the relationship between teachers’ work engagement and resilience (characterized here as a capacity to maintain emotional distance and to cope with failure at work) with their occupational well-being and effectiveness of instruction. Of importance because of its suggested links between teacher resilience and student outcomes, this research was conducted in two parts. The first part tested if—based on questionnaires assessing work engagement, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 74 resilience, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction—the researchers could reliably classify teachers into one of four self-regulatory types. Based on latent profile analysis of patterns in 1,789 German math teachers’ questionnaire answers, the researchers tried to classify each teacher as either healthy-ambitious (H) type with high engagement/high resilience, unambitious (U) type with low engagement/high resilience, excessively ambitious (A) type with high engagement/low resilience, or, resigned (R) type with low engagement/low resilience. The results of Klusmann et al.’s analysis partially supported their first hypothesis that empirical identification of the H/U/A/R patterns of self-regulatory behaviour might be possible: H- and U-types were distinguishable from each other and from the other two types but A- and R-types were indistinguishable from each other. In the second part of their work, Klusmann et al. (2008) hypothesized that H-type teachers would have the highest levels of occupational well-being and would be perceived by their students as being among the most effective of teachers. Conversely, they predicted that those teachers with R-type profiles would have the lowest levels of well-being and perceived effectiveness. U- and A-type teachers were predicted to fall between the two extremes, with the former associated with better outcomes than the latter. The hypotheses in this second part of the research were tested on a 318-person subsample of the teachers surveyed in Part 1 and included the teachers’ students’ perceptions of instructional performance. Although no relationship was found between students’ mathematical achievement and teachers’ self-regulatory styles, Klusmann et al. did find a significant difference in the students’ reports based on whether they had H- or R-type teachers: students taught by H-type teachers reported feeling more motivated, competent, and autonomous than those taught by R-type teachers. This finding suggests that RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 75 teacher resilience may be beneficial not only for teachers, but also for the students they teach, thereby providing additional justification for research into teachers’ workplace resilience. Psychological Resilience While the benefits of teachers’ resilience for teachers and students (whether directly or via the school community) appears to be an idea that is well supported, a precise definition of resilience is still somewhat nebulous. Whereas some researchers focus on one specific aspect of teachers’ resilience, the education literature typically conceptualizes teacher resilience as a dynamic process that is contextually and interpersonally mediated (Day & Gu, 2014; Day, Stobart, et al., 2006; Ebersöhn, 2014; Gu & Day, 2013). For example, looking again at the definition developed by Mansfield et al. (2012), resilience is operationalized as consisting of “dynamic processes that are the result of interaction over time between a person and the environment [that] is evidenced by how individuals respond to challenging or adverse situations” (p. 358) including, “protective and risk factors (both individual and contextual)… [and] personal strengths, including particular characteristics, attributes, assets or competencies” (p. 358). In considering the interactions between home and work life, I propose that it would be especially beneficial to consider what individual protective factors and personal strengths teachers might be able to develop and use in both settings. Based on their work at the University of Pennsylvania, Reivich and Shatté (2002) developed a list of personal resilience skills, which I will now describe in terms of their connections to teacher resilience. Factors contributing to psychological resilience. Based on the extensive work they did as part of Martin Seligman’s ongoing research investigating individuals’ resilience to affective disorders like depression, Reivich and Shatté (2002) identified psychological factors that appeared to contribute to individuals’ abilities to stay engaged with life and be mentally RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 76 healthy despite challenging starts and/or circumstances. Positing that resilience stems largely from a person’s ability to generate accurate perceptions about a situation, they speculated that people who were able to recognize the influences of their personal histories and emotions on their interpretations of events could learn to focus on facts more than interpretations. They believed that, by working to change their beliefs about why something has happened, is happening, or will happen, people would also increase their overall mental resilience and, ultimately, improve their mental health (particularly in terms of stress reduction). The theory of resilience that Reivich and Shatté built from this speculation focused mainly on enhancing individual capabilities to help people build self-awareness and avoid succumbing to stressors that might eventually contribute to an affective disorder or other psychological strain. Based on the factors that appeared to help people build these protective capabilities, Reivich and Shatté outlined seven abilities that they suggested comprised resilience: emotion regulation, impulse control, empathy, optimism, causal analysis, self-efficacy, and reaching out (accessing relationships for support). With their straightforward explanations of the factors that contribute to resilience, the work of Reivich and Shatté (2002) provides a convenient way to conceptualize how resilience in teaching might be recognized and supported. However, whereas these authors examined and described seven distinct skills that contribute to resilience, I have condensed the list so that it better aligns with the current research on resilience in education. Starting with one of the most commonly identified contributions to resilience [self-efficacy], I will now link Reivich and Shatté’s work to the education literature. Self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is probably the most frequently cited factor in the development and maintenance of resilience, in the education literature and elsewhere; it is undeniably an important factor in teachers’ resilience (Bobek, 2007; Day et al., 2007; Howard RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 77 & Johnson, 2004; Le Cornu, 2009; Peixoto, Wosnitza, Pipa, Morgan, & Cefai, 2018). Although there has been research that suggests that beliefs about the collective efficacy of a school staff as a whole are beneficial for aspects of teachers’ resilience, particularly in the reduction of stress due to beliefs that efforts in student discipline will be supported (Klassen, 2010), selfefficacy is more commonly included in research on individual teachers’ resilience. With the exception of the first and last items on her list, Bobek’s (2002) widely cited description of five resources important to teacher resilience have clear links to self-efficacy; this list features significant relationships, career competence and skills, personal ownership/advancement, sense of accomplishment, and sense of humour. Like the related factors on Bobek’s list, self-efficacy is generally conceptualized as a situational strength rather than a trait-like aspect of personality (Peterson, Buchanan, & Seligman, 1995)—it relates to people’s beliefs that they are able to respond to situations in ways that align with desired outcomes (Bandura, 1997). Whether or not the outcomes themselves are achieved is not as important as whether people believe that they have some capacity to act as agents of change in their environments. Autonomy. Teachers’ sense of self-efficacy is almost certainly linked to their perceptions of autonomy and control. When teachers feel that they are lacking or losing control at work, their sense of self-efficacy is negatively impacted and they may end up less resilient, which can lead to reduced effectiveness as a teacher (Gu & Day, 2007; Leroux & Théorêt, 2014) and an increased likelihood of leaving teaching altogether (Hoffman, Palladino, & Barnett, 2007; Hong, 2012). As there have been suggestions that teachers may feel they have less control than professionals in other fields (Grenville-Cleave & Boniwell, 2012), the necessity of including self-efficacy in any study of teacher resilience appears to be a foregone conclusion. It is a conclusion that is particularly salient given that interventions to help teachers to recognize and RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 78 build sources of personal agency have already been identified and successfully implemented as resilience-building supports for new teachers especially (Castro, Kelly, & Shih, 2010; Curry & O'Brien, 2012). By enhancing and increasing their self-efficacy beliefs, it is possible that teachers are also helping to reduce the likelihood that they will experience burnout, since impairments in perceived self-efficacy have been linked to higher prevalences of burnout (Brouwers & Tomic, 2000). Testing their hypotheses that teachers have lower perceived control in the workplace and lower well-being than other groups of professionals, Grenville-Cleave and Boniwell (2012) administered an online, quantitative survey to 150 teachers and 148 other (non-teacher) professionals and conducted semi-structured interviews with six people. It is unstated what the professions of the interviewees were or whether they had all taken part in the quantitative phase of the data collection. Also unstated is how participants were recruited or where the research took place; presumably, it occurred somewhere in Great Britain, but this information is not provided. The central argument of this work appears to be that changes to the education system in England (specifically) have negatively affected teachers’ sense of control over their work and, subsequently, their well-being. Analyzing their quantitative data with t-tests, GrenvilleCleave and Boniwell found that teachers in their sample did have measures of perceived control and well-being that were significantly lower than those in the non-teacher group. Upon analysis of the qualitative data, the researchers discerned that it too presented themes related to control and well-being: autonomy, authenticity, connection to others, and resilience. In general, the professionals surveyed emphasized the importance of good social supports at work and of being allowed to operate from and within their values in ways that they felt were representative of professional excellence. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 79 This research would be more useful had the researchers described their data collection procedures and some additional characteristics of their sample’s groups. Even so, the suggestion that teachers may feel that they have less control than other professionals provides support for interventions and policies that might enable greater perceptions of control and, subsequently, feelings of self-efficacy: that ever-important aspect of resilience. Collective efficacy. Besides investigating factors related to individual (i.e., self-) efficacy, there is also (a less robust) literature that explores the importance of a collective sense of efficacy in a staff. Klassen (2010) investigated the importance of a school staff’s collective efficacy in teachers’ perceptions of job stress and job satisfaction. Defining teachers’ collective efficacy (TCE) as “teachers’ perceptions that the school staff, as a group, can effectively work together to improve student learning and behavior” (p. 342), Klassen identified TCE as a potential mediator between teacher stress and job satisfaction—a connection based on research linking TCE to student achievement and academic climate. He hypothesized that teachers’ workplace challenges might be tempered by belief in the school’s collective capacity to effect change, particularly concerning student misbehaviour (a significant source of stress in teaching). Klassen’s sample consisted of 951 teachers from elementary and secondary schools in western Canada. Participants filled out surveys intended to measure their sense of collective efficacy, their stress levels, and their job satisfaction; the ensuing data were analyzed using MANOVA and confirmatory factor analysis. The results of the analyses indicated that teachers’ beliefs in the ability of their schools’ TCE to deal effectively with student misbehaviour mediated the influence of their discipline-related job stress on their job satisfaction. This result implies that collective efficacy may contribute to teacher resilience and, as such, provides a hitherto unconsidered angle to consider when determining how to support teacher resilience: RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 80 fostering collective efficacy in concert with school community building. Whether collective or individual, efficacy beliefs are closely related to the resilience skills of attributional style and optimism as each involves a person’s interpretations of the events of her/his life. Attributional style (causal analysis) and optimism. Whereas self-efficacy focuses on individuals’ convictions that they are effective agents of change in specific situations, attributional style refers to the way that people tend to interpret events and offer similar sorts of explanations for different happenings and experiences (Peterson, Buchanan, & Seligman, 1995). Self-efficacy and attributional style are closely related; the latter often influences the former. Because of this, it can be difficult to ascertain which of the two constructs are influential in a study unless there are indications that considerations of either personality or adaptive ability are included, where the former is indicative of the trait-like construct of attributional style and the latter of self-efficacy. While Reivich and Shatté (2002) included causal analysis—the ability to make accurate, neutral connections between situations and their causal factors and an offshoot of attributional style—in their consideration of resilience, I will refer primarily to attributional style (how/where one finds “blame” for an event, e.g., externally or internally) and appraisal style (interpretations of one’s emotional reactions). Attributional style. Although attributional style is more trait-like than the highly circumscribed construct of self-efficacy, this is not to say that it is immutable. Through reappraisal exercises, teachers could learn to be aware of the roles that sub- or unconscious interpretations of events play in their emotional reactions to events in order to shift their interpretations of events towards those that are neutral (Hülsheger, Lang, & Maier, 2010; Keller, Chang, Becker, Goetz, & Frenzel, 2014). By focusing on neutral interpretations of events, teachers might be able to reduce or at least control the emotions engendered from said RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 81 events, while also consciously accepting that having intense emotional reactions at work is a natural part of teaching and does not need to be taken personally (Chang, 2009; Hülsheger, et al., 2010; Keller, et al., 2014). Leroux & Théorêt (2014) highlighted the importance of this interpretation skill in their finding that “very resilient” individuals differed significantly from “non-resilient” in the former’s tendency to focus on factors that were external rather than internal, helping this “very resilient” group to remain so by avoiding being overwhelmed by feelings of personal responsibility. This work by Leroux & Théorêt also reiterated that, besides learning to alter their perceptions of events, it is helpful for teachers to focus on controllable aspects of a situation to reduce stress and increase resilience. Appraisal style. Appraisal style has been suggested as driving the process through which internal and external resources are commandeered to enact resilience (Schwarze & Wosnitza, 2018). Mansfield et al. (2012) suggested that new teachers associated characteristics related to appraisal style with resilience in experienced teachers. In particular, optimism and a relish for challenge emerged as sources of resilience that aligned with not only Reivich and Shatté’s (2002) resilience skills, but also a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006). In her work exploring the resilience narratives of eight teachers in Malta, Galea’s (2018) findings also had clear “growth mindset” overtones. She found that even though each teacher’s resilient story was different, two common factors included a positive attitude (i.e., optimism) and seeing mistakes as learning opportunities. That appraisal style might be related to mindset and outlook (i.e., optimism) is not a stretch as the development of the former relies largely on appraisal style, while the latter implies that positive aspects are sought out in one’s appraisals. As behavioural intentions are related to expectations of future happenings (Weiner, 1986), it is likely that a person will more RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 82 likely be resilient and stay with teaching if she or he has an optimistic outlook and a mindset that promotes eagerness both to take on new challenges and to find effective new solutions for old ones. In order to notice these opportunities as they arise, it is also important for teachers to be able to self-regulate, to control their emotions and their impulses, and to ensure that their reactions tend to be appropriate to a situation. Each of these is a skill that also contributes to resilience. Emotional regulation, empathy, and impulse control. Besides self-efficacy, optimism, and causal analysis, Reivich and Shatté (2002) identified emotional regulation, empathy, and impulse control as sources of resilience. Much of these factors’ importance is in their relationship to teachers’ emotions—an important and often under-acknowledged (or underrecognized) aspect of teaching. Hargreaves (2000) argued that it is vital for teachers and other education stakeholders to be aware of the relevance of emotions to teaching because of their centrality to working life and life in general; there is a growing body of research that supports this premise. Emotional regulation. As mentioned earlier, Mansfield et al. (2012) reported that just over 60% of graduating and early-career teachers surveyed included some aspect of emotionrelated resilience in their descriptions of a resilient teacher. This finding supports that of Day and Kington (2008), who found that work-related emotions shape teachers’ very identities at work—including their capacities for resilience. The particular importance of emotional regulation to teachers’ work is highlighted by a 2003 literature review conducted by Sutton and Wheatley, who concluded that teachers’ emotional regulation abilities and the ways in which these abilities informed their appraisals of student behaviours influenced not only teachers’ psychological and physiological health, but also their classroom management and discipline RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 83 practices. Klusmann et al.’s (2008) findings connecting teachers’ self-regulatory styles and their perceived effectiveness further supported Sutton and Wheatley’s (2003) conclusions regarding the connection between teachers’ resilience and their classroom practices. In terms of teachers’ resilience, discussions of emotional regulation are often in relation to emotional labour. As mentioned in the section describing my theoretical background, emotional labour was brought to prominence by Hochschild (1983/2003) based on ethnographic research with various service industry personnel. Referring largely to the suppression and manipulation of emotions through “surface acting” and “deep acting,” Hochschild noted that emotional labours tended to lead to depletion of workers’ mental resources. In teachers, this type of labour may contribute to burnout if resilience is absent—a possibility that is supported by an abundance of evidence in the education literature, especially since surface acting is implicated in the development of the emotional exhaustion and depersonalization aspects of burnout (Naring, Briet, & Brouwers, 2006; Phillip & Schupbach, 2010; Taxer & Frenzel, 2015). Attempting to quantify the frequency with which teachers employ emotional labour as part of their teaching practice, Keller, Chang, Becker, Goetz, and Frenzel (2014) collected realtime data on 39 German teachers’ momentary emotional states and emotional labours over three weeks of teaching regular lessons. When analyzed in combination with these same teachers’ surveys for emotional exhaustion, the researchers found that the teachers’ overall levels of emotional exhaustion varied in relation to the emotional experiences that they had while teaching: those teachers who experienced less enjoyment and more anger had higher levels of emotional exhaustion. This result suggests that reappraisal training might be beneficial for teachers who might be prone to the emotional exhaustion dimension of burnout. In particular, it could be useful to help teachers to identify how they might deal effectively and adaptively with RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 84 feelings of anger that arise while teaching. Professional learning around these goals is one way that teacher resilience might be improved and supported, as it would help to enhance the emotion regulation aspect of resilience. Keller et al.’s conclusions echoed similar findings from another group of German researchers, Hülsheger, Lang, and Maier (2010). Based on their observation that the extant literature on emotional labour relied solely upon cross-sectional studies, Hülsheger et al. (2010) conducted a longitudinal study to investigate the directionality assumed to be inherent in the emotional labour/psychological strain/job performance relationship. To this end, Hülsheger and his colleagues hypothesized: • That surface acting would lead to increased psychological strain. • That surface acting would lead to impaired job performance. • That deep acting would lead to improved job performance. Using structural equation modeling techniques, they tested whether the predicted antecedents of emotional labour did precede the observed effects on strain and job performance; they also tested the data for effects of reverse causation, which would have been contrary to the literature on emotional labour. Collected data were from 151 German trainee teachers who completed two rounds of surveys and job performance evaluations two months apart. The researchers found that surface acting led to increases in psychological strain and that deep acting led to improved job performance; no reverse causation was evident for either of these two supported hypotheses. These results have clear implications for the study of teachers’ workplace resilience as they reinforce the importance of helping teachers learn to recognize and minimize surface acting in favour of deep acting. Hülsheger et al.’s findings imply that teachers ultimately experience lower levels of psychological strain and enhanced job performance if they practice strategies to reappraise emotional situations in the classroom (i.e., use deep instead of surface RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 85 acting). By improving their emotional regulation practices in this way, teachers would also be improving their resilience at work. Taxer and Frenzel (2015) also concluded that it might be more beneficial for teachers to use deep acting. In this case, they compared the use of deep acting to the expression of natural, negatively valenced emotions and found that the former was more highly correlated to teachers’ abilities to maintain their resilience and optimize their workplace mental health. They [the researchers] determined that “teachers who reported frequently expressing their positive emotions were efficacious, felt related to their students, were mentally healthy, satisfied with their jobs, and had low levels of emotional exhaustion” (p. 85) providing a clear connection to teacher resilience and mental health. To reach this conclusion, Taxer and Frenzel investigated the frequency with which teachers used emotional labour techniques in their work and how the use of those techniques was related to the teachers’ well-being, self-efficacy, and feelings of relatedness with students. Participants were 266 secondary school teachers representing both rural and urban Oklahoma. All participants completed seven surveys to assess their selfefficacy beliefs, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction; the extent to which they felt related to their students; their mental and physical health; and the extent to which they genuinely expressed, faked, and hid different discrete emotions. While expressions of positive emotion were positively correlated with benefits to the teacher participants, the researchers in this case observed that expressions of negative emotion were related to perceptions of low self-efficacy, isolation, dissatisfaction, and increased emotional exhaustion. Interestingly, this finding seems to contradict a finding from Naring, Briet, and Brouwers (2006) that emotional consonance is supportive of resilience and good mental health, indicating that further research on this topic RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 86 may be warranted. The potential repercussions of expressing genuine emotions at work have also been studied from an organizational perspective. Taking something of a novel angle, research by Park, O’Rourke, and O’Brien (2014) examined the effect of school employees’ emotional labours on the frequency of their interpersonally targeted organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). Of particular relevance to teachers’ mental health, they also investigated the ways in which naturally felt emotions might be related to burnout (naturally felt emotions being a form of emotional labour describing the effort behind displaying felt emotions). Using correlations and multiple regressions to test survey data collected from a sample of 95 American school employees (including but not limited to teachers) in a rural school district, Park et al. found multiple significant relationships: • As rates of surface acting increased, the frequency of OCBs decreased and the incidence of all three dimensions of burnout increased. • As expressions of naturally felt emotions increased, the frequency of OCBs increased and the incidence of all three dimensions of burnout decreased. • As the perceived level of interpersonal influence (a political skill reflective of a person’s perceived ability to affect other people) increased, the frequency of OCBs increased and the incidence of all three dimensions of burnout decreased. • Interpersonal influence mediated the relationships between surface acting and both the reduced personal accomplishment dimension of burnout and the frequency of OCBs. These findings are particularly salient when one considers the importance of collegial relationships to teacher resilience. Taking the OCB data as a proxy for the extent to which school employees tend to engage with co-workers in positive and supportive ways, these results RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 87 suggest that school employees might reach out less as they begin to experience symptoms of burnout or as they begin to adopt behaviours that typically lead to accelerated rates of burnout (e.g., surface acting). Recognition of this relationship could provide a rationale for teachers to be aware of emotional labour and the effects that it may have on personal function, including the ways in which it might negatively affect resilience. As interpersonal influence appears to have conceptual overlap with self-efficacy, this work also supports the premise that strengthening teachers’ skills and confidence in that area might help to increase their resistance to burnout. In general, although the data appear to support the use of deep instead of surface acting, the benefits or risks of using deep acting are still somewhat inconclusive. In a longitudinal study conducted in two waves over one year’s time, Phillip and Schupbach (2010) investigated connections between 102 German teachers’ emotional labours and their dedication to teaching and symptoms of emotional exhaustion. For the purposes of this research, all the teachers that participated for the duration (108 participants were lost between the first and second waves of data collection) twice completed German versions of the Emotional Labour Scale, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (the seven items related to emotional exhaustion only), and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scales. Using structural equation modeling, Phillip and Schupbach determined that those teachers who used deep acting had lower levels of emotional exhaustion over the one-year period and that, as teachers experienced higher levels of emotional exhaustion, they tended to start using more surface acting techniques. With regards to teacher dedication, Phillip and Schupbach found indications that those teachers who described themselves as more dedicated did not rely as much (or at all) on emotional labour. While this last supposition was not directly supported by the researchers’ analyses, it is a suggestion that RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 88 makes sense in light of other research that has found that when teachers feel a sense of vocation or calling in their work, they tend to be more resilient and less prone to burnout (assuming that dedication and vocation are overlapping constructs). In one of the few studies to use a random sample rather than a sample of convenience, Naring et al. (2006) used the Dutch Questionnaire on Emotional Labor to survey 365 Dutch math teachers about their use of surface acting and emotion suppression, both of which are types of emotional labour. Because of inconsistent data regarding the effects of deep acting on burnout, the researchers did not include deep acting in their hypotheses but neither did they exclude it from their data collection. Naring et al. predicted that teachers’ work would demonstrate an association between emotional labour and burnout that was distinct from the connection between emotional labour and the Demand Control Support (DCS) model of the relationship between job characteristics and worker well-being. Whereas the DCS model supposes that burnout results from job stress related to chronically high demands, low control, and little support, Naring et al.’s research attempted to evaluate the ways in which emotional labour also factors in, thus adding a consideration of personal ability to a model that otherwise only included contextual factors. Besides measuring incidences of surface acting and suppression of emotions, Naring et al. (2006) tested if emotional consonance was related to emotional exhaustion and depersonalization beyond its relationship with the variables in the DCS model. Emotional consonance is the degree to which a person feels and expresses emotions that are appropriate to the current situation. The inclusion of this consideration makes this work particularly relevant to an exploration of resilience as it represents a strength-based perspective: teachers able to express their feelings in work-appropriate ways would not need to resort to emotional labour RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 89 techniques and should therefore be less vulnerable to emotional exhaustion—a prediction supported by this research. The researchers noted a positive relationship between emotional consonance and personal accomplishment, they confirmed that surface acting is related to both emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and they found emotion suppression to be related to depersonalization, which was a new finding. Once again, these findings help to rationalize the inclusion of emotion-related curricula in teacher education and professional development programs as sound emotional regulation abilities appear unquestionably related to teachers’ workplace resilience. Empathy. Debates over the value of deep acting techniques aside, not all teachers utilize emotional labour and it is not just through surface or deep acting that emotional regulation and teachers’ work are connected. Teaching is inherently emotional work. Teachers use empathy to build relationships with students to create communities of learning anew each year and this carries emotional risks for teachers; they must be judicious especially in their extended use of empathy for students. While empathy is helpful for teachers to sustain care for their students— which makes it more likely that teachers will feel motivated to help students to learn and succeed—it is important that teachers do not use empathy to the point that they begin to experience adverse personal effects. As will be explained in a later section, sustained care for students—especially high-needs students—may take a toll on the caregiving teacher through compassion fatigue (Hoffman, et al., 2007). Even given its risks, empathy is also an aspect of resilience. Empathic responses towards others help support many feats of self-regulation, such as the impulse to ignore the emotions and desires of others in pursuit of one’s own ends. Controlling potentially harmful RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 90 impulses is much easier to do when a person feels that s/he can relate to another person’s feelings and/or perspectives. Impulse control. It is partially because of the awareness and self-care required to mitigate some of the possible effects of extended caregiving that impulse control is included in this section. It is also included here because it is typically while under the influence of strong emotion that the importance of impulse control is revealed; actively controlling and manipulating emotions and setting and maintaining healthy boundaries all require that teachers exercise impulse control. Reivich and Shatté (2002) noted that people who scored high on measures of emotional regulation also tended to have high levels of impulse control. Those researchers posited that this observation was likely due to a common underlying belief system wherein people with low impulse control tended to act on their first impulsive beliefs about a situation and behave accordingly. This premise has definite merit: as summarized by Hargreaves (2000), emotions and impulses introduce bias into the values and judgements that guide human behaviour and, as such, help to narrow people’s range of responses to a given set of circumstances. Rather than questioning or trying to alter their emotional responses and corresponding impulses, people with low impulse control act as if their feelings about situations correspond perfectly with the facts of the situations and, as such, may end up responding in less-than-resilient ways that may negatively affect their relationships with others. In doing so, they might unwittingly damage a major source of resilience for many people: relationships. Relationships (reaching out). Relationships are a well-recognized source of resilience. Along with self-efficacy, the importance of supportive and reliable relationships to the maintenance of resilience is reiterated throughout the resilience literature, including Reivich and Shatté (2002), who counted reaching out to others for social support as one of their seven RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 91 resilience skills. It is important to recognize that “relationship” does not necessarily mean close, intimate connection, although these types of relationships do have clear supportive benefits. As demonstrated by Granovetter (1973), and since confirmed by various other researchers, the weaker ties that often drive social interactions are “key to an individual’s integration into broader structures by giving them a sense of community” (Ong, Richardson, Porter, & Grime, 2014, p. 304). It is likely that many interactions comprising teachers’ work relationships fall into this category of “weak ties,” so it is important to recognize their value as supports. While the benefits of a strong support group for teachers to be resilient at work is well established and discussed throughout this work (e.g., Compton, 2010; Gu & Day, 2013; Howard & Johnson, 2004; Le Cornu, 2013), the characteristics and functions of this group are somewhat less well-established. At the very least, it seems that teachers at work need to feel they can trust and rely upon their administrators (Borg, Riding, & Falzon, 1991; Christie, Jordan, & Troth, 2015; Crossman & Harris, 2006; Gu & Day, 2013; Troman, 2000; Van Maele & Van Houtte, 2015) and a supportive peer group (Bedard, 2004; Castro, et al., 2010; Le Cornu, 2013; Leroux & Théorêt, 2014; Van der Klink, Blonk, Schene, & van Dijk, 2001), although the importance of good relationships with students, students’ parents, and social supports outside of work have also been examined. Bedard (2004) identified peer support groups as a source of resilience for teachers. She proposed that these groups benefit teachers by helping them find ways to reframe problems as resolvable and controllable and by supporting them as they become more adept at planning and adjusting coping strategies. Peer groups of this type may support resilience in new teachers in particular as those educators are still forming their identities as teachers (Beltman, Mansfield, & Price, 2011; Castro, Kelly, & Shih, 2010; Le Cornu, 2009). Being as this may, it appears that RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 92 seeking out and receiving support and feedback from others can help teachers at any stage in their career enhance their resilience (Bobek, 2002; Compton, 2010; Leroux & Théorêt, 2014; Van der Klink, Blonk, Schene, & van Dijk, 2001). It is likely that this type of sharing would also help support teachers’ perceptions that their work had meaning and significance as their peers would be able to help name and validate evidence for those beliefs. By contemplating and sharing not only their challenges but their successes, teachers would be sustaining their resilience in multiple ways, especially since celebrating success is another way to support and help develop a person’s resilience (Collin & Karsenti, 2011; Ebersöhn, 2014; Skovholt & Trotter-Mathison, 2011; Thompson, Amatea, & Thompson, 2014). As there is such strong evidence regarding the importance of good relationships to teachers’ resilience at work, it is valuable to understand what some of the antecedents to those relationships might be. Christie, Jordan, and Troth (2015) contributed to this understanding by providing suggestions regarding the ways in which individual teachers’ emotional intelligence abilities influence others’ perceptions of (and trust in) them. To do so, Christie et al. examined the ways that teachers’ emotional intelligence related to their trust in co-workers. In particular, the researchers were interested in “the extent to which an individual’s ability to perceive and manage emotions, as well as the perceptions they [held] of others in their workplace, [impacted] on their level of trust in co-workers” (pp. 89-90). The research hypotheses were that people perceived to demonstrate ability, benevolence, and integrity would be more trusted by their coworkers and that those teachers who perceived themselves to have higher levels of emotional intelligence would be more trusting of others. Based on 84 surveys completed by a sample of Australian teachers, the results of this work fully supported the first of these hypotheses and partially supported the second: only teachers who rated themselves higher on their ability to RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 93 perceive the emotions of others had increased likelihood of higher trust in others. As trust is a crucial component of a good relationship, the conclusions drawn by Christie et al. connect to at least the precursors of teacher resilience in schools, especially in terms of work relationships. The importance of trust in schools is further supported by the work of Van Maele and Van Houtte (2015). Based upon their tests of the connections between teachers’ various work relationships and their symptoms of burnout, Van Maele and Van Houtte found that trust in administration is related to reduced emotional exhaustion, trust in colleagues is most closely related to preventing depersonalization, and trust in students is predictive of feelings of personal accomplishment. This result provides one mechanism through which relationships might be linked to teachers’ resilience. It also supports suggestions that the quality of teachers’ relationships with their students may be of significance in the development and maintenance of relationship-related aspects of teacher resilience. Certain aspects of relationship are probably also important to the maintenance of teachers’ feelings of vocation. Vocation and a sense of significance. Although not included in the list compiled by Reivich and Shatté (2002), vocation is another factor that some educational researchers have linked to teachers’ resilience (Bullogh, Jr. & Hall-Kenyon, 2011; Gu & Day, 2007; Hansen, 1994; Hansen, 1995; Palmer, 1998). Gu (2018) argued that vocation is key to understanding why teachers do what they do and how they navigate the complex and ever-changing relationships between self and work. According to Hansen (1995), a sense of calling or vocation “finds its expression at the crossroads of public obligation and personal fulfillment [and] takes shape through involvement in work that has social meaning and value” (p. 3). It appears that this sense may develop at any time in a teacher’s career, not just before the actual work of teaching begins (Bullogh, Jr. & Hall-Kenyon, 2011). Along with development of a sense of RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 94 efficacy, Gu and Day (2007) identified the ability to sustain a sense of vocation as one of two main factors that contributed to teachers’ abilities to stay teaching despite a variety of challenging contexts. This may be because teachers who are more dedicated to their work do not resort to emotional labour as readily as those who are without a comparable sense of meaning (Phillip & Schupbach, 2010). This increased dedication may also underlie Howard and Johnson’s (2004) observation that teachers who chose to teach in disadvantaged schools appeared to have a sense of moral purpose that intertwined with the teachers’ sense of agency and their feelings that they were competent in an area of personal importance. Brunetti (2006) supported Howard and Johnson’s conclusions that sense of purpose and personal importance are related to teachers’ resilience with his finding that those teachers who chose to work (and stay working over many years) in a challenging, inner-city school did so partly out of feelings of professional and personal fulfillment. Although Brunetti did not make specific reference to vocation, it is clear from his discussion of his research participants’ experiences and opinions that the teachers felt they were engaged in work that had social meaning and value, i.e., that they were working at Hansen’s crossroad of public obligation and personal fulfillment. Motivation and sense of vocation were also key findings in Flores’ (2018) mixed methods research examining challenging conditions based on data from up to 2,702 teachers (in the survey portion) in Portugal. Sharing stories from teachers who chose to continue teaching despite increasing workloads and bureaucracies and decreasing supports, Flores reported that the teachers drew “upon their sense of vocation (in their commitment and willingness to make a difference in their students’ lives) in order to face adverse contexts of teaching” (p. 177). They relied upon their internal pictures of themselves as teachers to focus on their personal fulfillment despite the ever-more challenging public obligations. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 95 Palmer (1998) emphasized the importance of the teacher as a person to her or his resilience and effectiveness in the classroom. Interested in charting the inner landscape of the teaching self in terms of its intellectual, emotional, and spiritual aspects, Palmer used a variety of educator case studies to highlight the importance of knowledge of self to sustainability as a teacher. Based on data that he collected while facilitating workshops and retreats for educators, Palmer posited that “the more familiar we are with our inner terrain, the more surefooted our teaching—and living—becomes” (p. 5), thus providing an eloquent argument for why teachers need to spend time learning about themselves and how they might begin to do just that in service of building and supporting their workplace resilience. Based on just the five groups of predominately individual and psychological factors that I have described, it is clear that one might approach teachers’ resilience from a variety of angles. What may not be so clear, however, are potential implications for someone for whom resilience is scarce. To illustrate why it is valuable to understand what contributes to and sustains resilience for teachers at work, the next section will provide an overview of some of the potential consequences of its lack. The Importance of Resilience As operationalized for this research and based on the work of Reivich and Shatté (2002), resilience is important because it acts as a protective factor against psychological strain and mental illness (e.g., affective disorders such as depression and anxiety). In the education literature specifically, resilience is often conceptualized in terms of its importance in helping to prevent teacher attrition. Besides investigating factors that contribute to teacher retention, however, it is also valuable to consider what factors contribute to teacher wellness and how resilience is enacted in the face of school-specific stressors. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 96 Stress of one sort or another is common in most (if not all) workplaces. Antecedents to stress, however, appear to differ on a profession-specific basis. In a large-scale (n = 6,378) study of Italian workers from a variety of organizations, Marinaccio et al. (2013) investigated if/what demographic and occupational variables were related to workers’ perceived risks of work-related stress. Of the 75 participating organizations’ 8,537 workers approached, 74.8% returned a completed Health and Safety Executive Management Standards Indicator Tools (HSE MS IT) survey. Although the data do not appear to have been transformed to control for multiple comparisons, this research is very interesting because of the authors’ myriad significant results and their ultimate suggestion that specific socio-demographic and occupational risk factors should be considered when evaluating risks of work-related stress (rather than relying on the overt characteristics of a given job). For teachers in particular, this research provides a rationale for the development of profession-specific resilience support programs. Even though teaching shares characteristics with other helping professions such as nursing, it appears that it is useful to be aware of profession-specific antecedents to burnout and compassion fatigue: two potential consequences of insufficient resilience. Burnout. Accumulation of stressors at work may result in burnout, wherein the roles required of a person outstrip that person’s capacity to fill them. Maslach (1982) defined burnout as “a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who do ‘people-work’ of some kind” (p. 3). It is likely that, for teachers, development of one or more of the three aspects of burnout is contingent upon the quality of relationships at work, wherein these relationships might be detrimental (Van Maele & Van Houtte, 2015) or beneficial to teachers’ continued wellness (Brunetti, 2006; Fox-Mallory, 2011; Hayes, 2006), although individual characteristics and job RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 97 related stressors have also been implicated. For example, Kokkinos (2007) found that both personality and stressors specific to work teaching were predictive of burnout in a sample of 447 primary school teachers in Cyprus. In consideration of a variety of factors and based on ten years of research with people from a variety of helping professions, Maslach (1982) developed an overview of major themes and issues regarding burnout: • Burnout involves complex interactions between individual, interpersonal, and institutional factors and can occur at any or all those levels. • The risk of burnout is greatest when people feel powerless; autonomy and personal control are important protective factors against burnout. • Finding and maintaining balance in life is crucial to preventing burnout. It is particularly important to maintain balance between compassion and objectivity (what Maslach called “detached concern”) when caring for other people. These themes provide a convenient framework for examining ways in which teachers might be demonstrating use of or need for resilience, especially if it is true that “many women have become so inured to the stress and pressure endemic to their lives and roles, the feeling state of exhaustion is construed as normal living” (Freudenberger & North, 1985, p. 10). Adoption of such a framework represents a potential first step in planning specific interventions to help alleviate some of the symptoms of burnout, perhaps especially for teacher/mothers as women who have “multiple functions” be at higher risk for burnout (Innstrand, Langballe, Falkum, & Aasland, 2011), although this may only be the case when satisfaction in roles is low (Kirchmeyer, 1993). Many of these interventions would likely focus on helping teachers to recognize and minimize the detrimental overuse of emotional labour techniques. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 98 Emotional labour and burnout are unequivocally connected. Teachers’ continuous use of emotional resources and their experiences of emotional labour in the classroom are well documented as factors that are antecedent to the development of burnout. Chang (2009) reviewed and reflected upon the literature on teacher burnout and teachers’ emotions. After reviewing 30 years [1979-2009] of research on teacher burnout and teachers’ emotions, she proposed a mechanism through which the two might be connected and theorized how the recognition of these possible connections might be useful in the prevention of teacher burnout. Chang proposed that teachers do not experience burnout because of students’ behaviours, but because of their own appraisals of their students’ behaviours; her main argument is that helping teachers learn to be aware of and question their judgements regarding student behaviours and other teaching tasks could help enhance teachers’ emotional regulation and therefore resilience. Chang’s (2009) conclusion was supported by the work of Wrobel (2013), who hypothesized that teachers’ desires to appear and/or be empathic with students would lead them to use emotional labour techniques to display work-appropriate emotions, which might then result in emotional exhaustion from the constant emotional control. To test this hypothesis, Wrobel surveyed 168 Polish teachers. These teachers completed four quantitative measures to assess their uses of deep and surface acting, their tendencies to use positive and/or negative mood induction strategies, their levels of emotional exhaustion, and their degrees of empathy. In partial support of her hypothesis, Wrobel found that both types of emotional labour were positively interrelated with negative mood induction and emotional exhaustion. She also determined that deep acting mediated the relationship between teachers’ use of empathy and their incidences of emotional exhaustion; her results suggest that teachers who used deep acting to respond empathically to students’ negatively-valenced emotions experienced more emotional RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 99 exhaustion due to their own moods being negatively influenced (the lowering of mood being what was believed to be related to the development of emotional exhaustion). Based on her results, Wrobel (2013) made suggestions that supported Chang’s (2009) conclusions. She proposed that teachers need to be aware of the ways in which their feelings are triggered so as to avoid using surface acting, and that any interventions meant to help prevent teacher burnout must include aspects of mood regulation. As emotional regulation is a skill associated with resilience, this study’s conclusions are relevant to any work contemplating workplace resilience and how it might be developed. In being aware of the role of their often sub- or unconscious interpretations of events in their emotional reactions to those events, teachers might be able to avoid taking things personally by actively influencing their interpretations, a suggestion that is echoed in the promotion of reappraisal training by Hülsheger et al. (2010) and Keller et al. (2014). By testing different appraisals and practicing staying neutral when ascribing attributions to events, teachers are further building their resilience. Chang argued that beginning teachers especially “should understand the dramatic range of intense emotions they will experience so they may enter the profession with a realistic view instead of an overoptimistic view of teaching” (p. 212), which might then help them to generate flexible (i.e., more resilient) responses to challenging situations. Important though it is, emotion regulation is not the only aspect of resilience connected to burnout. Self-efficacy also appears linked to teachers’ resistance to burnout. Brouwers and Tomic (2000) “investigated the direction and time frame of the relationship between perceived selfefficacy in classroom management and the three dimensions of teacher burnout” (p. 242) with a sample of 243 secondary school teachers in the Netherlands. To do this, they surveyed teachers twice over five months using the Dutch version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory for teachers RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 100 and the 14-item Self-Efficacy Scale for Classroom Management and Discipline. Through a structural equation modelling procedure, the researchers found that perceived self-efficacy was related to each of the three dimensions of burnout (i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment) in a different way. While perceptions of impaired self-efficacy were predictive of depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment (through longitudinal and synchronous effects, respectively), the reverse was true for emotional exhaustion. According to Brouwers and Tomic, emotional exhaustion was predictive of perceptions of impaired self-efficacy through synchronous effects. Because this work parses out tentative relationships between perceptions of self-efficacy and the three dimensions of burnout—including temporal aspects of these relationships—it provides some guidance in considering a useful starting point for inhibiting teacher burnout. Specifically, as it appears that increasing emotional exhaustion has a real-time effect on teachers’ perceptions of self-efficacy, perhaps helping to increase teachers’ capacity for resilience in the face of stressors that typically lead to emotional exhaustion would be a fruitful avenue to explore when attempting to find ways to reduce burnout. Based on the collective conclusions of Chang (2009), Wrobel (2013), and Brouwers and Tomic (2000), one type of effective intervention for teacher burnout might be something that incorporates awareness of attributional and/or appraisal styles into a mindfulness-based intervention. Supporting the development and maintenance of trusting relationships is another way through which one might prevent burnout in teachers. Interested primarily in the relationship between teachers’ trust of students, colleagues, and administration and their probability of burnout, Van Maele and Van Houtte (2015) collected quantitative survey data from 673 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 101 teachers across 58 elementary schools in the Flanders region of Belgium. To test the trustburnout association, the researchers used four hypotheses: • Teachers who had trust in their principal, colleagues, or students would be less likely to demonstrate burnout. • Trust in students would relate more strongly to teacher burnout and its specific dimensions than trust in the principal or colleagues. • Trust would be observable as a collective feature of faculties within schools. • Faculty trust, as an organizational characteristic, might affect teacher burnout beyond a possible influence of teacher trust. In general, the researchers found that teachers who perceived their principal, colleagues, or students as trustworthy had lower levels of burnout. Each school-related trust relationship was related to a different aspect of burnout. As I described in the section describing the importance of school-based relationships, trust in the principal was most predictive of reduced emotional exhaustion, trust in colleagues was most closely related to preventing depersonalization, and trust in students predicted feelings of personal accomplishment. In line with their third and fourth hypotheses, the researchers found that levels of trust tended to be consistent among faculty in a school, but that teacher burnout was not; whereas trust appeared to be a collective characteristic of a school faculty, burnout was a characteristic of individual teachers. This result is relevant to research exploring the importance of resilience at work because of the suggestion that a specific aspect of relationship—trust—is important in preventing or reducing teacher burnout. As relationship is cited consistently as an important factor in the development and sustenance of resilience, factors that lead to its formation and maintenance are then also highly germane to the study of resilience. As relationship and emotional regulation RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 102 abilities appear to be such integral parts of resilience, it is likely that focusing on these aspects could help teachers sustain their wellness and their effectiveness by helping them to resist burnout. They might be particularly helpful in consideration of the intensely emotional work in which teachers and other HPs regularly engage—work that may render them particularly vulnerable to burnout due to the increased difficulties in leaving work-related concerns at work. This extended and extensive use of emotion may also result in compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue. Sometimes conceptualized as a specific form of burnout, compassion fatigue is generally associated with the work of HPs who must deal with traumatized and/or suffering people. It is linked to the stress and exhaustion associated with experiences of intensively caring for others over extended periods of time and the chronic use of empathy entailed therein (Newell & MacNeil, 2010; Newell & Nelson-Gardell, 2014). Hoffman, Palladino, and Barnett (2007) examined the goodness of fit of compassion fatigue (defined here as a unique form of burnout distinguished by its direct link to caregiving) as an explanation for American special education teachers’ high rates of attrition. Hoffman et al. based their work on their observation that the stress/burnout lens did not account for why some special education teachers stayed in the profession despite experiencing stress- and/or burnout-related symptoms. As compassion fatigue has similar symptoms to burnout but is remediable through self-care, Hoffman et al. proposed that perhaps this was behind the resilience of those teachers who did not burn out. To test this theory, the researchers investigated the applicability of the compassion fatigue construct to the work of 20 [presumably American] novice special education teachers by asking if “special education teachers become so engaged in their students’ disability needs that they [the teachers] experience fatigue relative to their students’ struggles” (p. 17). All the teacher participants were characterized only as RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 103 “novice” and reflective of the typical age/experience of those who tend to leave teaching for stress-related reasons. This particular paper focused on the self-disclosures shared by a subgroup of five middle school teachers (taken from within the larger sample) during semistructured, 90-minute interviews centering on participants’ recollections of and reflections upon specific students and situations that they identified as being related to the origins of their stress. Although the researchers in this case concentrated on teachers who were within the typical timeframe of departure from teaching for stress-related reasons rather than those who had successfully navigated that time, this research has clear links to resilience. Hoffman et al. (2007) conducted their research under the assumption that they might find indications of the processes that ultimately led to teacher attrition in order to identify and proactively act upon them. Prior to their data analysis and based on related research, Hoffman et al. determined that organizational stress, role conflict, role ambiguity, and dissonance were likely to emerge as major components of their participants’ job-based compassion fatigue. To this end, they sorted their participants’ responses according to those four criteria and extracted three themes that were related to the teachers’ shared experiences and were congruent with compassion fatigue: loss of control (with students and/or other school staff), responsibility (for their duties above their self-care), and empathy (for students or a particular student). The authors observed that, “although [their teacher participants] exceeded in ‘getting the job done,’ they did so at an emotional cost” (p. 20), which stemmed from numerous unhealthy behaviours such as denial, avoidance, and grandiosity. Because the participants appeared to be on their way towards sustained careers in teaching, the authors ruled out burnout and exiting the profession as likely outcomes for the group; compassion fatigue, however, was a clear possibility due to the strain and exhaustion that the teachers regularly experienced in their work. As developing and RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 104 supporting resilience is particularly important in situations in which the need for it might be most acute, it is essential to be able to identify where and how such acute needs might develop. This work outlined some of the particulars that may have contributed to one such situation. In doing so, it also provides a strong argument for the incorporation of resilience-enhancing professional learning into teacher programs and professional development opportunities. While compassion fatigue may not result in burnout in and of itself, left untreated it may become overwhelming to the point where it may lead to burnout (Robinson, 2005; Wolpow, Johnson, Hertel, & Kincaid, 2009). As compassion fatigue is mitigated through self-care (Rothschild, 2006; Skovholt & Trotter-Mathison, 2011), it is important to identify it to help teachers develop their resilience and be proactive in maintaining their mental health and their effectiveness before they progress into burnout. This support may be provided in numerous ways including professional development opportunities that teach specific skills, encouragement for administrators and other teacher support personnel to take a genuine interest in their staff’s stress and how it might be lessened, and preservice training regarding self-care. One part of any of these opportunities could be a wellness plan, defined as understanding what constitutes personal wellness and actively demonstrating self-regulatory processes to support it (Curry & O'Brien, 2012). To illustrate the potential power and usefulness of such plans, Curry and O’Brien (2012) developed case conceptualizations involving the stories of two new teachers with whom they [the authors] were acquainted. The stories highlighted the ways in which a wellness plan “can help provide stability, a focus on internal locus of control, and support to new teachers in the school-to-career transition” (p. 184) and, as such, help support teachers’ resilience. As a starting point for this type of support, the authors provided descriptions of the wellness plans that they asked all the students in their classes to write (with RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 105 examples supplied in the appendices). These plans offer ready-to-use templates for teachers to practice reflecting on their own resilience and for researchers to use in conducting research in related areas. From even just this brief review of some of the literature relating to teachers’ workplace resilience, it appears clear that there are numerous potentially fruitful avenues that further research might explore. The importance of self-efficacy, emotional regulation, attributional style, and supportive relationships to teachers’ workplace resilience appears to be especially clear. Additional research further investigating if and how teachers operationalize these skills to stay resilient while working and raising a family might be a reasonable next step in this line of research and this is exactly the step that I attempted to take in my own research. Whether approached from a perspective of enhancing wellness or mitigating consequences, understanding resilience might be especially beneficial for those teachers who have young families at home; an exploration of this possibility will comprise the remainder of this chapter. Work-Family Equilibrium Although I personally conceptualize the process of managing family and work responsibilities as comprising an equilibrium rather than a balance, the literature exploring these relationships tends to use the term “work-family balance.” As such, that term will feature prominently in my report of the extant literature in that field. Work-family balance is often conceptualized in terms of work-family conflict (WFC) and family-work conflict (FWC), two bidirectional and mutually influential aspects of work-family balance research that describe the impact of work obligations on family life and family obligations on work life (Frone, 2003; Frone, Yardley, & Markel, 1997). Frone, Russell, and Cooper (1992) characterized WFC/FWC as a reflection of the goodness-of-fit between work and family life, a perspective supported by RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 106 Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) who defined them as “a form of interrole (sic) conflict in which the role pressures from the work and family domains are mutually incompatible in some respect” (p. 77). Indeed, WFC may even be an important mediating factor between a person’s personal resources (i.e., resilience) and their well-being (Braunstein-Bercovitz, Frish-Burstein, & Benjamin, 2012), wherein impaired mental health may result from overly acute WFC (Oomens, Geurts, & Scheepers, 2007). Research involving these constructs is often (but not always) focused on workers with young children at home, a particularly salient population for this research given that number of children may influence both WFC and FWC. Conducting research with a sample of 544 manufacturing, service, and not-for-profit employees in the United States, Adkins and Premeaux (2012) found a variety of non-linear relationships between work hours, family characteristics, and WFC/FWC, including that those employees who had fewer children actually experienced greater WFC than those with more. Although Adkins and Premeaux did not specifically mention differences between employees with children and those without, other sources have measured consistent relationships between increased WFC/FWC and the condition of having children at home versus not. In a sample of 225 individuals employed full-time in a variety of organizations in a midwestern American city, Carlson (1999) found that the more children a person had at home, the greater the likelihood that s/he would experience WFC. This result included both time- and strain-based WFC: participants experienced the former because time devoted to one domain left insufficient time to participate in the other and the latter when the stress that resulted from one role impeded expected performance in the other, in line with the definitions of time- and strain-based conflict developed by Greenhaus and Beutell (1985). Carlson’s work did not RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 107 include a consideration of behaviour-based conflict, a third type of WFC/FWC named by Greenhaus and Beutell (1985), wherein behaviours in one role are incompatible with those required in the other role. For research on teachers’ experiences of conflict between home and work, it is reasonable to assume that behaviour-based conflict is less common than time- or strain- as the work of teaching and parenting requires similar child-focused behaviours. In addition to distinctions between parents and non-parents, researchers have also noted differences between men’s and women’s experiences of WFC/FWC. Using a series of profiles developed via an earlier study, Cinamon and Rich (2002) explored between- and within-gender differences in 213 [self-identified] upper-middle class participants’ experiences of WFC. Of the 126 married men and 87 married women that took part, 79.3% were parents, a factor that was not found to relate to any significant differences noted between the participants in this study. What was found to be significant was the difference between the men’s and women’s experiences of WFC: women reported higher levels and frequencies of WFC than men did, as determined by statistical analysis using MANOVA. Duxbury, Higgins, and Lee (1994) also explicitly tested the link between gender and WFC/FWC using MANOVA but, whereas Cinamon and Rich had a relatively small sample of 213, Duxbury et al. ran their tests on a sample of 1,989 participants, each of whom had children between the ages of 6 and 12. The women in this sample (n = 1,059) reported higher rates of both WFC and FWC than the men. Due in part to these noted differences and in part to the prevalence of women in much of the literature focusing on the work lives of teachers in particular, much of the work included here concentrates primarily on women. Having said that, the confluence of female teachers’ resilience (work-related or otherwise) and their skill and/or challenges in managing work and family obligations simultaneously did not appear to have been well-studied from the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 108 perspective of common underlying strengths. I proposed that similar resilience-related factors may underlie both teachers’ resilience at work and their successful maintenance of equilibrium in work and family obligations. Before testing this prediction, it was beneficial to first elucidate what links already existed between resilience and work-family balance research. Defining Work-Family Balance Within the sociology and business literatures, there are numerous interview-based investigations that delineate modern women’s experiences (and struggles) in managing work and family demands. Journalist Leslie Bennetts (2007) interviewed women at various life stages and in diverse roles (i.e., students, working mothers, stay-at-home mothers, and retirees) to explore their experiences in combining work and parenthood. Comparing the stories of women who had stopped working to raise their children and those who had worked while raising their children, Bennetts questioned the nature of the work-family debate in the United States, particularly in consideration of the strong Conservative rhetoric on the subject in that country. She posited that part of the problem for women negotiating ways to have meaningful employment and satisfying family lives is that many women who have managed this equilibrium have not shared their experiences; the loudest voices in debates over working and parenting have tended to be those of the women who have left the workforce to be home with their children. Based on her interviews and her own experiences as a working journalist and mother, Bennetts encourages women to embrace and share the positive experiences of working and parenting in all their imperfect messiness, thereby normalizing the reality of many women’s lived experiences rather than allowing tropes about idealized stay-at-home-mothers to stand unchallenged. She posits that this would be beneficial both for the peace that it could provide individual women and in the provision of more role models for women who are not yet at a RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 109 point where they themselves are navigating the same equilibrium. This theme of accepting the imperfect reality of work-family balance is echoed by Warner (2006) and Spar (2013), who both remarked that the tendency for some women expect themselves to have “perfect” careers and families is what often drives them to give up the former to focus on the latter. Echoing Winnicott’s (1965) conceptualization of the “good enough” mother, Bennetts (2007), Warner (2006), and Spar (2013) all encourage working mothers to accept the reality that it is acceptable and healthy to make choices that contribute to lives lived in pursuit of “good enough” rather than “perfect” and to recognize that many mothers do successfully do so and experience satisfaction (Kirchmeyer, 1992; Kirchmeyer, 1993). Whether or not these mothers are able to do so with the active support of their workplaces is another question. Spar (2013) in particular notes that many workplaces do not maintain cultures that condone or even accept employees’ choices to put energy towards that other than work-related pursuits, regardless of gender. The importance of an actively family-friendly work culture was highlighted by Hochschild (1997/2000). Over three summers researching the work-family arrangements of employees at all levels of an ostensibly family-friendly Fortune 500 company, Hochschild realized that, even though the company had policies meant to encourage flexibility in work arrangements, very few employees took advantage of any of them. Through her interviews with the company’s employees, Hochschild found that the reality of staying competitive (or, for many factory workers, solvent) in the workplace required that they not take advantage of the policies. Although policies had been developed and were on paper as being available, the reality was that the workplace did not encourage their use. Hochschild noted that a typical way for the parents in her research to maintain their work paces was to develop a “potential self” wherein the promise of future family rituals and activities when time allowed RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 110 became a substitute for ever actually doing them. Spar (2013) argues that it is incumbent upon workplaces and society in general to find ways to dismantle the tangible and intangible barriers that may prevent women from finding successful ways to maintain their work and family lives. For teachers, an awareness of the ways in which these spheres may already complement each other might be one way through which truly family-friendly policies might be developed in ways that increase congruency between teachers’ potential selves and their actual selves and, in doing so, promote wellness and overall increases in productivity. Outside of sociology, the psychology and management research investigating the nexus of work and family life typically centres on factors that contribute to, mediate, or mitigate conflicts between the domains of work and home. According to a meta-analysis conducted by Michel, Kotrba, Mitchelson, Clark, and Baltes (2010) and including work from 1987 to 2002, antecedents to WFC and FWC include a wide variety of common factors including work/family role stressors, work/family involvement, work/family social supports, work/family characteristics, and personality. This finding suggests that there may be common themes underlying the extent to which family life affects work and work life affects family; it is likely that certain psychological factors contribute to (or even constitute) these themes. Two such characteristics could be self-efficacy and sense of competence. Based on data collected as part of the longitudinal Flemish Study on Parenting, Personality, and Development, de Haan, Prinzie, and Deković (2009) suggested that sense of competence may mediate the relationship between parents’ personalities and their parenting style and effectiveness. This study had parents provide ratings of their own personalities at Time 1 and of their sense of parental competence at Time 2, six years later. At Time 2, the parents’ adolescent children also participated and rated their perceptions of their parents’ RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 111 warmth, involvement and overreactivity at Time 2. 480 Belgian families completed the data collection procedures at both Time 1 and Time 2. Developing their hypotheses based on previous observations that parental personalities shaped both parenting styles and the broader contexts in which parent-child relationships existed, de Haan et al. tested the relationships between the parents’ Big Five personality dimensions and the children’s reports of their parents’ warmth and overreactivity: both directly and with the inclusion of parental competence as a mediating factor. They found that, for both mothers and fathers, sense of competence as a parent completely mediated the relationship between parental personality and overreactivity as a parent, wherein increased competence led to decreased overreactivity. These researchers also found a strong relationship between parents’ higher sense of competence as parents and increased incidences of warmth from them towards their children. If sense of competence is comparable to self-efficacy, this link between people’s perceptions of their abilities to generate change and their mental health and effectiveness may represent a common factor underlying both parenting and work, especially (given the breadth of research supporting the importance of self-efficacy to teacher effectiveness and well-being) work as a teacher. This supposition is supported not only by the resilience research’s connections between self-efficacy and resilience but also by Allen et al.’s (2012) finding that positive trait-based variables such as self-efficacy appear to act as protective factors against WFC, a conclusion drawn from meta-analytic exploration of dispositional variables (i.e., aspects of personality) and their relatedness to indications of WFC and FWC. Social supports (i.e., relationships) are another factor implicated in reduced WFC. Based on survey answers from 444 respondents (271 men and 173 women) randomly selected from a group that comprised a Dutch national household research panel, van Daalen et al. (2006) RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 112 examined the relationships between social supports and reports of WFC and FWC. For this work, the researchers differentiated between time- and strain-based conflicts. In their work, van Daalen et al. found that, while social support was important in reducing both time- and strainbased FWC, decreases in WFC were only significantly correlated with decreases in the number of hours worked, regardless of whether it was the respondent or the respondent’s spouse who worked less. While this particular study did not stratify by profession, the importance of social supports is one aspect of work-family balance that has been studied in teachers specifically. Work-Family Balance Research with Teachers In general, issues in work-family balance for teachers are not well studied. What literature there is can be grouped into cultural influences on WFC, structural influences on WFC, and dispositional/individual influences on WFC. I will now summarize the research in each of these three domains. Cultural considerations. It is clearly important to recognize that there are cultural differences in teachers’ experiences of work-family balance, particularly since culture may be a source of resources or a source of stress (Benz, Bull, Mittelmark, & Vaandrager, 2014). It appears that, in particular, differences in collectivistic and individualistic cultural contexts influence workers’ capacities to blend work and family roles effectively (Cinamon, 2009; Joplin, Francesco, Shaffer, & Lau, 2003; Korabik, Lero, & Ayman, 2003). Gender differences also exist in experiences of WFC (Cinamon & Rich, 2002; Duxbury, Higgins, & Lee, 1994) and must be taken into account when conducting research in this area, perhaps especially, as suggested by Cinamon and Rich (2002), in connection to vocation. Oftentimes it is difficult to separate the influence of gender from that of culture as the two are very much bound together in the WFC literature; typically, in terms of how the former is bound by the expectations inherent RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 113 in the latter. Consistent with the focus of my research, the work that I summarize in this section will emphasize the experiences of female teachers from a variety of cultural milieux. Using self-report surveys to research connections between surface acting, WFC, and burnout in a sample of 102 female Malay teachers—each of whom had at least one child at home—Noor and Zainuddin (2011) hypothesized that WFC would contribute to emotionallabour-related variance in burnout through both mediation and moderation effects. Collecting data only once and without including any real-time measures of emotional labour, the researchers noted an indirect, mediational effect on the relationship between teachers’ emotional labour and their experiences of burnout. They found that WFC fully mediated the relationship between their teacher participants’ demonstrations of surface acting and incidences of emotional exhaustion, and partially mediated the relationship between surface acting and the depersonalization aspect of burnout. While, as explained by the authors, these participants were from a culture wherein women are expected to assume the responsibility for home and children regardless of work commitments, their experiences are likely still relevant to the experiences of teacher/mothers in other cultural contexts. Although not acknowledged as openly, expectations regarding women’s domestic responsibilities appear to underlie family life in North America too. For example, based on interviews with 50 heterosexual American couples who were parents of preschoolaged children, Hochschild (1989/2012) observed that, on average, women’s domestic contributions exceeded men’s by an amount of time equivalent to four weeks a year of 24-hour days—a phenomenon she termed the “second shift.” In the Afterword to the 2012 edition of her book, follow-up data indicate that, while it is now an average of two weeks of 24-hour days, the “second shift” is still very much a part of North American working mothers’ experiences. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 114 Where North American and Malay women’s incidences of WFC may differ is that the formers’ may be more pronounced. In her work investigating the experiences of Jewish and Muslim Arab women teachers, Cinamon (2009) found that the Arab women, whose collectivist cultural backgrounds were similar to the Malay women’s, had lower incidences of WFC than the more individualistic Jewish teachers. In this same research, Cinamon noted that the Jewish teachers ascribed greater importance to their family roles and the Arab teachers to their work roles; the Arab participants were viewed as rather modern and non-traditional in terms of their cultural norms. In consideration of the Arab women’s avant-gardism, Cinamon proposed that their lower WFC might have stemmed from those participants’ abilities to better reconcile their work and family roles as this would have been necessary for them to justify working outside the home—they may have viewed their work as an essential and integral part of their family obligations. Even in a collectivistic culture, however, WFC may negatively affect teachers’ mental health and their job satisfaction. In a sample of 100 male (n = 28) and female (n = 72) Malay teachers, Panatik, Badri, Rajab, Rahman, and Shah (2011) found that WFC predicted 23% of the variance in the teachers’ mental health as assessed by the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS 21) and 35% of their intention to quit as assessed by the three-item Michigan Organizational Assessment Questionnaire. Although cultural considerations do appear to influence teachers’ successes in maintaining equilibrium between home and work, they are by no means the only factors to do so. Structural considerations. Regardless of cultural particulars, it would likely be valuable to investigate what sources of resilience might underlie teachers’ successful navigation of work and family from multiple perspectives. From a strengths-based perspective, one might explore what teachers perceive as contributing to their abilities to maintain work-family RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 115 equilibrium. From the perspective of elucidating possible challenges to the maintenance of said equilibrium, it might be beneficial to explore what aspects of work teachers perceive to be impinging on their home lives (WFC) and vice versa (FWC). While not focusing on resilience per se, there is research that suggests that factors known to support resilience in the workplace are also useful for teachers looking to “balance” their work and home lives. Based on participants’ responses to their experiences in an intervention program meant to help ease teachers’ WFC, Cinamon and Rich (2005a) reported three factors deemed most important and valuable by the teacher participants. Reminiscent of research highlighting the importance of relationship and vocation to resilience, teachers most appreciated the chance to discuss difficulties in combining work and family roles, the opportunity to learn new skills to help balance work-family pressures, and the contributions to their self-awareness via the group’s stimulation to clarify the personal meanings of their life roles and their coping styles. For Israeli teachers, Cinamon and Rich (2005b) noted that teachers’ experiences of WFC were similar to those of workers in other high-stress occupations and was predictive of teacher burnout (Cinamon & Rich, 2010). Should this latter finding hold true for teachers in other parts of the world, it provides another reason to examine work-family equilibrium issues in concert with resilience. This suggestion aligns with that of Beltman et al. (2011) who recommended that researchers begin work to identify how the overlap between teachers’ resilience and the multiple contexts in which they live and work may influence each other; including a determination of how the potential for satisfaction in these roles might be salient to a strengths-based approach given that there is evidence to suggest that satisfaction is protective against the negative effects of multiple roles (Kirchmeyer, 1992). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 116 Research of this type may be particularly significant for teachers in BC, who have reported substantial work-related losses of time with family or friends and stress levels higher than colleagues in any other part of Canada (Naylor & Schaefer, 2003), a country where 75% of professional women with children admit to struggling with WFC (Metcalfe, et al., 2014). For teaching professionals, the influences of teaching-specific work characteristics and social supports have been investigated in terms of their connections to WFC. Teaching-specific work characteristics. While there are similarities between teaching and other high-stress professions, there are also some notable exceptions, particularly teachers’ lack of flexible scheduling (especially for full-time teachers) and their obligatory continuous caring work with children. The capacity for resilience might be especially important for teachers given that they are typically unable to exercise much or any autonomy regarding the specific days and hours that they work (again, especially if they work full-time). Control over one’s workday schedule appears connected to lower incidences of WFC for employees including telecommunications workers (Valcour, 2007) and healthcare managers (Porter & Ayman, 2010). Because of the low control over their schedules, it is conceivable that teachers must find ways of managing potential sources of WFC in ways that differ from workers in other fields such as those researched by Valcour (2007) and Porter and Ayman (2010). Perhaps it is partly the lack of flexibility in scheduling that contributed to Panatik et al.’s (2011) finding that teachers’ WFC may be linked to impaired health outcomes for those professionals. This lack of flexibility may also be related to the relationship between teachers’ WFC/FWC and burnout. Besides mediating teachers’ emotional labour and their experiences of burnout (Noor & Zainuddin, 2011) and possibly influencing teachers’ experiences of depression, anxiety, and stress (Panatik, et al., 2011), WFC and FWC may also be predictive of teacher burnout. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 117 Cinamon, Rich, and Westman (2007) tested this relationship with a group of 230 Israeli high school teachers consisting of 48 men and 182 women. Via seven separate surveys and a demographic questionnaire, Cinamon et al. collected data on participants’ WFC/FWC, their sources of support, the flexibility of their hours and feelings of vigour at work, their experiences of emotional exhaustion, and their perceived investments in their students’ behaviour problems and relationships with students’ parents. Through regression analysis, Cinamon and her colleagues examined generic and specific antecedents to the high school teachers’ WFC/FWC and investigated the extent to which WFC/FWC contributed to those teachers’ experiences of burnout and vigour. The main findings of these regression analyses were twofold: factors specific to teaching (rather than generic stressors) made the greatest contribution to participants’ WFC, and both WFC and FWC predicted teacher burnout. Regarding the first of these findings, perceived investments in student misbehaviours and relations with students’ parents were the two variables that explained the greatest amount of variance (11% when considered together as ‘specific factors’) in the teachers’ experiences of WFC. As Cinamon et al. determined these occupation-specific stressors to be significant factors in teachers’ WFC, this finding helps to justify my own decision to concentrate on research with just that group of professionals. Social supports and teaching. Supportive relationships with colleagues appear very important for teachers’ capacities to stay well at teaching. In their research with a group of 780 primary and secondary school teachers in South London, Griffith, Steptoe, and Cropley (1999) found relationships between high job stress and low social support at work. Although Griffith et al. did not include items intended to assess the potential repercussions of their participants’ RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 118 impaired social connectivity beyond the increases in stress, other researchers have implicated social supports in longer term outcomes. Cinamon and Rich (2010) revisited their research on the relationship between WFC/FWC and burnout with a group of 322 female, married teachers in Israel to investigate the role of social supports in those teachers’ experiences of burnout and vigour; 281 of the teachers had children of unspecified ages. While men were originally included in the data collection process, they were excluded from the data analysis when only 23 of them returned completed surveys. Noting that work-family relations typically included both conflict and facilitation components, Cinamon and Rich investigated the effects of social supports on teachers’ perceptions of conflict/facilitation and the connections between those factors and the same teachers’ experiences of WFC/FWC and tendencies towards burnout and/or vigour. To this end, the researchers administered self-report surveys of WFC/FWC, work-family facilitation/familywork facilitation (WFF/FWF), perceptions of support, feelings of vigour at work, and the emotional exhaustion aspect of burnout. Based on the self-reports of this sample, Cinamon and Rich determined that spousal, colleague, and managerial support were all significantly, positively related to the participants’ experiences of increased facilitation between work and home (WFF and FWF), decreased FWC, increased work vigour, and decreased burnout. Managerial support alone was also positively associated with decreased WFC to a statisticallysignificant degree. This finding echoes that reported by van Daalen et al. (2006), who examined the relationship between these same three sources of social support plus relatives and friends as a fourth source, and who found that social support was important in reducing both time- and strain-based FWC but not WFC. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 119 The desire for teachers at all stages of their careers to take advantage of opportunities to connect with colleagues was highlighted by Compton (2010), who, with an unstated sample size consisting of teachers from a large suburban school district, surveyed his study participants’ desired professional development opportunities using a tool based on a model of teacher career growth. While teachers rated most of the suggested activities differently depending on their career stage, “having opportunities to connect with other teachers” had the highest mean score for teachers in each of Compton’s four career stages (apprentice, professional, expert, and distinguished). Considering both the demonstrated importance of social supports to enhanced mental health and decreased WFC and the evident desire of teachers to engage in building collegial supports, working within a variety of structures to facilitate relationships between teachers might provide one way to enhance all teachers’ resilience (e.g., through mentorship or facilitated peer supervision groups). Dispositional considerations. Besides cultural and structural influences that the work of teaching may have on WFC, another contextual consideration is that of individual dispositions. It is important to recognize that different people will have different motives for assigning importance or salience to specific life roles and that this importance will be expressed in diverse ways depending on the individual’s stage of life (Cinamon & Rich, 2002; Cinamon & Rich, 2005a; Day, Kington, et al., 2006). It is likely that whatever the motives behind an individual’s assignment of importance to particular roles, they [the motives] would reflect some of the psychological characteristics described by Hong (2012) as being inextricably linked to teachers’ meaning-making processes and internal value systems. These psychological characteristics include factors such as values, beliefs, emotions, and self-efficacy—factors that also influence an individual’s parenting. In line with Hong’s discernment of the interactions RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 120 between career practices and personal values, I predicted that similar interactions would be relevant to the development and expression of teacher/mothers’ WFC—a prediction I probed as I studied the ways in which teachers successfully managed the demands of work and family life. Hong’s emphasis on psychological factors, rather than those that were organizational or external, also made her work particularly relevant to my research focus as the sources of resilience described therein aligned with those depicted in the parenting literature. Considering such overlap, it was possible that certain individual factors benefit teacher/mothers in their roles as educators and as parents simultaneously, a possibility was been considered at least once before. Working from a qualitative perspective, Claesson and Brice (1989) investigated the possibility that the roles of teacher and parent might be complementary. Through in-depth interviews with 18 primary teachers who were also mothers of young children of similar ages to their students, Claesson and Brice studied how this group viewed their roles as teachers and mothers to overlap given that they were in positions of primary responsibility for young children both at home and at work. Noting that the participants perceived the roles of teacher and parent to be predominately complementary, the researchers (with their subjects) elucidated what advantages and strategies the overlapping roles conferred and then what problems resulted from the dual roles. For this sample, the advantages of being simultaneously responsible for young children at home and at work were described (in order) as: increases in empathy and patience for students; increased awareness of “typical” child development, which could then be applied to children at home and to considerations of the participants’ career decisions; and perceptions of increased credibility among students’ parents. Aspects perceived to be most problematic were largely related to heightened awareness of potential issues (e.g., apparent RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 121 neglect from other parents) and expectations that the participants held for themselves and perceived others to hold of them. In particular, participants reported having unrealistic expectations for their students and for their own children and/or children’s teachers and stress over others’ expectations regarding their performance at home and work (i.e., as unrealistically high), their availability for consultation, and their needs for assistance (e.g., from partners). Not surprisingly, the participants in this study also reported that they had reduced energy for and increased scrutiny of their own children since beginning simultaneously teaching and parenting. Connecting their findings to the extant literature, Claesson and Brice remarked that, “teaching as easy work versus exhaustion is an especially troublesome problem for women who have responsibility for young children at home as well as at school” (1989, p. 16). Strategies suggested for coping with the dual role of teacher and mother concentrated on cultivating and maintaining meaningful relationships and taking time for self-care while focusing on what was most important to the participants. Although they centered their work on informants who felt they were successfully handling the teacher/mother role and who were part of “intact” families with employed husbands, Claesson and Brice (1989) noted that their findings were consistent with those of similar studies with very different populations. It appears that home and school are inextricably linked for teacher/mothers. Limited numbers of findings such as these notwithstanding, there is a dearth of research that considers the issues teachers might have in working with children all day, only to go home and continue their evenings and weekends in a similar vein. As suggested by the work of Cinamon and Rich (2010) and Claesson and Brice (1989), work and family may actually provide benefits for teachers in that the similar demands allow for some measure of WFF/FWF—especially if the roles are satisfying (Kirchmeyer, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 122 1992; Kirchmeyer, 1993). This is not to say, however, that distinctions between conflict and facilitation are clear. Besides investigating the influences of social supports, Cinamon and Rich (2010) tested the degree to which conflict and facilitation were relatively similar or distinct; the results of these analyses are unclear. While factor analysis indicated that the measurements of conflict and facilitation investigated by the duo did assess different constructs, regression analysis results suggested that, in the family domain, there were interrelationships between conflict and facilitation wherein FWC predicted FWF and vice versa. No such similar trends were noted for the comparable work to family relationships (i.e., WFC and WFF). As noted by the researchers, it is possible that the overlaps in the family domain could be related to their survey’s use of global perceptions of conflict and facilitation and the nebulous borders that tend to define roles within a family. Assuming a person’s roles within her or his family are more negotiable and circumstantial than those at work, it may be that global questionnaires are not sensitive enough to elicit responses that allow for a clear demarcation between conflict and facilitation in FWC and FWF. Clearly, more research on these constructs is required. Although the research on WFF/FWF is not as robust as that on WFC/FWC, there has been some interest in what Greenhaus and Powell (2006) defined as the extent to which experiences in one role (such as teacher) enhance and improve quality of life in other roles (such as parent). Due to the parallel requirements one is called upon to meet in teaching and in parenting, it would not be surprising to find that comparable resources were beneficial for each—resilience might be one such resource. Allen et al. (2012) supported this proposed relationship between resilience and WFF/FWF when they elucidated clear links between the resilience and WFC literatures in their RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 123 meta-analysis examining the links between personality and resilience. Based on their observation that the relationship between dispositional variables and WFC had not been studied in the same depth as situational links to WFC, Allen et al.’s meta-analysis included 75 independent samples from 68 articles investigating disposition and WFC. Utilizing the correlation coefficients provided by each study’s authors (or, based on the data provided, calculated by the meta-analysis authors if the information was not part of the actual study), Allen et al. calculated effect sizes across the studies for 13 dispositional variables. The researchers also conducted analyses to investigate the relationships between certain dispositions and Greenhaus and Beutell’s (1985) three types of WFC: time-based, strain-based, and behaviour-based. This work is evocative of the resilience research in the types of dispositional variables that the researchers noted as being protective against WFC: self-efficacy, positive affect, internal locus of control, and optimism. That these factors echo important factors implicated in studies of teachers’ resilience provides further evidence of similar underlying sources of resilience for teachers at home and at work. Allen et al. suggested that these traits provide “psychological capital that may play a role in managing work and family” (p. 22). So, exactly how is it that a teacher’s work life might even begin to impinge upon her family life, especially when teaching is considered a job that provides so-called “mothers’ hours” (i.e., a schedule that allows a person to be available during those times that her/his children are not in school to provide care for them). The next section will examine why research investigating the interface of work and home is important not only for the teacher/mothers at said interface, but for their children as well. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 124 Workplace Stress and Family Life Supporting teachers as parents is important for both parties in the parent/child relationship because of the potential ramifications of a parent’s impaired wellness on her or his children. Support might be particularly significant for mothers with children younger than 13. In Canada, Higgins, Duxbury, and Lee (1994) found that working mothers reported higher levels of conflict between work and family than fathers did until children were 13 years and older, at which point women’s levels of WFC and FWC dropped dramatically; this was based on surveys done with 3,616 respondents from a variety of white-collar, professional employment backgrounds. While it is likely that teachers’ well-being will influence their students (Day, Kington, et al., 2006), it is almost undoubtable that it will have a larger effect on their own children with whom they live. The influence of parents’ emotional availability and reactivity on the home environment and the children therein is well established. Saarni (1999) discovered that children started looking to their parents as examples of how to react in unfamiliar situations from as early as 10 months of age. The example set by parents seems likely to contribute to children’s emotional intelligence, an attribute that Gottman, Katz, and Hooven (1997) suggested is the mediating link between emotion regulation abilities learned from parents at home and peer social competencies. This conclusion is supported by work that investigates the development of various phenomena that comprise or are at least related to emotional intelligence. For example, Giroux (2012) measured a small but significant negative correlation between parental trait anxiety and adolescent stress management ability, and Wei, Cummings, Villabø, and Kendall (2014) found that maternal (but not paternal) anxious self-talk was positively related to youth’s anxious self-talk. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 125 The influence of parents on their offspring’s emotional development is not solely the purview of the social sciences; parental modelling is likely even influential at a biological level. Fiori (2009) suggested that at least some level of automaticity is involved in the learning of social skills, suggesting that mimicry of emotions may be the result of automatic imitation of someone else’s expression, which then leads to an induced emotional reaction resulting from feedback elicited by facial muscles. Via a mechanism such as this, Fiori postulated that it is possible that a person likely not only mimics but also understands and even experiences the same emotion as that which the sender is experiencing. This process likely involves mirror neurons, an additional biological reason that suggests that it is not enough for a parent to “talk the talk,” they must also be sure to “walk the walk” when it comes to teaching their children self-regulatory and emotional intelligence skills. By utilizing resilience-enhancing skills to selfregulate and to manage workplace stressors and the challenges inherent in negotiating an equilibrium between work and home, parents (including teacher/mothers) are likely not only sustaining their effectiveness as teachers but also as parents responsible for helping their own children’s social-emotional development. Like resilience, work-family equilibrium is important for teachers; without a sense of it, wellness may be difficult for teachers to achieve and maintain as they may be preoccupied with events in one domain to the detriment of their health. As de Haan et al. (2009) suggested, sense of competence is particularly changeable and represents a potential avenue for interventions with parents and/or teachers. This suggestion is supported by Noor and Zainuddin (2011), who suggested that teachers require access to training that helps them to recognize their need to manage the emotional demands of teaching—particularly for mothers who are similarly engaged with their own children at home. As highlighted by Cinamon (2009) and in line with RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 126 CBPR best practices, any such training must take cultural contexts into consideration to ensure it is sensitive and relevant to the participants. In the next chapter—Research Design—I will explain the ways in which I was mindful of these considerations in carrying out my own research. Chapter Summary According to Naylor and Schaefer (2003), “student-related factors: the effects of dysfunctional family environments, the unmet needs of students, and non-designated ‘greyarea’ students” (p. viii) comprise the largest sources of stress for teachers in BC. As these factors are not ones that teachers can ameliorate directly, it is incumbent upon these education professionals to find ways to cope with the stress thus engendered in ways that do not require manipulation of the source(s) of the stress. Resilience as I have described it so far is one way that teachers might access just such a skill set for coping with the spectrum of challenges inherent in any classroom, and it is not just in the classroom that such a skill set might be beneficial. If teachers could be made more aware of how their work and family lives overlap, either through explicit training opportunities or through more informal means, it is likely that both their own children and the children with whom they work would benefit from the proactive measures that could be implemented and sustained. In the next chapter, I will describe the ways in which I used mixed-methods research to start trying to help raise teachers’ awareness of the ways in the overlaps between home and work may affect them and—in particular—what strategies they and their colleagues are already using to negotiate these overlaps in addition to the already-challenging roles of teacher and parent. In this Literature Review I have appraised and evaluated the current body of literature relevant to psychological resilience and WFC/FWC—primarily as it relates to teachers and (to a RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 127 lesser extent) other HPs. This chapter built on the previous (i.e., the Introduction) by providing context for the research that I proposed in that earlier chapter. In the next chapter, I will describe the methods and the population that I included in this work before I then use the final three chapters to share my findings, discuss their significance, and provide suggestions for meaningful changes and future directions that this research might suggest. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 128 Chapter 3 – Research Design For my research, I investigated ways that women maintain careers teaching groups of (largely) unrelated children while simultaneously raising their own children at home. In the two previous chapters, I described the ways in which a closer examination of teacher/mothers’ resilience might benefit both those women and the system(s) in which they work. Now, I will delineate the ways in which I carried out this investigation. Purpose Through quantitative and qualitative data collection, I investigated female teachers’ experiences of WFC/FWC and the strategies that teacher/mothers use to maintain their resilience while working with children both at home and at work. To do this, I worked from a series of related research questions: • Are there differences in self-reports of resilience, WFC/FWC, and/or teachingspecific stress in teachers who are actively parenting their own children (i.e., teacher/mothers) and those of women who are not simultaneously teaching and parenting (i.e., who are not mothers)? • Do teacher/mothers’ self-reports of resilience, WFC/FWC, and/or teaching-specific stress differ based on the ages of their own children? • Are there measurable relationships between teacher/mothers’ indications of resilience and their measures of work-related stress and/or WFC/FWC and/or the ages of their own children? • What phenomena (i.e., resilience strategies) do teacher/mothers perceive as helpful in supporting their health and well-being at work, at home, and in the overlaps between these spheres? RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 129 Based on my findings, I anticipated that I—along with an interested, informed participant subset of my sample of teacher/mothers—would be able to develop recommendations as to how educational systems and individuals within those systems might help sustain and develop teachers’ resilience and their abilities to maintain their wellness while undertaking both work and family commitments. Put simply, I intended (and still intend) that the findings of this research will help teacher/mothers support their health and well-being at work and at home. Besides attempting to measure resilience directly via the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) (Connor & Davidson, 2003; Davidson & Connor, 2016)—an assessment that fairly closely matches the factors that the literature signals as important to teachers’ resilience—I sought additional quantitative evidence for the teacher/mother participants’ resilience by quantifying the relative levels of teaching-related stress in their lives compared to the levels of those participants who were not actively raising young children while working as teachers. As explained in the delimiters, participants were not asked about specific psychopathology at any time during this research. Instead, I assessed participants only for evidence of occupational stress, as was aligned with the intended uses of the assessment that I chose. Research Methodology and Population To explore the potential existence of underlying factors that may have helped elucidate relationships between those aspects of life as a teacher/mother that most interested me, I undertook this research from a mixed-methods research (MMR) approach within a PNI framework (Kurtz, 2014). In PNI, stories (rather than opinions or “facts”) are elicited from research participants so that the broader themes and ideas that are frequently alluded to in stories might be incorporated into a research project. As happened in my own qualitative work, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 130 analysis (“sensemaking”) of these stories happens with the very active participation of a group of the storytellers so that the stories are kept by their progenitors—or at least a representative sample of the larger group. I will describe PNI more fully after first outlining MMR. Methodology Before describing my methods, I will provide a brief history of MMR to justify its use for this research. To this end, I will now provide a definition of MMR, a brief overview of its history and its current uses, and a summary of its core characteristics. Mixed Methods Research (MMR). A mixed methods approach to research is much more than a rejection of the dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative approaches: it is a third methodological movement, with its own nomenclature, methodology, and utilization potential (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2010). In the United States, Creswell, Klassen, Plano Clark, and Smith (2011) developed a definition of MMR for use in evaluating research proposals submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH): For the purposes of [NIH resesearch], mixed methods research will be defined as a research approach or methodology: • focusing on research questions that call for real-life contextual understandings, multi-level perspectives, and cultural influences; • employing rigorous quantitative research assessing magnitude and frequency of constructs and rigorous qualitative research exploring the meaning and understanding of constructs; • utilizing multiple methods (e.g., intervention trials and in-depth interviews); • intentionally integrating or combining these methods to draw on the strengths of each; and RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS • 131 framing the investigation within philosophical and theoretical positions (p. 4). This definition provides a helpful checklist to help ensure that researchers consistently employ best practices in their MMR. In general, MMR as a methodology can be defined as a broad inquiry logic that rejects the necessity of an “either-or” approach to selecting qualitative or quantitative techniques but rather, guides the selection of specific methods informed by conceptual positions common to mixed methods practitioners (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2010). Teddlie and Tashakkori (2010) positioned this rejection of the “either-or” as key to a guiding methodological principle of MMR: methodological eclecticism, wherein—regardless of their specific theoretical background(s) or orientation(s)—MMR researchers select and integrate techniques from a variety of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed strategies to comprehensively investigate phenomena of interest. To provide clarity regarding the specific strategies selected for a given project, two particular conceptual and methodological principles must be identified in any MMR study: the sequence of qualitative and/or quantitative strands and/or phases, and the specific data collection procedures or types of data needed to answer the research question(s) (Tashakkori, 2009). While not specifically named as a principle, Tashakkori also mentioned that there appears to be a consensus that integration is necessary for a project to be considered MMR. Morse (2010a) saw integration as being part of what distinguishes MMR from research utilizing multiple methods. She defined multiple methods design as that consisting of “two or more studies using different methods, which address the same research question or different parts of the same research question or programmatic goal” (p. 340). As such, it is clear that it is not simply the collection of multiple sets of data that make an MMR project MMR. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 132 Benefits of MMR. According to some feminist researchers, “mixed methods research holds out great promise to traverse macro- and micro-layered understandings of women’s lived experiences and brings forth diverse understandings of women’s lives” (Hesse-Biber, 2010a, p. 188). This is done in part through MMR’s minimization of some of the dualisms that can otherwise exist in research: between quantitative and qualitative methodologies, between subjects and objects of interest, and between rationality and emotion (Hesse-Biber, 2012). By using MMR to incorporate each of these phenomena into my research, I endeavoured to better align myself with my stated feminist theoretical orientation; the incorporation of multiple perspectives and ways of knowing being a fundamental tenet of feminist research (Hesse-Biber, 2012). Given this alignment and my desire to utilize dual data sources (surveys and PNI groups) in complementary ways, and considering evidence that a mixed methods approach provides a clearer picture of stress processes in particular (Hugentobler, Israel, & Schurman, 1992; Schonfeld & Farrell, 2010), it was evident that MMR was how I might best meet my research goals—particularly since there was evidence that this dual focus helps minimize gaps that may be left by either of the other two methodologies. For example, the inclusion of qualitative data may help control for common method variance in the quantitative data (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Lee, 2003), while a consideration of quantitative trends may help to provide more “concrete” evidence of trends that are otherwise hinted at by qualitative data (Miner, Jayaratne, Pesonen, & Zurbrügg, 2012). One of the principles of feminist research is that participants should benefit from their involvement (Koch & Kralik, 2006). I intend to operationalize the conclusions drawn from my research in ways that will support, sustain, and/or increase teachers’ resilience and their abilities to maintain their wellness and their life-satisfaction while undertaking both work and family RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 133 commitments. Preliminary suggestions of potential directions for doing so may be found in my final chapters, the Discussion and Conclusion. As I am confident that my specific recommendations are based on solid evidence, I expect that this work has the potential to influence future workplace policy (especially regarding wellness) and also provide an impetus for development of further professional development and/or teacher training opportunities for mental health and the successful management of multiple sets of responsibilities. I anticipate that this work could benefit a wider variety of HPs than teachers alone; however, my sample of participants was restricted to just that narrower population. The Research Population All participants were teachers who self-identified as female. For the first phase of data collection, I included mothers and non-mothers. In the second phase (and for data checking), I only involved those women who were simultaneously working as teachers and actively parenting at least one child at home at the time of this research (i.e., teacher/mothers). While I drew from this population of teacher/mothers for both phases of my data collection, the mechanisms by which I recruited them differed and built upon each other over the phases. I will describe these mechanisms and differences after providing a demographic overview of my sample. Population characteristics. A minimum of 85 returned surveys was necessary to yield a power of .80 at α = .05 when effect size was assumed to be of a medium magnitude in the population (Cohen, 1992). Once all research activities were concluded and the sample was identified, there were a total of 181 participants that qualified for inclusion in this study: 125 teacher/mothers and 56 non-mothers. There were 12 other participants that completed the survey but whose parental status was unclear (e.g., they indicated that they did not have RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 134 children at home, but their answers suggested they had step-children or children who were grown and not living at home). Of the 181 people included in the sample, 10 (5.5%) identified as being of First Nations or Metis descent, a proportion reflective of the reported 6% actual fraction of the local population (Stats Canada, 2016). Another 22 (12.2%) of the participants identified as being of Asian descent. This percentage was not reflective of Stats Canada’s (2016) report that 28% of British Columbians identify as being of Asian descent. Only 1% of BC residents identified as being of Latin American descent in 2016; my sample included one participant for a sample proportion of .5%. The remaining six participants did not disclose this information. All participants were teachers who identified as female. The greatest proportions of both mothers and non-mothers had five-year teaching degrees: 42% and 50% respectively. 30% of mothers and 23% of non-mothers had completed sufficient upper-level coursework to earn a “five plus” category and the rest of each group (28% of mothers and 27% of non-mothers) had a Master’s degree or (in the case of one participant) PhD. Table 1 summarizes other demographic characteristics of the mothers and non-mothers who took part in this research. Table 2 provides information on the teacher/mothers’ children. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 135 Table 1 Other Sample Characteristics Variable Marital Status Married/committed Separated Divorced Single Widowed Participant Age Range 20 – 29 30 – 39 40 – 49 50 – 59 60 + Level(s) Currently Taught Elementary Middle Secondary Multiple Mothers Frequency Percentage 112 6 5 2 0 89.6 4.8 4.0 1.6 0 25 1 1 28 1 44.6 1.8 1.8 50 1.8 2 45 66 12 0 1.6 36.0 52.8 9.6 0 11 23 12 9 1 19.6 41.1 21.4 16.1 1.8 64 15 38 8 51.2 12.0 30.4 6.4 38 5 11 2 67.9 8.9 19.6 3.6 Table 2 Characteristics of Teacher/Mothers’ Children Variable Age of Youngest Child Under 5 years 5 – 9 years 10 – 14 years 15 – 19 years 20+ years Number of Children 1 child 2 children 3 children 4 children Non-mothers Frequency Percentage Frequency Percentage 36 47 21 16 5 28.8 37.6 16.8 12.8 4.0 31 70 21 3 24.8 56.0 16.8 2.4 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 136 There were no participants with more than four children in this sample and no information was gathered on any attributes that would make raising any child or children more challenging than others. Neither did I exclude those women whose youngest children were older than schoolaged or gather specific information on the circumstances of any specific child or children being at home. Recruitment and characteristics of participants for Phase 1. My target sample for the surveys that comprised the first phase of my research were women who were working as teachers in BC schools. All participants were employed in some aspect of K – 12 education and all but four worked in a public school. To collect data from a sufficiently large sample, I initially sent 30 survey packages each to colleagues in eight different school districts that, collectively, covered geographically much of central and southern BC—the northern portions of the province, while not unrepresented, were not as well sampled. I asked each of my colleagues (each of whom was herself working as a teacher in a different part of BC) to help me include women of their acquaintances in their respective school districts: ideally, 15 of whom were concurrently working as public school teachers and raising children; and 15 of whom were working as teachers in public schools, but who did not have children. Each local contact used snowball sampling and the gift of a $5.00 coffee card (given to each participant as part of the survey package regardless of completion) to enlist participants from her school district. Recruitment and characteristics of participants for Phase 2. The second phase of my research was analysis of qualitative survey data through PNI groups. Recruitment of participants for this second phase of data collection was purposive and based on convenience. It was limited to teacher/mothers who worked in one of two specific districts—either a rural/small-urban school district in BC’s Interior or an urban district in the province’s Lower RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 137 Mainland—in which I already had a support person who was willing to help recruit participants. Relying on the assistance of my local contacts in each of the two areas, potential participants were contacted individually via phone and/or text message to ask them to consider participating in a follow-up story analysis group in their area. If they were interested, they were emailed a letter outlining the purpose of the research, the basic tenets of PNI, and some of the benefits of participating. Regardless of whether they participated in a group, all participants were asked if they would allow their anonymized stories to be used by the PNI groups to conduct thematic analysis on their content via a process akin to consensual coding. Instruments In this section, I will detail each data collection instrument that I used in the first phase of my research, which relied on survey data. For this survey, portions of which are included in Appendix B, I combined a demographic questionnaire with three instruments that assessed dimensions of teacher-related stress, overlap and interplay of work and family responsibilities, and resilience. Associated with the relevant scales—with sufficient space left for writing—I included story-eliciting questions as per the examples provided by Kurtz (2014). These questions enabled me to collect qualitative data simultaneously with the quantitative. As per Rea and Parker’s (2005) suggestion for encouraging completion of mailed-out surveys, I ensured that the entire survey did not take longer than 30 minutes to complete even though they were being collected rather than mailed. My selected instruments and story-eliciting questions are detailed below. The Teacher Stress Inventory. Working from the assumption that resilience is only observable as adaptation despite adversity, I included a measure of teaching-specific stress to evaluate the ways in which teachers avoided or coped with stress and how this stress might RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 138 have carried over into their home lives. Fimian’s (1984, 1988) Teacher Stress Inventory (TSI) provides a non-clinical snapshot of common, stressful experiences in teaching. The TSI was available free of charge for research purposes on the author’s website. This instrument best fit my research goals because it was profession-specific and it facilitated the collection of data on sources and manifestations of teacher stress. Stress sources examined were time management; work-related stressors; professional distress; discipline and motivation; and professional investment. Stress manifestations were grouped into emotional, fatigue, cardiovascular, gastronomic, and behavioural factors. Each factor included three to eight items. Findings from this inventory are shared in the Results chapter. The TSI has 49 five-point Likert-scale items; as such, it comprised the bulk of my survey. Validity of the TSI. The TSI was developed specifically for use with K – 12 teachers. Based on an aggregate sample of 3,401 K – 12 teachers (collected over five years in seven American states), Fimian (1988) established the factorial validity of this instrument’s 10 subscales. He established content validity through work with 226 experts’ regular contributions of data over these same five years. He demonstrated convergent validity in several ways: by correlating teachers’ self-reports on the TSI with ratings made independently by someone who knew the person well; by correlating total TSI scores with the presence of specific personal or professional characteristics; and, by correlating TSI scores with various other stress-related constructs. These three sets of correlations provided evidence of convergent validity. Confirmatory factor analysis on a Greek version of the TSI further supported the convergent validity of the TSI (Kourmousi, Darviri, Varvogli, & Alexopoulos, 2015). Reliability of the TSI. Besides having adequate validity, the TSI is also possessed of good reliability, which was also supported by the work of Kourmousi et al. (2015). Fimian RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 139 (1988) reported each of the 10 subscales to have an alpha (i.e., internal consistency reliability) score of .75 or greater (all but three were greater than .80). Test-retest reliability was also good, with all but one measurement (Behavioural Manifestations over a one-week period) recording statistically-significant correlations to at least the .05 level across a variety of time periods. Overall, I was satisfied with both the validity and the reliability of the TSI for the aims of my research. After completing it, participants were asked a question meant to elicit a story about how they managed stress: In the space below and/or on the back of this page, please share how you have been able to get through a particularly stressful time. What happened? What was helpful to you at that time? Following the TSI and first question were a set of scales to assess work-family and family-work conflicts. Work-Family Conflict/Family-Work Conflict Scales. To assess participants’ experiences of WFC (when work requirements interfere with family roles) and FWC (when family requirements interfere with work), I used the 18-item Work-Family Conflict/FamilyWork Conflict Scales (Carlson, Kacmar, & Williams, 2000). As suggested by its name, this measure consists of two scales: one to measure the interference of work on family (WIF) and one to measure family’s interference with work (FIW). This scale was developed based on the definition of WFC as “a form of interrole conflict in which the general demands of, time devoted to, and strain created by the job interfere with performing family-related responsibilities” (Netemeyer, McMurrian, & Boles, 1996, p. 401). Based on this definition, Netemeyer et al. (1996) developed a very popular WFC/FWC scale based on time-based and strain-based interferences. Carlson et al. (2000) included a third consideration—behaviourbased interferences—thereby better aligning it with those three aspects that were identified by Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) in their seminal work that first described the phenomena of RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 140 WFC/FWC in terms of interrole conflict rather than resource scarcity. It is largely because of this third aspect that Casper, De Hauw, and Wayne (2013) recommended Carlson et al.’s (2000) instrument over that developed by Netermeyer et al. (1996). Carlson et al.’s (2000) scales have been widely used in the assessment of work’s potential to negatively impact family life and vice versa, in part because they are not specific to any particular job or profession. Carlson et al. developed and validated this instrument based on five separate samples of university students and professionals (N = 1,211). Lapierre et al. (2005) further validated it on a sample of 451 New Zealand and 181 Canadian managers. I chose this measure partly because of its general language: it was written in a way that allowed individuals to interpret the questions in light of their particular circumstances, thereby making it less likely that any potentially problematic situations would be excluded. However, as I will consider in the Discussion chapter, the language was perhaps not general enough that participants who were single and/or non-mothers connected with the FWC scales, a possibility that was partially supported by the findings of Waumsley, Houston, and Marks (2010). According to the website of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) at the Centres for Disease Control this instrument is in the public domain, which meant it was free for use. Rather than assessing the potential somatic, physical, and mental outcomes that may result from them, Carlson et al.’s (2000) scales purport to measure incidences of WFC and FWC directly. Scale dimensionality, discriminant validity, and internal consistency of the final forms of the scales were assessed via confirmatory factor analysis, which found each of those constructs to be adequate across the three samples surveyed. Internal consistency of the WFC scale in particular (with an average coefficient alpha of .88) was found to be greater than that of RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 141 other similar scales. Lapierre et al. (2005) also measured alpha coefficients in this range: for the New Zealand sample, Cronbach’s alphas were .84 for time-based WIF, .86 for strain-based, and .83 for behaviour-based; for the Canadian sample, the values for these same three interferences were .84, .87, and .83, respectively. Considering FWC, Lapierre et al. reported Cronbach’s alphas of .75 for time-based FIW, .89 for strain-based FIW, and .86 for behaviourbased FIW for the New Zealand sample. The Canadian sample reported FIW values for these same three interferences as .80, .87, and .89, respectively. In line with my aim to help teachers identify sources of resilience, I was acutely interested in the times and ways in which teacher/mothers perceived themselves to be minimizing their experiences of WFC and FWC. To elicit these perceptions after they completed the scales, participants were asked: In the space below and/or on the back of this page, please share a time that you felt you “had it all together” (or at least more together than usual) at home and at work (e.g., as a parent and a teacher, etc.)? What were the circumstances? How did it happen? After participants completed the portions of the survey that asked them to share experiences of challenge (i.e., stress and WFC/FWC), I asked them to complete the CD-RISC in consideration of the ways in which they tended to work through challenges (i.e., how they demonstrated resilience). Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale. As I was interested in delineating the ways in which teachers (and teacher/mothers in particular) built and sustained their resilience across their home and work settings, I wished to assess the extent to which each participant experienced and actualized resilience in her life. I was interested in the experiences of resilient individuals who “experience disruption from stress but then use personal strengths to grow stronger and function above the norm” (Tusaie & Dyer, 2004, p. 3) in demonstration of their RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 142 resilience—recognizing that it is not a static construct. To evaluate this, I used the CD-RISC, which I chose because it is intended to measure resilience based on specific characteristics, the list of which aligns well with the list that I compiled and delineated in the Literature Review. It was also a good choice because investigation of adaptive and maladaptive strategies for coping with stress was identified by Connor and Davidson (2003) as one potential use. Additionally, based on a quality analysis of the extant research, the CD-RISC was very psychometrically sound—one of the best available to assess resilience (Windle, Bennett, & Noyes, 2011). The CD-RISC was developed as a 25-item measure (Connor & Davidson, 2003; Davidson & Connor, 2016), that was later refined and reduced to a 10-item version—the CDRISC-10 (Campbell-Sills & Stein, 2007). This refinement was made based on Campbell-Sills and Stein’s (2007) exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses that showed that the five-factor structure of the original assessment was unstable and that a 10-item unidimensional scale was a better fit. Gucciardi, Jackson, Coulter, and Mallett (2011) supported the psychometric superiority of the CD-RISC-10 over the original CD-RISC. Rather than incorporating as many strategies as the original, this short form purports to only evaluate a “hardiness” aspect of resilience. In the interest of parsimony, I used the CD-RISC-10 (although I have referred it to only as the CD-RISC throughout this work). Using this shorter version enabled me to ask teacher/mother survey participants to answer its questions twice: once in consideration of work demands and once in consideration of home/family. This helped to provide a more complete picture of those participants’ resilience since, as the tool’s authors pointed out, “it is possible to perform well in one area in the face of adversity (e.g., work) but to function poorly in another (i.e., interpersonal relationships); [begging the question:] would such a person be considered resilient?” (Connor & Davidson, 2003, p. 81). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 143 Like the other two measurements I used, this assessment was composed of Likert-type items. Originally validated using a random sample of the population (n = 577), a group of primary care outpatients (n = 139), and a group of people with a variety of psychiatric concerns (n = 112), initial analyses of the instrument found that it had sound psychometric properties: internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and convergent and divergent validity (Connor & Davidson, 2003; Davidson & Connor, 2016). Further testing found the CD-RISC’s and the CDRISC-10’s reliability and validity to be stable in various populations, both clinical (e.g., Davidson et al., 2008; Karairmark, 2010) and general (e.g., Gucciardi et al., 2011; NotarioPacheco, et al., 2011; Scali et al., 2012; Sexton, Byrd, & von Kluge, 2010). Based on their research with a sample of 238 “high risk” women, Scali et al. (2012), suggested that past trauma affects the results of this tool’s self-evaluations of resilience, wherein trauma history correlates with higher resilience. They posited that this might be due to a “vaccination” effect, whereby a person’s past experiences of trauma have made them better able to withstand current stressors. As I did not explore participants’ trauma histories, I will not be able to confirm this finding, but I will further explore the potential connection between adversity and increased resilience in the Discussion chapter. This instrument was purchased through the publisher’s website. After the work-related CD-RISC, participants were asked: In the space below and/or on the back of this page, please share a time recently when you felt being a teacher was particularly challenging. What happened? How did you get through it? After the final survey, the home-related CD-RISC (requested of teacher/mothers only) were asked this same storyeliciting question regarding an experience as a parent, rather than one as a teacher. The final RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 144 component of my survey was a demographic questionnaire meant to help describe the research participants. Demographic questionnaire. The demographic questionnaire was the first component of the survey and helped flesh out the particulars of each participant’s social network via the inclusion of questions to help reveal those parameters. The demographic questionnaire had nine items meant to delineate the following participant characteristics: • age (within a range), • teaching experience (length of career; current grade level; current school district), • education (based primarily on Teacher Qualification Service—TQS—category), • family constellation (number and ages of children; marital status), and • self-identified ethnic background. Survey assembly. The four components I have described in this section were assembled into a single survey. Each of the three standardized measures had an associated story-prompting question that was related to the topic but asked in such a way that it would not unduly prejudice participants’ answers to the scale questions, should they have read the story questions first. As indicated in the wordings, each short-answer question was followed by space for writing, with additional space available on the back of each page. These surveys were an integral part of my data collection procedures, which I now describe. Procedures According to Tashakkori (2009), determining if the approach to a project will be either qualitative-dominant (QUAL) or quantitative-dominant (QUAN) at the beginning (or even in the midst) of a study is not always possible as it is conceivable that components may not clearly fit into one side or the other of the continuum. While I used a survey that included both RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 145 qualitative and quantitative pieces, my overall intention for this research was to quantify any differences between teacher/mothers and non-mother teachers and to potentially translate those findings into suggestions for life-stage-specific supports based on qualitative PNI group findings developed with a group of teacher/mothers. Given this overarchingly deductive drive, it might appear that this research best fit one of the models proposed by Morse and Niehaus (2009), who conceptualized MMR as necessarily consisting of two projects that encompass five obligatory components: • A theoretical drive (the overall conceptual direction of the research question—either QUAN or QUAL). • Pacing (the organization of a project’s two components—either sequential or simultaneous). • A point of interface (the point at which the two components will meet). • Core component methods (the ways in which data will be collected for the standalone portion of the project). • Supplemental component methods (the way(s) in which data will be collected for the ancillary portion of the project that could not be reported on without the core component). As is suggested by the above list, this MMR design consists of one project, known as the core project, which is a complete method in itself, and a second project consisting of a different type of data or analysis, using a strategy or combination of strategies that is not comprehensible or publishable apart from the core project (Morse, 2010a). Morse and Niehaus (2009) conceptualized the supplemental strategy (or strategies) as a means to access areas that are pertinent to the research question but cannot be included in the core component. While it would RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 146 be possible to incorporate multiple supplementary strategies in a single design, there is only ever a single core component. There is, however, potential to combine multiple MMR projects or MMR and single-method projects in what Morse (2010a) terms a multiple methods design. In general, Morse and Niehaus’ (2009) model requires that the distinct components are kept as separate as possible outside the point of interface where the two components are deliberately joined (Morse, 2010a; Morse, 2010b). Additionally, Morse and Niehaus (2009) are adamant that it is necessary to prioritize one component over another. They argue that it is out of this combination of core and supplemental components that validity emerges. It is in this insistence that the research components cannot be given equal priority that Morse and Niehaus differ from Creswell (2014) and Tashakkori and Teddlie (2010). Although the latter pair of researchers do concede that sometimes priority of approach will be a salient design characteristic, they do not believe in the necessity of pre-specifying a dominant approach but state rather, “that any single study is composed of multiple criteria, each conceptualized as a continuum, rather than a single dichotomy between core and supplementary components” (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2010, p. 25). Creswell and Plano Clark’s (2007) embedded model also has similarities to Morse and Niehaus’ vision as it includes a main project combined with smaller “embedded” components but, again, they do not emphasize the priority of the one over the other to quite the same extent. My own preferences were better aligned with an approach that did not prioritize one component over another or require that one was construed as supplementary to the other to the point that it could stand alone as a publishable data set. Since I was not confident that the results of the individual qualitative and/or qualitative components would or could be standalone, I chose not to use a model suggested by Morse and Niehaus RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 147 (2009) as I would not have satisfied their stated core requirements for a mixed-methods approach. From the outset of my research, I was confident that by first collecting quantitative data about teacher/mothers’ perceived stress, experiences of WFC/FWC, and resilience, then using my analyses of that data to explore stories of resilience with a subsample of the survey group, I would be able to get a portrayal of how teacher/mothers stayed well while providing almost continuous care for others. I was also confident that this portrayal would be more accurate and more robust than a single-method representation. Having used multiple sources of data, I am confident that I have provided a multifaceted representation of this sample’s experiences rather than a one-sided portrait that might have left out important aspects of their lives. As described by Padgett (2012), a “delicate balance between accuracy and sensitivity to respondents’ needs affects studies of the despicable, the heroic, and the everyday people in between” (p. 97); using one of the MMR strategies outlined by Creswell (2014) provided me with the tools to achieve and maintain just such a balance. While a transformative model would have potentially fit my intentions due to my feminist orientation, I did not believe that the population with whom I intended to work fit Creswell’s (2014) definition of a vulnerable population. As such, I initially intended to use an explanatory sequential strategy, which would have entailed first collecting quantitative data, then using that data to inform the collection of qualitative data. However, as stated by Creswell (2014), the key idea of the explanatory sequential mixed methods design is “that the qualitative data builds directly on the quantitative results” (p. 224). Although I had intended to collect quantitative and qualitative data simultaneously from the outset (thereby pointing to a convergent rather than a sequential model), I had had RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 148 reservations regarding the amount of qualitative data that would be shared be with me via the survey questions and so had planned to collect the bulk of my qualitative data during the PNI groups. As such, I had initially expected to use my quantitative results as a foundation upon which to build my qualitative data collection procedures, which would have justified the use of an explanatory sequential strategy; however, the substantial quantity of qualitative data shared on the surveys led me to believe that an in-depth examination of that data on its own terms would be more appropriate. Figure 1 provides an illustration of the data transformation model of concurrent triangulation design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007): this was the strategy that I chose to use instead of the explanatory sequential as the steps involved in that strategy were more appropriate to the ways in which I was able to collect the data. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 149 QUAN data collection Surveys with Likert-type items. QUAL data collection Short answer story-eliciting questions from surveys and PNI groups. QUAN data analysis Data analysis in SPSS: Repeated measures MANCOVA. Partial correlation. QUAL data analysis Analysis of stories via PNI groups. Data transformation: PNI group results transformed into QUAN data. Mixed Methods Data Analysis Results compared to: Describe why outcomes occurred. Describe how participants maintain resilience. Figure 1. Data transformation triangulation model (adapted from Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007). A data transformation triangulation model was appropriate as I transformed my qualitative data into quantitative as one part of my analysis (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007). I used this strategy as one part of my larger analysis, wherein I collected qualitative and quantitative data simultaneously but analyzed them separately. Post-analysis, the data were then compared and combined to cross-validate and corroborate findings. The transformation of qualitative [story] data to quantitative was completed after the stories had already undergone analysis via the PNI groups’ work summarizing, sorting, and making meaning of them. Converting story data to quantitative is something for which Kurtz (2014) advocates as part of a process of catalysis: working to concentrate and solidify patterns in a set of stories into a smaller number of coherent patterns before expanding those [new groups] to provide new representations, interpretations, and ideas about each pattern. The interpretations generated are “statements about the meanings of observations” (Kurtz, 2014, p. 215). I used Tableau (Tableau Software, Inc., 2018) to generate visual images of these RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 150 statements of meaning and will share them and my interpretations of them in the Results and Discussion chapters. As I completed my main quantitative data analysis before the qualitative, I will now describe those processes in that same order. Quantitative Data Collection For the main quantitative phase of my data collection, I relied on the surveys provided via personal connections to female teachers in school districts around the province. Each individual female teacher was asked to complete the paper-based survey, which was then returned to my contacts in sealed manila envelopes meant to maintain anonymity and confidentiality. My contacts collected and returned these completed surveys to me for analysis via postage-paid “Xpresspost” envelopes. Teachers who were on leave during the time of the data collection were not asked to participate as I was interested in how people experienced the phenomena in question while working as teachers. There was one teacher who had recently started a maternity leave who participated in both phases of the research. For the first (quantitative) phase of data collection, I used self-report surveys that included short-answer story-eliciting questions. Rea and Parker (2005) noted that surveys provide a multitude of advantages for quantitative research: they generate standardized data that can be quantified, statistically analyzed, and used to make generalizations about populations based on sample inferences; they are reasonably accurate, unbiased and scientifically rigorous; they can be implemented and replicated across geographic and institutional locales with minimal financial or time requirements. Survey use was also in line with my feminist orientation. Miner et al. (2012) advocated for the use of survey methods in feminist research, arguing that “survey research is one method that can both facilitate our understanding of the lived experiences of women and other marginalized groups and spawn RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 151 changes in society that can impact their lives positively” (p. 238). Given surveys’ potentials to sample large and diverse groups relatively quickly and cost-efficiently, Miner et al. viewed them as especially useful in influencing policy and public opinion, making them a particularly valuable tool for extending research into practical action and social transformation for women. Besides this initial phase of quantitative data collection, I also used quantitative methods to analyze the collected qualitative data once it was coded through thematic analysis by the PNI group participants. As modelled by Kurtz (2014), I used the frequency of the uncovered themes to develop graphic representations of the qualitative data. In this way, I attempted to make the qualitative data “more understandable and accessible by transforming them into visual information… [and highlight] trends and patterns not easily visible to the naked eye” (Kurtz, 2014, p. 215). To accumulate these themes, the PNI group participants and I worked together to consensually code stories shared with us by teacher/mothers around BC, thereby accomplishing this final phase of quantitative data collection for subsequent analysis. Qualitative Data Collection Adhering to Creswell (2014), I collected qualitative data in two parts. In this section, I will describe my specific design for qualitative data collection and the ways in which I ensured that this phase of my data collection aligned with best practices. Specific design. Both on the surveys and in the qualitative data analysis groups, I used a PNI-based approach for the bulk of my qualitative data collection (Kurtz, 2014). In PNI, qualitative data is collected via the use of stories, rather than through shared facts, opinions, or answers to direct questions (except where those questions are worded in such as way that they elicit stories). Kurtz proposed stories as a particularly rich sort of qualitative data. By providing some emotional distance for them to disclose deeply-held feelings and beliefs, people sharing RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 152 stories do not need to directly confess ownership of particular feelings and beliefs but can let them colour their stories for later explication. It was in the explication of deeper meanings from participants’ stories that particularly strong links between this method and my feminist theoretical orientation were formed, as it was the storytellers themselves who retained ownership of their stories and worked with them individually and collectively to arrive at pictures of where they were and where they wanted to go. As Kurtz explained, this collectivism is important because when everyone who participates can understand and explain what has been discovered and/or decided, the newly co-created work is then that much more robust, resilient, and grounded than had any one person alone given her interpretations. PNI is a research approach “in which groups of people participate in gathering and working with raw stories of personal experience in order to make sense of complex situations for better decision making” (Kurtz, 2014, p. 85). It is a relatively recent method that has been most notably described and summarized by Cynthia Kurtz (2014), who has helped to develop it over the course of multiple projects incorporating its philosophies and procedures. I expected that PNI would be appropriate for my research goals as it aligned with my goals and my feminist leanings: it is collaborative and inclusive of all participants’ voices, its application is reliant on the specific needs of the group using it, and it helps to “revitalize, challenge and motivate people in communities and organizations by helping them explore” (Kurtz, 2014, p. 67). Due to their well-recognized ability to gain access to participants’ views, experiences, and attitudes (e.g., Morgan, Krueger, & King, 1998; Parker, et al., 2012), my use of modified focus groups (what I have been calling “PNI groups”) was also suitable for my aims. According to Parker et al. (2012), focus groups are particularly appropriate for narrative methods, especially RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 153 when one is interested in encouraging participants to share emotional experiences and/or perspectives on how their lives have been shaped by their experiences. I had expected to collect at least a small amount of qualitative data via the storysoliciting short answer questions that were included on the survey; the actual volume of qualitative data shared was far greater than I anticipated! Given the highly productive initial foray, it was not necessary to collect additional data from the PNI groups to increase either the breadth or the depth of the qualitative data. Participants were invited to add stories to the extant data set or—for those who had already shared a story (or stories) on the survey—modify previously shared stories. Two participants did add stories at this point; however, no participants changed previously shared stories. Without needing to spend time on story generation, the PNI groups concentrated on using consensual coding to sort and analyze the stories that were shared on the surveys. The goal of the PNI analysis was not just to reveal what the data had to say, but what the empowered PNI group participants said about what it had to say (Kurtz, 2014). For the group participants to gain a broader perspective on the entirety of the collected data, I had intended to offer to share trends that had emerged from the analysis of the survey’s quantitative results to help provide additional context for the PNI groups’ work analyzing the stories and, ultimately, elucidating resilience strategies used by teacher/mothers. Again, in consideration of the size of the qualitative data set and the limited time to which group members were able to commit, I did not share this data ahead of time, although I did make it clear that I would answer any questions that group participants had about those results or the processes by which I had determined them. As all the PNI group participants were teacher/mothers themselves, I expected that they would be comfortable working with these stories, which did appear to be the case. Focus group RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 154 research is generally continued until theoretical saturation is reached (Morgan et al., 1998)—at which point new information and understandings are no longer generated by consecutive groups. As I will discuss in the Results chapter, the four groups convened on behalf of this research generated similar themes throughout the process. As such, I was confident that the major ideas contained in the stories were extracted. While I did not leave them un-moderated, I guided the PNI group conversations only to such an extent that they understood what was being asked of them, but not to the extent that authentic dialogue was dissuaded. By concentrating on self-care and other aspects of resilience, I believe that these data collection and analysis procedures helped to promote the teacher/mother participants’ wellnesses by helping them to understand and potentially change their own situations, another important aspect of feminist research (Lather, 1991). Further to this goal, I was open to changing my question(s) to ensure that my research remained truly grounded in the needs and realities of my community, but this was unnecessary. Core components of qualitative research. In determining the suitability of qualitative data collection for answering my research question examining the relationships between resilience, WFC/FWC, and/or stress-related symptoms in teachers who were actively parenting their own children, I considered the extent to which my proposed methods aligned with the core components of qualitative research (Creswell, 2014). In this section, I will summarize each of the eight features identified by Creswell and the ways in which I addressed them. Natural setting. According to Creswell (2014), qualitative research is typically collected in the field at the site where participants experience the issue under study. As I was interested in phenomena that affected teacher/mothers at home and at work (where each individual participant might find different aspects of one or both challenging), I believed that I might best RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 155 meet this requirement by conducting the PNI groups in a fairly neutral setting where the focus was on the socially supportive nature of the group, rather than on either the home or work setting of any one participant. As such, the groups in one location were held in the library of an elementary school at which none of the participants worked and the group in the other location was held in a private room in a restaurant as that was what the time and locale allowed and also what worked best for (and was suggested by) the participants. Researcher as key instrument. As I was interested in hearing teacher/mothers’ stories about their experiences managing their family/work equilibria, I framed the survey questions in such a way that they facilitated the sharing of such stories. Because of the number of stories collected via the surveys, the groups did not require me to provide further questions at all—we were able to concentrate fully on the task of sensemaking, which I will explain later in this chapter. During this process of reading and interpreting the collected stories, I acted as a moderator and a support person rather than a facilitator. Multiple sources of data. Although the majority of stories came from one qualitative data source—the surveys—the PNI groups were an iterative process during which stories were returned to their [interested] progenitors for checking and, where applicable, modification. Interested participants were also privy to the results of the quantitative data from the surveys. In using multiple sources of data (i.e., Likert-type survey questions, story-eliciting short answer questions, and participant interpretations and additions) this way, the group participants and I organized the collective data into themes that superseded any individual modality on its own. Inductive and deductive data analysis. Inductive analysis, wherein participants made observations to develop theory, was via the sensemaking work that the PNI groups and I did to draw out themes from the stories that were shared. This included grouping the stories’ group- RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 156 derived meta-data based on the trends and patterns that emerged during the analysis. I incorporated deductive data analysis into this qualitative phase when I connected the story data, the PNI group results, and the quantitative data set in Tableau and used that software to explore patterns and relationships within the story data and among the three data sets to help me build interpretations of the data as a whole. Participants’ meanings. Creswell (2014) highlighted the importance of concentrating on learning what participants are sharing and what they perceive to be salient, rather than what the literature or my own paradigm would lead me to believe or to emphasize. Through the use of PNI, I am confident that each participant was supported in uncovering those items she viewed as most salient to her resilience and in finding a way to comfortably share these findings with the group and me. By thinking and hearing about other teacher/mothers’ self-care strategies, the group participants and I were then able to “collectively research who [we are] in relationship to one another, and how [we] could care for [ourselves] in order to better continue caring for others” (Christofferson, 2003, p. 128). This was important, as a lack of self-care has been implicated in the development of negative outcomes for both the professionals who demonstrate the lack, and for the populations they serve (Hamilton, 2008; Lucas, 2007; Radey & Figley, 2007). Rothschild (2006) suggested that working on increasing self-knowledge and self-care are especially effective methods to help HPs such as teachers to separate themselves from work-induced stressors as these types of activities may help to strengthen a person’s boundaries; this is likely due at least in part to commensurate decreases in self-blame (Norcross, 2000) and increases in meaning found outside of work (Radey & Figley, 2007). As such, these groups may have implications far beyond the validation of the participants’ experiences and the lessening of stress that may have ensued. This is especially promising when RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 157 one considers that openly engaging in self-care practices can result in teachers’ modeling of health-sustaining behaviours to students, which may help those others to also learn how to manage stressors in ways that do not impair their health (Lucas, 2007; Thompson, 2003; van Dernoot Lipsky & Burk, 2009; Wrobel, 2013). Emergent design. While I did have an idea of the form that my research design would take, there were undoubtedly emergent aspects; some of which I have already described in my selection of a different MMR strategy. I also changed the way that I undertook the PNI work and the data checking procedures. Because those parts of the research were collaborative, they were especially open to participants’ collective will in determining what was significant and where the work should subsequently proceed—although there was very little response to my request for feedback/data checking for the final product of the group work. Reflexivity. Reflexivity is defined as the interrogation of the ways in which differences in power and privilege shape research relationships across diverse contexts (Frisby & Creese, 2011) and is an important part of maintaining objectivity in feminist research (Harding, 1993). As described by Hesse-Biber (2010b), practicing reflexivity in my research will likely have helped me become more conscious of my values, attitudes, and concerns regarding my research questions, which helped me to elucidate my assumptions in conducting this research. As I am a teacher/mother myself, I was intimately connected to this research and I expected to have a lot in common with many of the other women who took part in this work with me. This commonality was one aspect with which I dealt using reflexivity. Madrid, Baldwin, and Frye (2013) caution against the appearance of friendship during women’s research with other women due to the potential for a false sense of familiarity, which may then lead participants to reveal more than they may have otherwise done. To prevent this RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 158 ethical dilemma, all PNI group participants were explicitly told about the purpose of the research, and, after the example set by Madrid et al., any “critical friendships” that developed would not have been couched as anything but professional relationships had this been a concern (it was not). Having the teacher/mothers involved with the groups act as coresearchers through the work of PNI further helped to diffuse power between myself and the other research participants, thereby helping to prevent the potential exploitation of the participants while encouraging their authentic interpretations and engagement (Madrid et al., 2013). Chettiar et al. (2011) highlighted the importance of letting women know that they are integral parts of the research structure and design when one hopes to encourage genuine feedback on aspects of the research process or design. Besides ensuring that the research participants knew how valued they were, I also actively and continually reflected upon how my own experiences and interpretations might have affected the meanings that I ascribed to the work that I was doing with these other teacher/mothers so that I did not overlook or discourage contributions from them. Holistic account. The larger picture of teacher/mother resilience was key to my research, especially because of my feminist leanings. Health may be construed as a continuum along which one will advance in health promoting directions via gains in personal resources accumulated in part through viewing life as being structured, manageable, and coherent (Antonovsky, 1996; Lindström & Eriksson, 2005). Though the experience of participating in these PNI groups with other teacher/mothers, I expected that participants would become more aware of the ways that they could support and enhance their wellness at work and at home. In particular, I foresaw the combination of hearing about others’ strategies and being encouraged to reflect upon their own strategies to increase and sustain their resilience would validate as RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 159 well as potentially increase participants’ health-supporting behaviours. In this way, these PNI groups may even have acted as a source of resilience for participants since disconfirming individual feelings of unique wretchedness and affirming the universality of challenges can be therapeutic in and of itself (Koch & Kralik, 2006; Norcross, 2000), thereby providing a truly holistic experience for all participants as we connected to both internal and external milieux. As I will reveal in the Discussion, this was indeed the case for participants; confirmation of which was partially confirmed by the results of my data analyses—the procedures for which I will now describe. Data Analysis I conducted quantitative data analysis after ending the first phase of data collection and—to a lesser extent—once the PNI groups were concluded. Qualitative analysis was completed by the teacher/mother PNI group participants. I will describe all these various processes in this section. Quantitative data analysis. To analyze the quantitative (survey) data, I entered the results of the Likert-type items into Microsoft Excel (2016) and then imported them into Statistics Package for Social Sciences, Version 24 (IBM Corp., 2016). I conducted quantitative data analysis at two points in my research: after the initial surveys and after the completion of thematic analysis of participants’ stories. Only the first of these analyses was completed in SPSS, the other was done using Tableau. The first analysis tested for relationships between the total scores on the three standardized assessments and demographic variables to analyze differences and connections between those phenomena and specific demographic characteristics. The second analysis was descriptive only and summarized patterns and frequencies of occurrence in the qualitative themes. Based on the questions that I was interested RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 160 in answering, I used repeated measures MANCOVA (with ANOVA post hoc tests) and partial correlation to investigate the following questions: • Are there differences in self-reports of resilience, WFC/FWC, and/or work-related stress in teachers who are actively parenting their own children (i.e., teacher/mothers) and those that are not simultaneously teaching and parenting (i.e., non-mothers)? • Are there differences in self-reports of resilience, WFC/FWC, and/or work-related stress in teacher/mothers based on the ages of their own children (where the age of the youngest is used as a sorting variable for grouping)? • Are there measurable relationships between teacher/mothers’ self-reports of resilience, WFC/FWC, and/or work-related stress and the ages of their own children (based on the ages of the youngest children)? I used repeated measures MANCOVA with ANOVA post hoc tests to investigate the first two of these questions and partial correlation to test the last. Assumptions. Before running any tests, all data were examined to ensure that they were normally distributed and appropriate for analysis with parametric tests. All data sufficiently fulfilled assumptions to the extent necessary for a sample of this size. Parametric statistics were also appropriate because of the interval/ratio nature of the data. All the assessments that I used involved scales of Likert-type items wherein the range of values fell upon a continuum of possible answers, each of which corresponded to a numerical value. By tallying up the values associated with the various answers, each study participant was assigned a total score, the magnitude of which corresponded to a specific level of work-related stress, WFC, FWC, or RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 161 resilience. As these scores potentially included all whole number values between zero and the tests' respective maximums, the data was thus defined as interval/ratio. My use of multivariate statistics was warranted because of the complexity inherent in these data. As pointed out by Tabachnick and Fidell (2013), “these statistics provide insight into relationships among variables that may more closely resemble the complexity of the ‘real’ world” (p. 5). I chose to use MANCOVA based on the assumptions that number of years of teaching experience would affect participants’ answers (thereby making it a covariate) and that the groups of dependent variables tested each shared a common underlying latent variable (i.e., within each of the two groups tested together). Choosing to use partial correlation to investigate the third question was a decision based on the assumption that there were linear relationships between children’s ages and the various survey instruments, a decision that I made based on the shapes of the age data, which looked sufficiently unimodal to make this choice appropriate, especially since direct relationships involving children’s ages has previously been assumed in research investigating motivation (Lepper, Corpus, & Iyengar, 2005) among other things. When performing the statistical tests on the collected quantitative survey data, I used a confidence level of 95 % (i.e., α = .05). I selected this value to compromise between the possibility of Type I and Type II errors. At the .05 level, a statistically-significant finding is indicative of a high probability that there is a true relationship or difference between the factors tested as α = .05 leaves only a small margin of error that the null hypothesis will be falsely rejected (i.e., Type I error). The risk of Type II error, wherein the null hypothesis is falsely accepted, was similarly controlled for by using an interval of .05, as this level of confidence allows for only an intermediate level of risk. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 162 Research hypotheses. Once I had received a sufficient number of completed surveys and concluded my quantitative data collection, I entered the results into Excel before exporting them into SPSS for analysis. In SPSS, I first confirmed that the data were sufficiently normally distributed to make parametric statistical tests appropriate for use in my analyses. Assuming that the TSI scales were all assessing a single latent variable (teacher stress) and the WFC/FWC and resilience measures were tapping into a second latent variable (resilience in managing home and work), I used repeated measures MANCOVA to test for statistically-significant differences in self-reported prevalences of work-related stress across the 11 dimensions measured by the TSI, followed by a second repeated measures MANCOVA to test for differences in WFC/FWC and resilience at work between teacher/mothers and non-mothers. Each of these tests held “years of teaching” constant by including it as a covariate. I tested for these differences using the following hypothesis for the first test: Ho: there is no difference between teacher/mothers’ and non-mothers’ selfreports of work-related stress on any of the dimensions of the TSI (including total TSI score); HA: teacher/mothers and non-mothers do differ on at least one of the 11 dimensions of the TSI. For the second part of this first comparison (i.e., teacher/mothers and non-mothers), I used the hypothesis: Ho: there is no difference between teacher/mothers’ and non-mothers’ selfreports of WFC and/or FWC and/or resilience at work; HA: teacher/mothers and non-mothers do differ on at least one of the three phenomena of WFC, FWC and/or resilience at work. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 163 Besides testing to see if I could measure any statistically-significant differences between teacher/mothers and non-mothers, I also tested for differences between groups of teacher/mothers based on the ages of their youngest children—under five years old, five to nine years old, 10 to 14 years old, 15 to 19 years old, 20 to 24 years old, and 25 and older—using repeated measures MANCOVA with years of teaching experience as a covariate. As I was working from the same assumptions regarding a common underlying latent variable being tapped, I tested the TSI data separately from the WFC/FWC and resilience data. While not all the children included necessarily lived at home, all the teacher/mothers did have at least one child who lived at home at the time of the survey. For the first test, I used the hypothesis: Ho: there are no differences between teacher/mothers’ self-reports of work-related stress across the 11 dimensions of the TSI based on the ages of their children; HA: there are differences between teacher/mothers’ self-reports of work-related stress across at least one of the 11 dimensions of the TSI based on the ages of their children. Subsequently, I tested the data based on the WFC/FWC and resilience at home and at work scores using the hypothesis: Ho: there are no differences between teacher/mothers’ self-reports of WFC and/or FWC and/or resilience based on the ages of their children; HA: there are differences between teacher/mothers’ self-reports of WFC and/or FWC and/or resilience based on the ages of their children. Before running this MANCOVA, I first confirmed that I did not need to transform the data to account for unequal groups (as I did not sample for specific numbers of individuals in each of the children’s age categories). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 164 Finally, I tested for relationships between teacher/mothers’ self-reports of resilience, work-related stress, WFC/FWC, and children’s ages. For any participant who had multiple children, I used the age of the youngest child for my analysis; this was based on the examples set in the reporting of maternal employment statistics by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2016) and Statistics Canada (Statistics Canada, 2007). In other research, the age of a mother’s youngest child has been found to predict maternal parental stress (Skreden, et al., 2012), potentially making it a particularly salient variable. I tested for relationships between these variables using partial correlation with years of teaching experience held constant. It was unclear whether it would be more likely that high self-reports of resilience varied with high self-reports of work-related stress, and/or WFC, and/or FWC (indicative of successful coping) or low self-reports of work-related stress, and/or WFC, and/or FWC (indicative of successful prevention) and how children’s ages might also be related to these various factors. As such, I tested for any correlation—positive or negative—using a two-tailed test. I included children’s ages in this correlation to test for a relationship between changes in that variable and related differences in the mental-health-related measures to see if there were any indications that some ages and/or stages appeared more challenging than others. For these tests, I used two sets of hypotheses. The first set referred to potential relationships between children’s ages and the survey scores: Ho: there is no relationship between children’s ages and their teacher/mothers’ selfreports of resilience, and/or work-related stress, and/or WFC, and/or FWC. HA: there is a relationship between children’s ages and their teacher/mothers’ selfreports of resilience, and/or work-related stress, and/or WFC, and/or FWC. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 165 The second set of partial correlation hypotheses referred to potential relationships between the various survey scores, especially with regards to resilience: Ho: there is no relationship between teacher/mothers’ self-reports of resilience and their self-reports of work-related stress, and/or WFC, and/or FWC. HA: there is a relationship between teacher/mothers’ self-reports of resilience and their self-reports of work-related stress, and/or WFC, and/or FWC. Once the stories that comprised the qualitative data were mined for themes using the sensemaking process, I conducted quantitative data analysis on those results as well. As will be highlighted in the Results chapter, I linked the spreadsheet data to Tableau to generate a variety of descriptive statistics from patterns in the demographic data—the most appropriate statistics for this type of frequency data—and visual representations of patterns (e.g., correlations) in the ratio-level scale data. As per the example set by Kurtz (2014), I ensured that the group participants and I provided multiple and varied interpretations of observations stemming from the stories that were shared and it was these observations that I linked to the quantitative data to look for patterns using Tableau. I will now describe the entirety of my qualitative data collection process. Qualitative data analysis. Once the surveys were completed and returned to me, I transcribed and anonymized each story. All but 57 of the surveys included answers to at least one of the story-eliciting questions for a total of 489 discrete pieces of qualitative data—not all of which were “stories” per se. Although the option was provided to them, no participants requested that copies of their adapted stories be sent back to them. Once all the stories were anonymized and transcribed, I was able to have an experienced PNI researcher join me from the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 166 Netherlands for one week. We convened the PNI groups to collectively work with the shared stories in two separate locations over four days during this week. In PNI, analysis of stories is accomplished through the process of narrative sensemaking, wherein the collected stories are read and discussed with the goal of bridging the stories and the decisions to be made. Kurtz (2014) described three essential aspects of sensemaking: pertinence, practicality, and playfulness. Sensemaking is pertinent because it centers on and surrounds the making of decisions—for this work, the decision of how best to delineate the ways that teachers—and teacher/mothers in particular—enact resilience. Sensemaking is practical because it emphasizes the ways in which real people meet real challenges; it is playful because it happens improvisationally. Sensemaking is not restricted to PNI; in their work, Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld (2005) describe a form of sensemaking wherein they encourage rapidly switching between varying perspectives on the world to focus on what is most plausible—a process that they call ontological oscillation. In carrying out PNI with the groups of teacher/mothers who agreed to participate in this part of my research, I had a trained PhD-level PNI facilitator present to moderate the process of consensual coding as the participants and I moved through the four elements that Kurtz (2014) described as being fundamental to the process of using PNI. Consensual coding was a practical strategy to use for this work as it is not unfamiliar to teachers: any teacher that has been involved with school-wide writes (which includes at least a large number of elementary teachers) is already familiar with the processes of reading for evaluation and of working to reach consensus with a group of other teachers who are reading the same pieces. With the guidance of the facilitator, we ensured that everyone involved had ample opportunity to interact with the stories, what Kurtz calls “contact.” During the group work, “churning” happened by RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 167 working with the group participants to see the collected stories put together in a variety of ways so that we all considered a multitude of perspectives. In the “convergence” stage, meaning was created from the collection of stories, which has now led to the final element: “change,” the specifics of which I hope to see are described at length in the Discussion. Kurtz delineates how to facilitate these four elements, but also constantly reiterates that PNI must be made one’s own to truly be PNI and truly meet the needs of the community using it. Harold [the experienced facilitator] was very clear on this last point. Before we met with each group, we developed a plan for that evening’s work, building on the goals of the exercise and—except for the first group meeting—the lessons learned from previous sessions. All candidates were asked to first spend some time reading the stories and setting aside those with which they wanted to work. There were always three stations in common after participants finished reading: one for summarizing and sorting the stories into categories and two with scaling questions. This process is displayed in Figure 2: the group names at the end of step 2 were the “stereotypes” and the group names at the end of step 3 became the “archetypes” that I will discuss in the Results and Discussion chapters. As not all groups were given the same directions for the task of reading, I have not included that step in the diagram even though reading was a common task required before embarking on the process depicted in Figure 2. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 168 1. Record the subject of each selected story on sticky notes (there may be more than one topic per story). Write the story number on each sticky note. 2a. Place each summary on the continuum to show if the evidence indicates one sudden event or a series of small events led to the need for resilience. 2. Group the summaries so that "like is with like." Name each group. List potential benefits and detriments for each group on sticky notes (one per note). Write the group number on each note. 2b. Place each summary on the continuum to show if the evidence indicates the resilience resources used were more internal or more external. 3. Group the benefits and detriments so that "like is with like." Name each group. Figure 2. Common elements of the PNI strategy used over the four group sessions. Besides the changes to the reading directions, there were also slight alterations in question wordings between sessions; however, the meanings were comparable for each of the four groups (justifying their inclusion in the figure). Other than being present as a support person to provide refreshments and answer questions, I did not involve myself in the actual RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 169 processes of data analysis within the groups as I did not want to introduce bias that may have stemmed from desire to meet my research goals. The process depicted in Figure 2 consisted of a central, linear task (steps 1 – 3) and at least two peripheral tasks (steps 2a and 2b). All participants in all groups completed steps 1 – 3. The scaling questions represented by steps 2a and 2b were available for all the groups to complete, but at least one did not attempt them (even though the scales were at hand). Other departures from the procedure outlined in Figure 2 are described below. However, besides the common tasks, there were other common elements for the physical settings of each of the four PNI groups: • Sessions were always planned to take four hours with times set well in advance so that participants could plan for their evening. If participants needed to come late or leave early, they let me know ahead of time and we were able to keep the sessions largely to the set start and end times. • Upon arrival, participants were served pre-ordered drinks to enjoy as they worked with a break for dinner (provided) later in the evening. • Except for the sorting and naming tasks (steps 2 and 3 on Figure 2), participants were asked to work in silence. We adjusted the ways in which we asked the PNI group participants to work with the data based on our observations of what worked well. All the participant exercises were based on those that were tested and able to produce relatively predictable outcomes according to Kurtz (2014), who advocates for the use of such exercises to give participants concrete tasks to complete while also scaffolding the collective, growing understanding of what the data might be saying. The goal of each exercise was to facilitate interaction between the people, the stories RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 170 and the project. “Call it exposure, interface, proximity, communication: stories need to rub up against people and against the reason the stories were collected” (www.workingwithstories.org/) for sensemaking to be thorough and effective. I will now describe the lessons learned from each evening’s work and the resultant differences in their data analysis procedures. Group one: too much data. Survey participants contributed 489 pieces of qualitative data, only some of which were actual stories. This first group of five teachers (three elementary and two secondary) was given the entire data set for their analysis. As may be viewed in the work plans (Appendix C), teachers in this first group were instructed to select stories that they thought contained information on how people dealt with building up or losing resilience (whatever that may mean), particularly in terms of complexity drivers: those things that people do not talk about directly but are assumed/presumed to be operating in the background (e.g., “team spirit”). Although we had planned to keep participants moving through the stations based on predetermined timings, they required more time than anticipated to read the stories and select ones they saw as appropriate for the task. Besides the tasks outlined in Figure 2, this first group was also asked to complete two others: there was a second clustering/naming task in which participants were asked who or what stood in opposition in each story and where the participant saw tensions; there was a table with four definitions of resilience where participants were asked to place each story summary with the definition it best fit. The main lesson from this first session was that participants needed less data and more time—especially for the main summarizing and sorting tasks. We also realized the stories needed to be better mixed as one participant ended up working with just stories from nonmothers (as I will explain in the Results, the quantitative data led me to decide not to exclude RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 171 non-mothers’ qualitative data from this phase). Changes made for the second group are described in the next section. Group two: not enough movement. Before this second group of five teachers (three elementary and two secondary), Harold and I sorted the qualitative data to ensure that only actual stories were included in the set. Each included selection was required to have at least minimal elements of story: details relating an event (or events) of some sort and what happened as a result. We did not sort based on perceptions of resilience in action, only on whether the data had story characteristics. After sorting, we ended up with 257 stories for use with this and the two subsequent groups. Besides reducing the number of stories, we also reduced the number of tasks by removing the second clustering station and the definitions of resilience sort. We chose these tasks as the ones to discontinue because the data from the other stations were better aligned with my research goal to gain insight into mechanisms and strategies by which resilience was enacted (rather than defining resilience or sources of conflict). A final change made for this second group was a change in the way that we introduced the work to the participants. Whereas the first group was instructed to select stories they thought contained information on how people dealt with building up or losing resilience, this group was provided instructions without directions to look for indications of resilience. They were reminded that the research was about resilience and then were asked to select stories that resonated with them and to summarize them, etcetera. As it turned out, the participants in this second group did not attempt any of the tasks other than the main sequence (steps 1, 2, 3 on Figure 2). This was most likely due to the change in the physical setup for the story sorting, grouping, and naming. During the first group, participants read and summarized the stories in one location and then moved between tables to RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 172 complete the various tasks; for this second group, participants all sat at the table where the sorting and naming (and so on) would also take place and spent the entire session in that one location. Although they had not been asked to sit together at that table, they just happened to do so and then did an extremely thorough job in reading, summarizing, and sorting the stories—so thorough that they ended up not having time to visit the other tables to work through the scales. Group three: just about right. For this final group in our first location, the five teachers (two elementary and three secondary) were given instructions that differed from those provided to the previous groups. They were asked to pick up a story and walk it through each of the three stations (the summary and two scales) rather than reading numerous stories at once. In this way, we precluded the situation from the second group—where nobody left the table—from recurring. Other than this one change, we ran this group the same way as the second; they addressed all the tasks outlined in Figure 2. Group four: a different setting with similar results. This final group was held in a different city and setting than the first three: it took place in an urban Lower Mainland city rather than the small-urban Interior location and in a restaurant rather than a school library. This group consisted of seven elementary teachers—six from one school district and one from a neighbouring district. Although all were teacher/mothers who met the criterial for inclusion, three of the participants had not completed a survey. The choice of setting (a private room in a Mexican restaurant) was determined by the participants. These were the only differences between this group and group three; we followed the same plan and all three stations were used. The different setting made for a few noticeable changes to the way participants worked: • As the evening wore on and the restaurant got busier, the noise made it difficult to hear each other speaking. Superior communication within smaller groups meant RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 173 that more work was done in two or more smaller groups rather than as one complete group as had happened in the previous groups. • The busy restaurant made it even more of a sociable night out for participants, which was possibly a greater incentive for this group to make the effort to come out and take part in the research than the free sushi and high-end coffee shop beverage (in the school library) were for the other groups. It did not appear that the participants who had not participated in the first phase of research were disadvantaged in any way; they were enthusiastic participants in the sensemaking work. None of the other differences between this group and the previous three appeared to affect the worth of the work completed either; actually, as I will explain in the Discussion, the alternate venue greatly contributed to potential future applications of this work. Assumptions. In conducting this phase of my research, I again made numerous assumptions about my participants. Foremost among these was that they would be able to elucidate their experiences as teacher/mothers to an extent that made their shared data and stories useable for this process. I also assumed that we would have enough stories for the qualitative portion to be meaningful (i.e., to achieve saturation). For the analysis portions of this research, I assumed that the teachers participating were comfortable (or at least familiar) with the analysis procedures from other work that they had done as teachers. It is common practice for teachers to use similar consensual procedures when reading samples of student work to carry out school- or district-wide assessments of writing. As such, I assumed that unfamiliarity would not impede the analysis [sensemaking] process. This assumption appeared supported as there did not appear to be any discomfort or perplexity from the participants as they carried out their sensemaking work. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 174 Combining the Quantitative and Qualitative Data Because I used a convergent triangulation strategy (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007) to conduct this mixed methods research, I connected the quantitative and qualitative strands in such a way that insights from each individual method were used to explain observations in the other. Although I had initially desired to analyze both the quantitative and the qualitative data with the help of interested teacher/mothers, time constraints prevented this and allowed solely for group analysis of the qualitative survey data. As suggested by Hesse-Biber (2010b), I based my choice of strategy on my research questions and their overarching goals, which were to determine if teacher/mothers differed from non-mother teachers in their sustenance of mental health and to elucidate resilience strategies they employed. This strategy was the one that best met the needs of my research and the availabilities of my group participants and PNI facilitator. Although I did not use my quantitative findings to help the PNI facilitator guide the qualitative group conversations, findings from each modality complemented each other even though my use of a parallel rather than a sequential method meant there was a risk of divergent findings. I will explore this complementariness at length in the Discussion, where I will also explain potential inconsistencies, which Slonim-Nevo and Nevo (2009) suggested can help to reinforce the complexity of social science research. As part of the data collection process, all potential participants were asked to complete a consent form that informed them of the goals of this research and their rights as participants. Samples of these forms can be found in Appendix D. As a part of the permission collection process, participants were apprised of their right to drop out of the study at any time. None of the participants—either from the survey phase or the PNI groups—requested that their data not be included as part of this work. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 175 Chapter Summary Integrating quantitative and qualitative data in an MMR approach, I explored female teachers’ experiences of work-related stress, WFC/FWC, and resilience, and the strategies that teachers (particularly teacher/mothers) use to maintain their mental health while working with children both at home and at work. By collecting survey and story data and having groups of teacher/mothers collaborate in its interpretation, I am now able to explicate ways in which selfreports of resilience, WFC/FWC, and/or stress-related ailments differ between teachers who are actively mothering their own children (i.e., teacher/mothers) and those who are not simultaneously teaching and parenting; whether there are differences between teacher/mothers’ self-reports based on the ages of their own children; and what strategies these women perceive to support their health and well-being at work and at home. I anticipated that a broadly CBPR-informed, MMR approach was a good approach for this work for a several reasons: it was clearly aligned with feminist goals and philosophies, it allowed for (and even encouraged) the inclusion of a variety of voices and viewpoints, and it utilized and helped build the capacity for action research in the teacher participants—especially those who participated in the PNI groups. Since meeting with other teacher/mothers in a group setting may have provided benefits for participants by virtue of the normalization of experience that undoubtedly resulted for many of the participants (based on their anecdotal reports during the group meetings), it is possible that some change may have already resulted from this work for at least some participants. Beyond this small-scale, local change, I think there could also be opportunity for larger, systemic changes. As I will present in the Discussion, I anticipate that the methodology that I used for this work may have applications in the prevention and/or amelioration of work-related emotional strain in teachers (including teacher/mothers). I will RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 176 also outline the ways that this work has provided insight into ways that health and social issues overlap and interact for women who are teacher/mothers or otherwise spending substantial amounts of time working with children at home and at work and consider how this insight may help lead to supports for individuals and systems. Before this Discussion though, I will first summarize the results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses in the next chapter: Results. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 177 Chapter 4 – Results This work began with the Introduction in which I shared the significance and importance of research to explore teacher/mothers’ sources of resilience as they navigate the interactions of their work and home lives. Reiterating my problem statement from the first part of that chapter, this current research investigated if similar sources of resilience appeared to underlie teachers’ abilities to sustain their effectiveness as classroom teachers and their abilities to negotiate their work and family responsibilities in such ways that their mental health was preserved. In line with best practice in feminist—and qualitative—research, I elucidated my own location within my research in this first chapter. I also provided an overview of my theoretical orientation and reviewed limitations, delimiters, and ethical considerations in conducting this research. Following the Introduction, the Literature Review explored what work had already been completed in the areas of teacher resilience, WFC/FWC, and workplace stress. Chapter 3—Research Design—provided descriptions of my methodology and included detailed accounts of specific procedures and instruments used in conducting this research as well as a synopsis of the population of interest’s salient features. Having provided an overview of the background to my research and my methodology— including descriptions of my participants and my methods—I will now share the results of the data collection and analyses. I undertook this work using a mixed methods data transformation triangulation strategy (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007), for which I collected first quantitative (survey) data and then qualitative (modified focus group) data. Once both data sets were sufficiently robust, I transformed the qualitative data into quantitative before analyzing the data all together. In this chapter, I will describe first the quantitative and then the qualitative findings from this research. Analyses of these data will follow in the next chapter, the Discussion. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 178 Findings from the Quantitative Data I conducted quantitative data analysis at two points in my research: after the initial surveys, and after the PNI groups completed their thematic analyses of participants’ stories. The first analysis tested for relationships between the total scores on the three standardized assessments and two demographic variables (parent status and age of youngest child) to analyze differences between teacher/mothers’ and non-mother teachers’ survey results. I will now describe how I analyzed the scores from the surveys, after which I will share the results of the qualitative data analysis. I will also describe the findings from the quantitative analysis of the transformed qualitative data. This second quantitative analysis was largely a descriptive summary of frequencies of occurrences in the themes, but it also returned suggestions of some hitherto unmeasured correlations. Because participants completed multiple scaled assessments on the survey, I used a repeated measures design to test for statistically-significant differences and correlation in investigating the following questions: • Are there differences in self-reports of resilience, WFC, FWC, and/or stress in teachers who are actively parenting their own children (i.e., teacher/mothers) and those that are not simultaneously teaching and parenting? • Do teacher/mothers’ self-reports differ based on the ages of their own children? • Is there a measurable relationship between [all female] teachers’ indications of resilience and their measures of work-related stress and/or WFC and/or FWC? To ensure that the data were appropriate for testing with parametric statistics, I first confirmed that they were normally distributed and that—as they were different sizes—the groups of teacher/mothers and non-mothers had equal variances. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 179 Descriptive Statistics As I will discuss later in this chapter, there were statistically-significant differences between the mean scores of teacher/mothers and non-mothers on two of the nine main items from the surveys (when only the total TSI score is used). All but the CD-RISC had a minimum possible score of 1.00 and a possible maximum of 5.00. The CD-RISC had a minimum possible score of 0 and a possible maximum of 40.00. Of the 193-participant sample, all completed the TSI to the extent that I was able to calculate the total score according to the directions provided by Fimian (1988). As a group, the work-related stress levels of the teachers that took part in this research were neither significantly strong nor weak: the mean score on the total stress scale was 2.67, which is very close to the means of 2.59 that Fimian (1984) reported for special education teachers and 2.64 reported for “regular” education teachers. In the subset of the norm group that included only female teachers (n = 2,561) teaching at all levels (i.e., elementary, middle, and secondary), Fimian indicated that a significantly strong score was one that was 3.30 or above, a moderate score was one between 1.95 and 3.29, and a significantly weak score was 1.94 or below. This puts the mean TSI score for my sample almost exactly half way between the boundaries of the lowest score of Fimian’s declared “significantly weak” and “significantly strong” boundaries. Table 3 provides descriptive statistics for these and each of the remaining nine main items (i.e., all but the individual TSI scales)—for the groups of teacher/mothers and non-mothers and for the group as a whole. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 180 Table 3 Means and Standard Deviations for Teacher/Mothers’ and Non-Mothers’ Survey Scores 193 Mothers 𝑥̅ (𝑆𝐷) 2.67 (0.51) 125 Non-mothers 𝑥̅ (𝑆𝐷) 2.68 (0.55) 2.83 (0.93) 192 2.91 (0.90) 124 2.76 (1.03) 56 WFC strain 3.03 (1.00) 192 3.11 (0.96) 124 2.89 (1.11) 56 WFC behaviour 2.36 (0.96) 192 2.42 (0.96) 124 2.33 (1.00) 56 FWC time 2.29 (0.88) 190 2.54 (0.86) 124 1.80 (0.74) 54 FWC strain 2.00 (0.84) 191 2.12 (0.79) 125 1.72 (0.88) 54 FWC behaviour 2.09 (0.92) 191 2.11 (0.84) 125 2.03 (1.09) 54 CD- RISC work 27.80 (5.47) 193 27.82 (5.35) 125 27.31 (5.86) 56 CD-RISC home 27.23 (6.20) 135 27.07 (6.17) 122 TSI total Entire group M (σ) 2.66 (0.52) WFC time Survey scale Ngroup nmothers nnon-mothers 56 Differences Between Teacher/Mothers and Non-Mothers In testing for statistically-significant differences in self-reported prevalences of stress, work-family conflict, family-work conflict, and resilience between teacher/mothers and nonmothers using repeated measures MANCOVA, only one of the tests returned significant results. First repeated measures MANCOVA. This initial test, a repeated measures analysis in SPSS, included each of the 11 Teacher Stress Index (TSI) scales including the total score, which was calculated by taking an average of each of the ten individual scales. Entered as a covariate, years of teaching experience was held constant. This first test did not indicate any statistically-significant differences between the TSI scores of teacher/mothers and non-mothers. Second repeated measures MANCOVA. Again comparing teacher/mothers and nonmothers using repeated measures with years of teaching experience as a covariate, the second repeated measures analysis included WFC, FWC, and CD-RISC scores. As non-mothers were not asked to complete the survey assessing resilience at home, only scores for resilience at work were included. For this second test, the results indicated that there was a statistically-significant RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 181 difference between teacher/mothers and non-mothers on at least one of the seven scales included in this analysis. There was a significant three-way interaction between the scores on the WFC/FWC scales, number of years teaching, and whether participants had children F(3.963, 693.601) = 5.288, p = .000, ƞp2 = .029. An ANOVA post hoc test revealed two differences: teacher/mothers had higher scores than non-mothers on self-reports of time-based family interference with work F(54, 124) = 30.608, p = .000. Teacher/mothers had higher scores than non-mothers on self-reports of strain-based family interference with work F(54, 125) = 8.877, p = .003. The teacher/mothers’ FWC time and FWC strain scores were higher than those of the non-mothers, indicating that women who have children at home and are teaching are more likely than non-mothers to report family responsibilities interfering with work duties in terms of both time and strain. This is not to say that teacher/mothers do not experience interference of work with their families, indeed, it appears that both groups reported similarly high levels of work interference, regardless of whether they were mothers. Teacher/mothers, however, were more likely than non-mothers to also report high incidences of family interfering with work. Differences Based on Ages of Youngest Children Besides testing to see if there were any statistically-significant differences between teacher/mothers and non-mothers, I also tested for differences between groups of teacher/ mothers based on the ages of their youngest children in five-year increments. I once again used two repeated measures MANCOVAs to compare the five groups: once to test for differences in the scores on the 11 parts of the TSI and once to test the scores on the WFC/FWC scales and the CD-RISC. Neither test returned any statistically-significant results, indicating that none of the constructs measured by the survey differed according to the children’s ages. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 182 Correlations To test my final hypothesis that teacher/mothers’ reported incidences of stress, WFC, and FWC would be related to resilience (at work and at home) and/or the ages of participants’ youngest children, I used partial correlation. As I will explore in the Discussion, it is unclear whether it is more likely that high self-reports of resilience vary with high self-reports of stress, and/or WFC/FWC (indicative of successful coping) or low self-reports of stress, and/or WFC/FWC (indicative of successful prevention); however, there were multiple statisticallysignificant relationships highlighted by this test. Resilience score correlations. Holding years of teaching experience constant, correlations between scores on teacher/mothers’ self-reports of resilience at work (as measured by the CD-RISC) and scores on the other survey items indicated five statistically-significant relationships: • increased teacher stress was related to impaired resilience at work (r = - .353, p = .000), • increased WFC (time) was related to impaired resilience at work (r = - .195, p = .033), • increased WFC (strain) was related to impaired resilience at work (r = - .344, p = .000), • increased WFC (behaviour) was related to impaired resilience at work (r = - .277, p = .002), • increased FWC (behaviour) was related to impaired resilience at work (r = - .309, p = .001). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 183 Correlations between the CD-RISC scores for resilience at home and scores on the other measures suggested that increased strain-based WFC was related to impaired resilience at home (r = - .226, p = .014), and increased behaviour-based WFC was related to impaired resilience at home (r = - .302, p = .001). Finally (and not surprisingly), correlation between scores on the CD-RISC at home and at work showed that these two items were highly correlated: increased resilience at home was strongly related to increased resilience at work (r = .680, p = .000). Child age correlations. In testing whether survey scores were related to the ages of the teacher/mothers’ youngest children, there were two statistically-significant correlations: as the ages of the youngest children increased, there were decreases in the mothers’ time-based FWC scores (r = - .234, p = .009) and home-based CD-RISC scores (r = - .203, p = .025). As I will clarify and expand upon in the Discussion, these results suggested that as the children got older, they had fewer interfering demands on their teacher parents’ time (i.e., demands that interfered with time that was to otherwise be spent at or on work), but that those parents simultaneously felt less resilient at home. Summary of the Quantitative Findings The quantitative analysis of the survey data returned numerous results, which I have summarized in this section. I will consider their significance within the larger context of this research in the next chapter, the Discussion. Aligned with a mixed methods data transformation triangulation strategy, I will also connect these quantitative findings to their qualitative counterparts that have been transformed as prescribed by my chosen methodology. In the next section, I will summarize these qualitative results—largely in their already-quantized form. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 184 Findings from the Qualitative Data The quantitative comparison of teacher/mothers and non-mothers indicated that the condition of being a mother did not appear to make much of a difference to teachers’ experiences of work-related stress, WFC, or resilience for this sample. Although there were two differences between the self-reports of FWC, the majority of the assessments suggested that mothers and non-mothers were more alike than different. Because of this finding, I chose not to exclude the qualitative data from any of the participants—regardless of their parental status. This section will describe the results of the PNI groups’ analyses of these data. As described in the previous chapter, I enlisted the help of teacher/mothers in two locations to help analyze the short-story-type answers that survey participants provided on their surveys. The four groups of teachers interpreted the data to determine what themes might link the discrete stories. There were 489 individual items shared via the story-eliciting questions on the surveys. Two more stories were added during the second PNI session. Story contributions included: 115 from non-mothers, 306 from mothers, 68 from late additions (including mothers and non-mothers), and two in-session additions (both mothers) for a total of 491 stories. Of these 491 stories, 489 were provided to the first group and 257 to the other three. Sensemaking The majority of the sensemaking work took place via the four PNI groups; summaries of these data are in Appendix E. However, I did add to this work on my own once the groups were concluded. In this section, I will describe the results of both of these processes. Group sensemaking. As a researcher who was also a teacher/mother, I was very deliberate about taking precautions to, as much as possible, avoid introducing my own biases to my research. A major step in this direction was the involvement of Dr. Harold van Garderen, a RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 185 PhD researcher who uses my chosen qualitative method—Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI)—in his daily work with StoryConnect. Harold felt that it was unnecessary and perhaps counterproductive to introduce the quantitative results to the PNI group participants. As I had promised that participants would be privy to whatever quantitative results I had available, I decided that I would still share those results if asked but would not bring them up unsolicited. In the end, I shared the results with the first and fourth groups. This information did not appear to influence their work with the stories—after sharing it we did not hear it referenced in any of the deliberations, nor did participants make any explicit links to it in their summaries. One very significant result that was not measured or recorded by participants was the enthusiasm that group members had for their work in these groups. In every group there were remarks regarding the familiarity of the stories shared and the recognition participants felt for events in their own lives. These realizations were always accompanied by expressions of relief (and often some surprise) that the experiences shared by so many women had so many similarities to the group participants’ own. Although I did not make recordings of the sessions, I did take general notes on those parts of the conversations that strongly echoed my goal to elucidate the ways that teacher/mothers exercise their resilience—sharing and normalization of experience being one suggestion from the literature. Participants were aware of the items I recorded as I let them know when I was writing something down, what it was, and how I intended to use it. After sensemaking (as described in Chapter 3), I had 33 archetypes. Table 4 provides the name and a summary of the constituent parts of each of these archetypes in alphabetical order. “Evaluation” refers to the number of potential benefits or detriments that group members foresaw for each stereotype grouped by how they were associated with the final archetype groups. Following Table 4, Figure 3 shows the relationship between the components. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 186 Table 4 Archetypes with Numbers of Constituent Stereotypes, Stereotype Evaluations, and Stories Thu Mon Tue Mon Thu Thu Mon Tue Mon Wed Tue Tue Number of Stereotypes 1 4 1 2 3 4 3 5 6 5 5 9 Numbers of Evaluations 1 1, 1, 2, 3 1 1, 1 1, 1, 1 1, 1, 1, 1 1, 1, 3 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3 1, 1, 1, 1, 2 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4 Number of stories 15 79 16 52 41 45 61 46 119 64 67 102 Thu Wed Thu Tue Wed Thu Thu Mon Tue Thu Mon Tue Thu Wed 3 4 3 3 4 3 8 5 1 4 2 6 5 10 30 51 29 30 59 47 104 112 25 68 37 58 55 131 Tue 11 Mon Mon Mon Mon Mon Wed 2 7 2 4 2 8 1, 1, 1 1, 1, 1, 2 1, 1, 2 1, 2, 2 1, 2, 2, 2 1, 1, 1 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2 1, 1, 2, 2, 3 2 1, 1, 1, 2 2, 2 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3 1, 1, 1, 1, 2 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4 1, 2 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3 1, 3 1, 1, 1, 2 2, 4 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2 Archetype Day Admin (misc.) Balance and support Brutal, sad reality Burning out your support network Challenges: the grey areas Collaboration and relationship Collegiality Community connections help Coping and stress relief Coping skills Developing empathy Emotional baggage (truth (sic) or imagined) Emotional stress (home and job) Empathy Experiencing growth/positive change Family is put on the back burner Family life Guilt: unbalanced home and job Health and well-being Internal pressure “It looks good on paper” (it’s total BS) Lack of time Lack of time for self-care Negative effects of stressors on work Negative emotions Negative impacts on health and wellbeing Personal & positive outcomes of stressors Perspectives Reality of life Self-care Social pressures Time management Work/life skills 121 81 139 44 75 43 115 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 187 Themes Stories 489 potential stories shared by teachers on surveys. Winnowed to 257 stories by facilitators [Shirley and Harold] after first PNI group. Stereotypes 149 story summary groupings developed and named by PNI group participants. (Step 2 of Figure 2.) Evaluations 210 potential benefits and detriments of stereotypes determined by PNI group participants. (Step 2 of Figure 2.) Archetypes 33 collections of evaluations grouped and named by PNI group participants. (Step 3 of Figure 2.) 6 groups of archetypes developed by solo researcher [Shirley] in view of all PNI data. (Member checked by PNI groups.) Figure 3. Outline of PNI data sensemaking analysis showing individual and group contributions. Once the groups were concluded, I took the results and analyzed them as a single data set, subjecting them to more sensemaking on my own but sharing the results to all PNI group participants for member checking (i.e., confirmation that the themes into which I grouped the data were appropriate and meaningful in light of their experiences). The “themes” in Figure 3 represent this final step in this first sensemaking iteration, which I will describe in the next section. The preceding steps define the ways in which the PNI groups made sense of the story data (as summarized in Table 4). I will describe the results of my various quantitative analyses—what Kurtz (2014) calls catalysis—of these data and how they illustrate relationships between them after I describe the themes that I determined to best fit the data set as a whole. Individual sensemaking. Considering the archetype names together with the stereotype names and appraisals (i.e., potential benefits and detriments of each) and with the original stories, I grouped the data in a variety of ways to reduce the number of groups based on RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 188 thematic affiliations—undertaking my own sensemaking process. Numerous archetypes appeared to be standalone. To consolidate the data into fewer groups, I printed copies of each archetype group. These groups were comprised of stereotypes, which were sorted as discrete challenges or benefits (and were identified according to their identifying numbers) that comprised each group. Numerous themes were evident in the work done by the PNI groups as a whole: stress as a moderating influence, managing responsibilities at work and at home, sources of resilience, and challenges of work as a teacher were four initial themes I noticed and considered; however, not all of these had a strengths-based (i.e., salutogenic) focus and many of the archetypes clearly fit into multiple groups. As I wanted to focus on the ways in which teachers described enacting their resilience, I ultimately chose to group the archetypes based on six overarching themes: emotion, family, perspective, staying healthy, time, and working with people. These six categories provided clear criteria and most of the archetypes clearly fit best into a single theme; if there was a question where an archetype might best fit based on just the archetype name, I examined the underlying evaluations, stereotypes, and stories to see which group they most strongly favoured. I have organized the reporting of the qualitative results (from the PNI groups and my own analyses) based on this latter set of six groupings, which I have summarized in Table 5. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 189 Table 5 Overarching Themes (in Alphabetical Order) Showing Constituent Archetypes and Numbers of Stories Theme Component Archetypes Emotion Internal Pressure; Emotional Baggage (Truth (sic) or Imagined); Developing Empathy; Guilt: Unbalanced Home & Job; Negative Emotions; Emotional Stress (Home & Job); Empathy 464 Family Burning out your Support Network; Family is Put on the Back Burner; Family Life; “It Looks Good on Paper” (It’s Total BS); Challenges: The Grey Areas 207 Perspective Experiencing Growth/Positive Change; Perspectives; Brutal, Sad Reality; Work/Life Skills; Personal & Positive Outcomes of Stressors 362 Staying healthy Self-Care; Health & Well-Being; Coping Skills; Negative Impacts on Health & Well-Being 343 Time Time Management; Lack of Time for Self-Care; Reality of Life; Lack of Time 287 Working with people Social Pressures; Collegiality; Balance & Support; Community Connections Help; Negative Effects of Stressors on Work; Admin (Misc.); Collaboration & Relationship No. of Stories 379 The themes within which I grouped the archetypes were reflective of the resilience literature. However, while I was aware that I was considering the literature’s suggestions of ways in which people enact resilience, I tried to let the data dictate the groupings rather than any desired outcomes and I ensured that I kept induction as the root of my qualitative inquiry and kept moving “from an interest or topic, to working with [my] data, regardless of its source or form, to making contributions or generalizations for understanding the human condition” RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 190 (Mayan, 2009, p. 87). This inductive drive was to ensure I did not miss any emergent themes that may have provided some new contributions, even though I was also working deductively. Catalysis: quantifying relationships in the PNI data. In this section, I will share some of the findings from the analysis of the qualitative data in Tableau. I have only included results that were remarkable and relevant to my research questions: What resources do teachers (especially teacher/mothers) perceive as supporting their resilience in negotiating work and home demands? How does teachers’ resilience relate to their self-reported experiences of workrelated stress, WFC, and/or FWC? Are there differences in stress, WFC, FWC, and /or resilience based on the ages of teacher/mothers’ youngest children? I am starting with the less productive of the two group analyses that were available for each of the four groups: the scale questions, which asked participants to consider what the stories suggested were the types of events that precipitated a resilient response, and whether the stories suggested participants drew primarily from internal or external sources to be resilient. Scale question: precipitating events. This scaling question asked participants to take each story summary and place it on the scale to indicate the degree to which they perceived the summary to suggest it was a series of small, cumulative events that necessitated the contributor’s use of resilience or one larger, significant event. The wording of the question changed after the first group but not again after that. There was an additional option provided for each scaling question: “does not apply,” which was on its own sheet of paper to be used as a sticky note “parking lot” for appropriate summaries. The first group used 106 summaries for this activity, the third group used 116 summaries, and the fourth group used 107. I analyzed the data as a single set instead of three separate ones. This scale is recreated here as Figure 4. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 191 A series of eroding (almost) unnoticeable events. One big blow, a catastrophic event that hit out of the blue. A series of gradual (almost) unnoticeable events. A big event that hit out of the blue. Figure 4. Scaling questions for PNI group participants to use in answering the question “What got the teacher off balance?” (group 1 – top scale) or “What is the nature of the complication in the story?” (groups 2 through 4 – bottom scale). Working in Tableau, I inputted the three sets of scale data for this question in the order that each group of PNI participants placed them (the second group did not complete the scale questions). I linked the participant numbers on the summaries to the participants’ quantitative data and tested the data for patterns based on teachers’ self-reported scores on the TSI, WFC/FWC scales, and CD-RISC, and for patterns based on the ages of their youngest children—if participants were child-free or their parent status was unclear, this was also indicated on the scale data visualizations. These scales (which may be viewed in Appendix F) did not provide any patterns of interest. I repeated these procedures with the scale investigating connections between the quantitative data and the perceived source of a story-teller’s resilience (i.e., primarily internal or external). This second scale did provide some interesting suggestions. Scale question: sources of resilience. I dealt with this second scale question in the same ways as the first, investigating possibly significant arrangements over the three days’ worth of data en masse and excluding the second group. The recreations of this question may be viewed in Figure 5, with Table 6 providing a breakdown of the results by age. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 192 The teacher drew on internal resources only. The teacher fully relied on external resources. Drawing purely on internal resources. Fully relying on external resources. Figure 5. Scaling questions for PNI group participants to use in answering the question “What resources did the teacher use?” (group 1 – top scale) or “What resources did the teacher use to manage the situation?” (groups 2 through 4 – bottom scale). Table 6 Number of Records in Each Child Age Category per Half of the “Internal to External” Scale Age of Youngest Child No children Under 5 years 5 – 9 years 10 – 14 years 15 – 19 years 20+ years Child status unclear Total # of records # of Records: “Internal resources” # of Records: “External resources” 42.5 38.5 55.5 29 7 2 12 186.5 45.5 30.5 44.5 26 14 10 16 186.5 For this “internal/external” scale, the first group fit 151 summaries into the scale, the third group used 117, and the final group: 105. Figures 6 through 9 depict the scores’ connections to the scale, with age categories represented by colours as described in the legend below: RUNNING HEAD: RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 174 193 Primarily internal resources. M. W. T. Primarily external resources. Figure to resilience-supportive resilience-supportive resources resources(i.e. (i.e.internal internaltoto Figure 6. 6. Story Story summaries summaries scaled scaled according according to external moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the external moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated by its first letter and an arrow (  ) day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated by its first letter and an arrow () pointing themidpoint. midpoint Each of theline scale. Each line oneTSI participant’s TSI lines scoreindicate (longer indicatingtothe represents onerepresents participant’s score (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 188). higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 192). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 194 Primarily internal resources. Behaviour Strain Time Behaviour Strain Time Behaviour M. W. Strain Time T. Primarily external resources. Figure 7. Story summaries scaled according to resilience-related resources (i.e. internal to Figure 7. Story summaries scaled according to resilience-supportive resources (i.e. internal to external moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with day external moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated by its first letter and an arrow () showing (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated by its first letter and an arrow () indicating the midpoint. Each line represents one participant’s WFC score on behaviour-based, strainthe midpoint. Each line represents one participant’s WFC score on behaviour-based, strainbased, or time-based WFC as indicated by the labels above each column (longer lines indicate based, or time-based WFC as indicated by the labels above each column (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 188). higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 192). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 195 Primarily internal resources. Behaviour Strain Time Behaviour Strain Time Behaviour M. W. Strain Time T. Primarily external resources. Figure 8. Story summaries scaled according to resilience-related resources (i.e. internal to Figure 8.moving Story summaries according to resilience-supportive (i.e. internal external from top to scaled bottom). Each column represents one PNIresources group’s scale with dayto external moving from top or to bottom). column oneand PNIangroup’s with day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday)Each indicated by represents its first letter arrow (scale ) showing (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated by its first letter and an arrow () indicating the midpoint. Each line represents one participant’s FWC score on behaviour-based, strainthe midpoint. Each line represents one participant’s FWC score on behaviour-based, strainbased, or time-based FWC as indicated by the labels above each column (longer lines indicate based, or time-based asher indicated by child the labels above each higher scores) and theFWC age of youngest (see legend on p. column 188). (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 192). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS RUNNING HEAD: RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 174 196 Primarily internal resources. M. W. T. Primarily external resources. Figure 9. Story summaries scaled according to resilience-supportive resources (i.e. internal to Figure 9. Story summaries scaled according to resilience-supportive resources (i.e. internal to external moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the external moving from top to bottom). Eachindicated column by represents one PNI group’s day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) its first letter and an arrowscale () with the day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday)one indicated by itsCD-RISC first letter(work) and anscore arrow () indicating the midpoint. Each lineorrepresents participant’s (longer indicating the midpoint. Each line represents one participant’s CD-RISC (work) score (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 188). lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child (see legend on p. 192). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 197 Although I was unable to statistically quantify any differences between the two halves of the internal/external scale, based on their representative colours in Figures 6 though 9 there did appear to be patterns related to the ages of the teachers’ youngest children or whether a teacher was a parent. There were also patterns evident based on the magnitudes of the survey assessment scores. I will now describe these various patterns; analysis of their potential significance is in the Discussion. Patterns based on ages of the youngest children. The most obvious age-related trend was that most of the yellow and red data (from teachers who had children 15 to 19 years old or older than 20 years old, respectively) aggregated towards the “external” end of the scale. As demonstrated in Table 6, the difference was less for the scores of teachers with an undetermined parental status—many of whom presumably had grown children, an assumption supported by stories and comments shared on the surveys. Although these [orange] data appear more evenly distributed from Table 6, an examination of Figures 6 through 9 show that they too tended to lie on the “external” side of the scale or closer to the midpoint of the scale than near the far “internal” end. The data in Table 6 show that those parents whose children were between 0 and 14 years old tended to be found more on the “internal” than the “external” side of the scale. Looking at Figures 6 to 9 though, it is evident that these categories do not show the same strong tendencies towards aggregation; rather, they are fairly evenly distributed across the scale—as are the data representing those teachers who were definitely non-mothers (rather than the more ambiguous orange group). Besides examining the trends here, I also looked for patterns based on the participants’ survey scores; Table 7 summarizes the means and 95% confidence intervals (CI) of these results. Table 8 shows counts for each assessment combined over the three days. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 198 Table 7 Mean Scores with 95% Confidence Intervals (CI) for Items on the “Internal to External” Scales WFC behaviour Monday 2.42 Wednesday 2.41 Thursday 2.56 FWC behaviour Monday 2.16 Wednesday 2.17 Thursday 2.28 95% CI 2.24 2.59 2.22 2.60 2.36 2.77 95% CI 2.02 2.31 2.00 2.34 2.10 2.46 WFC strain 3.05 3.05 3.16 FWC strain 2.02 2.09 2.09 95% CI 2.88 3.22 2.87 3.23 2.96 3.35 95% CI 1.89 2.15 1.94 2.24 1.93 2.24 WFC time 2.79 2.85 2.99 FWC time 2.31 2.39 2.60 95% CI 2.63 2.94 2.66 3.03 2.80 3.10 TSI total 95% CI 2.61 2.78 2.59 2.62 2.63 2.82 2.69 2.68 2.72 95% CI 2.18 2.44 2.22 2.56 2.42 CDRISC work 27.42 27.44 26.82 95% CI 26.48 28.36 26.43 28.46 25.84 27.79 Table 8 Number of Records Above Each Assessment’s Sample Mean per Half of the “Internal to External” Scale Survey Measure # of Records: “Internal resources” # of Records: “External resources” WFC behaviour WFC strain WFC time TSI total FWC behaviour FWC strain FWC time CD-RISC (work) Total # of records 71.5 89.5 92.5 87.5 70 79.5 79.5 105 95.5 82.5 81.5 91.5 77 77.5 71.5 80 675 657 By using Tableau to calculate and display the means and 95% confidence intervals for each of the four assessments as demonstrated in Table 7, I was able to count how many scores exceeded the sample mean of each assessment on each day’s scales. Additionally, I was able to compare RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 199 the distributions of the higher scores in relation to the “primarily internal” and “primarily external” extremes to look for patterns of interest. Patterns based on WFC/FWC scale scores. The WFC scales’ scores and the FWC scales’ scores showed similar patterns in their connections to teachers’ tendencies to rely on internal or external sources of resilience. As such, I am choosing to report these results together. As shown in Table 8, higher scores on the WFC/FWC behaviour scale were associated with story summaries that suggested teachers were engaging in more external than internal means of enacting their resilience. The opposite was true for the strain- and time-based scales on these measures: the stories connected to higher scores on those scales were more strongly associated with internal resilience strategies. For all WFC/FWC scales, the distributions of high and low scores were interspersed across the internal/external continuum rather than clustered at one end or the other. Patterns based on TSI scores. Two of the three groups rated the summaries in such a way that the majority of the above-average TSI scores were on the “internal” side of the scale. Even so, because of the greater number of results in the first group’s scale, the overall trend suggested that the stories from teachers who reported higher levels of stress indicated a greater reliance on external sources of resilience. Patterns based on CD-RISC scores. Unlike the other scores, a higher level of resilience was the more desirable condition. Only taking into account the self-reports of resilience at work—which, unlike the home scores, were requested from all participants—it appears that teachers who reported higher levels of resilience at work may tend to rely on internal resilience supports more than external. All three PNI groups’ scales had more above-average CD-RISC scores on the “internal” side of the scale then the “external.” The first group’s result showed a RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 200 particularly strong trend towards the “internal” side, with all the highest scores on the “external” side clustering near the midpoint of the scale. Archetypal patterns. Other than for the two scale questions, I also developed descriptive quantitative data to represent the patterns in the grouping/naming activity that formed the basis of my group qualitative data analyses. Tables 4 and 5 have already provided general overviews of these groups’ compositions. In this section, I will again explore patterns between the measurements I took with the surveys and the stories shared. I will also highlight the prevalence of some specific terms from the stories to help illustrate the ways in which teachers in this sample reported enacting their resilience at home and/or at work. In analyzing these data and then organizing this work for presentation, I relied heavily on the work done by the PNI group participants to summarize, group, and start describing significant ways in which the qualitative survey data provided suggestions of teachers’ resilience strategies. In further grouping their archetypes into fewer themes, I looked at the various levels of data (i.e., stories, summaries, stereotypes, evaluations, and archetypes) as outlined in Figure 3 and identified the different themes based on the literature and on my research questions for study. In order of most to fewest composite stories, these themes were: emotion, staying healthy, working with people, perspective, time, and family. I will summarize findings for this part of my qualitative work according to these six themes, for which a graphic representation of the archetypes and relative numbers of stories associated with each was provided in Table 5. Over the next six sections, I will share excerpts from the stories shared by the research participants according to the archetypes developed by the PNI groups. In keeping with my feminist orientation and efforts to avoid privileging any one voice over another and to further quantize the data in keeping with my data transformation MMR framework, I selected the first, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 201 fourth, and tenth story from each archetype from a list that was not organized according to any regular criteria (e.g., participant number, etc.) except archetype name. Although some archetypes and/or themes may appear to focus on negative aspects or overtones from the stories, I am confident that the composite provides a picture of what teachers are already doing to sustain themselves, which was my goal for this portion of my research. Theme 1: Emotion. The importance and relevance of emotion to resilience is clear in the literature—both within education and in a larger milieu—and its relevance was reiterated again here by the archetypes developed by the PNI group participants. Many of the stories the PNI groups incorporated into the archetypes included suggestions of emotion rather than overt descriptions. The word “emotion” only appeared 20 times in the entire qualitative data set; this included its use as a root in words like “emotional” or “emotionally.” “Feel” (again used as a root word) and “felt” were more prevalent at 128 and 73 incidences, respectively, although many of these usages were in response to the wording of the questions as they specifically requested descriptions of times participants “felt” a certain way. Even with this dearth of emotion vocabulary, the PNI group participants indicated they clearly picked up on the emotional overtones of many of the stories and developed seven emotion-related archetypes that included 464 stories—keeping in mind that the same stories were reused over the four group meetings and that some stories had multiple topics and engendered multiple summaries (and therefor inclusions) from a single group. The illustrative quotes provided in Table 9 provide insight into the types of stories participants interpreted as being linked to some aspect of emotion—including empathy. Based on statistical techniques, catalysis work with the PNI groupings also generated suggestions of correlational patterns. Immediately after Table 9, Figures 10 through 12 share these findings for the Emotion theme. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Table 9 First Major PNI Group Theme: Emotion Theme Archetype Representative quote Emotion Developing empathy “I disagreed with her (the teacher’s) approach, which was hard as a fellow teacher. I talked lots with my husband and placed emphasis on building my daughter’s capacity to be flexible and persevere.” Emotional baggage (truth (sic) or imagined) “I had to keep on trucking and am thinking of what I'd like to do in the future if this FTE stays cut.” Emotional stress (home & job) “I slept more, talked to friends and leaned on my family, also focused on the awesome students that I teach. I also find it hard when students are struggling with their own home/personal issues and I feel helpless. I can listen and offer support but that feels not enough.” Empathy “I am much more open now with SST [School Support Team] and admin (than I would have been before my M.Ed.) about what is going on and my challenges. I am asking for help (not receiving much so far?) but I keep asking. In the past I would have just tried to deal with it on my own so I didn’t appear unable or ‘weak’.” Guilt: unbalanced home & job “I have taken a personal reduction in workload since my kids were born to allow myself extra time in the day to prep for school, do laundry at home and exercise.” Internal pressure “I manage that feeling [of always having more to do] as much as possible now as I get older and appreciate things more as they are and just be in the moment as much as possible.” Negative emotions “I am regularly just getting through the day, rather than enjoying the children. I just make a lot of lists to get through it. Planning dinners for the crockpot is necessary. I consult my calendar hourly.” 202 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 203 Figure 10. CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Emotion" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CDRISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. Figure 11. Relationship between CD-RISC (home) scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation (r2 = - .0164, p = .0158) when grouped according to the “Emotion” theme. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 204 Figure 12. Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing statistically-significant correlations for the “Emotion” theme on the FWC Behaviour scale (r2 = -.0172, p = .0134) and the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0354, p = .0004). In the Emotions theme, the majority of work-related resilience scores were between 21 to 28: represented by the large blocks of green and blue in Figure 10. These scores are slightly lower than but consistent with the mean CD-RISC (work) score of 27.8 for the entire sample; an observation common to all the themes. The correlations in Figures 11 and 12 echo the quantitative findings that increasing age of a youngest child may be related to teacher/mothers’ experiences of decreasing resilience at home (Figure 11) and decreasing interference of family with work in terms of time, but also suggests that increasing child age may be related to decreasing behaviour-based FWC when considering emotion specifically (Figure 12). Theme 2: Working with People. Relationships are another key piece of resilience. Based on the archetypes developed by the PNI groups, I incorporated 379 stories (representing seven archetypes) into this theme; representative sample stories are shown in Table 10, followed by PNI-uncovered trends in Figures 13 through 16. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Table 10 Second Major PNI Group Theme: Working with People Theme Archetype Representative quote Working with People Admin (misc.) “One student got mad at another student and became physically violent shouting ‘die, die, die!’ I had an educational support worker in the class with me and we at first tried to usher him out but when that didn’t work and the situation escalated, we ushered the other students out to keep them safe and called the office for reinforcements.” Balance & support “With the support of my family, co-workers and friends I was able to get through the death of my mother… while pregnant with my twins. I relied heavily on my support network to balance work, health and grief.” Collaboration & relationship “I had a parent storm into the resource room demanding that she have some paperwork back… we gave her back her information she submitted but I told her that the more people involved with her son the better… I was able to calm her down, and I had her apologizing by the time she left.” Collegiality “I struggled with myself, doubting myself and my skill set. Normally, this would be my ‘thing’ so not to be able to call upon it was difficult. It took a lot of thought and discussion with coworkers before I let it go.” Community connections help “I worked with a learning assistant who would often sabotage my lessons… at the end of my third year working with her, I quietly went up to my principal and asked him to set me up with someone different the next year and this problem was solved.” Negative effects of stressors on work “Throughout the entire [separation] process, I never missed a day of school. My mind wasn’t always 100% there but I pushed through it.” Social pressures “My husband left suddenly… on the first Friday of a new school year. My boys had just started K and Grade 3. Talking to family, friends and coworkers was essential. I received good counselling and dealt with the issue head on.” 205 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 206 Figure 13. CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Working with People" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CD-RISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. Figure 14. Relationship between WFC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing statistically-significant correlations for the “Working with People” theme on the WFC Strain scale (r2 = .0684, p < .0001) and the WFC Time scale (r2 = .0590, p < .0001). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 207 Figure 15. Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing statistically-significant correlations for the “Working with People” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0475, p = .0002). Correlations based on theme-related groupings of the data again reflected findings from the quantitative analysis, in which I also noted a correlation between increasing ages of youngest children and decreasing FWC (time). However, this current analysis suggests that those participants whose stories reflected aspects of “Working with People” also experienced increased strain- and time-based WFC as their children got older, whereas the initial quantitative analysis did not connect children’s ages and WFC. Based on the methods of Van Maele and Van Houtte (2015), I counted the stories’ mentions of four relationships: principals (60 times), colleagues (49 times), friends (44 times), and partner/spouse/husband (87 times). For the first time in this post-qualitative quantitative analysis, TSI scores were found to be significantly related to the ages of the youngest children (Figure 16). This suggests that as their children got older, the teachers’ experiences of work-related stress increased. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 208 Figure 16. Relationship between TSI (total) scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Working with People” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = .0411, p = .0006). Theme 3: Perspective. This theme was based on archetypes and underlying stories that made reference to teachers’ descriptions of taking perspective. While the word “perspective” only occurred four times in the stories (with other related terms such as “looking back” not appearing at all), there were many references to the ways in which teachers reframed or refocused themselves to sustain their resilience. Samples of the 362 stories in this theme are viewable in Table 11; upon reading the sample stories, I expect readers will gain a greater understanding of this theme’s constituency than that which I could provide through explanation alone. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 209 Table 11 Third Major PNI Group Theme: Perspective Theme Archetype Representative quote Perspective Brutal, sad reality “Not all my stories have these happy endings but I’m pleased to say that most do. Usually it just seems to be a matter for staying the course. Eventually they usually come to realize I have their child’s best interests at heart. Experiencing growth/ positive change “Talking to colleagues, getting fresh air, hanging out with my little guy and husband are stress relievers for me.” Personal & positive outcomes of stressors “This kid was horrific to everyone and he had no counselling or help other than me. I felt sick to my stomach at times. I dealt with it by continuing to advocate for better, I held out hope, I did yoga, I went for reflexology treatments. I didn’t let his trauma be my trauma.” Perspectives “Socializing with colleagues and developing genuine friendships has helped, but this has really only become feasible as my kids have gotten a bit older.” Work-life skills “New curriculum was drafted and I needed/wanted help with it. And I was in PAIN. I got through it though. I focused on my students and being the best I could be in my classroom. I was pretty anti-social, which was hard as I'm an extrovert who loves people. I stayed in my room (which is far away from the rest of my dept.) and kicked butt as a teacher.” In line with the findings I’ve already reported is a trend observable in Figure 17: work-based CD-RISC scores of participants in this theme were most frequently found in the 21- to 28-point range. Once the data were visualized in Tableau I noted a correlation between the ages of the participants’ youngest children and their time-based FWC scores in this theme. The correlation shown in Figure 18 is again aligned with that found between the ages of the youngest children and the time-based FWC scale as measured in the fully quantitative phase of my research. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 210 Figure 17. CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Perspective" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CDRISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. Figure 18. Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Perspective” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0438, p = .0004). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 211 Theme 4: Staying Healthy. Although health is typically conceptualized as a resilience outcome rather than a means, it is likely that the relationship is bidirectional—a potentiality that I will explore in the Discussion chapter. The exact nature of the relationship between health and resilience is not germane to the current chapter. Regardless of that relationship, health promotion and sustenance are primary goals of resilience; given this primacy, it was unsurprising to see 343 stories in five health-related archetypes. When searching the stories for references to health promotion and/or sustenance, I found 21 references to health (which included its use as a root in longer words), 13 references to exercise/exercised/exercising, and 17 references to sleep (i.e., “sleep” and “slept”). Based on my reading of the qualitative data, these appeared to be the specific health-related terms used by this sample of teachers in the completion of the surveys. The word “diet” also occurred once with regards to teacher health (and one more time in reference to students’ deprived lifestyles) while “nutrition” and its related terms were absent. As was the case with the other themes, not all these data were included in the stories selected by the PNI group participants. Table 12 provides an overview of these archetypes with representative quotes taken from the constituent stories. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 212 Table 12 Fourth Major PNI Group Theme: Staying Healthy Theme Archetype Representative quote Staying Healthy Coping & stress relief “My boys are at an age now where they are more independent and responsible. They are both doing pretty well in school and life seems to be balanced. I also carve out time daily to workout FOR ME. I could always put more time in to school but there is not much more to give.” Coping skills “I found working was best for me. It provided an escape from thinking about it. It was a distraction. I find the busier I am the better I can cope with stress because I don’t over think. That is the most difficult. By keeping busy I cope better.” Health & well-being “I have one student who is often not fed/washed/clothed properly and another who does not attend often (12/50 days). This is very emotionally draining and I struggle to cope with this.” Negative impacts on health & well-being “I stuck to my guns and when he repeatedly accused me of simply being a poor teacher, unable of teaching adequately, I responded ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’ The next couple of months he was clearly angry and either glared silently at me or didn’t look at me… Gradually the father’s attitude started to soften and he began to respond to my smiles at the door.” Self-care “I take time for myself (exercise daily), enjoy the outdoors, ‘date nights’ with my husband. Strong voice at school. Don’t overfill my plate.” Perhaps to a greater extend than any other theme, the ideas and summaries that comprised the theme of “Staying Healthy” were some that overlapped with many others ideologically but stood alone based on their preponderances of health-related ideas. Many of the stories shared in these archetypes described ways that participants improved or maintained their health—with little mention of “health” and minimal mention of “self-care,” although—as visible in Figure 19—the archetype names focused on health, care, and coping. As Figures 20–22 will show, this theme was another in which child age and WFC/FWC scores appeared correlated. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 213 Figure 19. CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Staying Healthy" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CD-RISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. Figure 20. Relationship between WFC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Staying Healthy” theme on the WFC Time scale (r2 = .0222, p = .0308). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 214 Figure 21. Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Staying Healthy” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0209, p = .0009). Figure 22. Relationship between TSI (total) score and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Staying Healthy” theme (r2 = .0317, p = .0009). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 215 Theme 5: Time. Although not as clearly reflective of the resilience literature, “Time” featured prominently in the PNI groups’ analyses of the story data. This is perhaps not surprising given the amount of work that teachers are required to do “after hours” regardless of whether they have children of their own. Analyzing the qualitative survey data (that which was selected for inclusion in the PNI analyses and that which was not), the word “time” appeared 218 times: it featured in more stories than any other word that I checked. Although the word “time” featured prominently in the stories, it was the focus of only four archetypes comprised of 287 stories—the second smallest theme. Although the word “time” appeared with such high frequency, it did not appear in every story included in this theme. This is reflected in the sample stories found in Table 13. After the table, Figures 23 through 26 display patterns and trends based on the “Time” theme, which—besides showing that only one story was connected to one of the very highest resilience scores (i.e., blue on Figure 23)—suggest that as children got older, their teacher/mothers experienced decreases in their resilience at work (Figure 24) and their time-based FWC (Figure 25), and increases in their work-related stress (Figure 26). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 216 Table 13 Fifth Major PNI Group Theme: Time Theme Archetype Representative quote Time Lack of time “I often feel ‘all together’ when I have finished a big project or task. For example, I can be a real procrastinator. If I avoid a task and then have to complete it, I am often scrambling. When I actually manage my time and complete a task, have my house clean, I feel accomplished. The busier I am the better I feel as a mom and leader. If I have too much time, I feel lousy!” Lack of time for self-care “I found working was best for me. It provided an escape from thinking about it. It was a distraction.” Reality of life “I always feel like I could/should do more in either realm: home or work. ‘Radical Acceptance’ is how I manage that feeling as much as possible now as I get older and appreciate things more as they are and just be in the moment as much as possible.” Time management “The balance of work and home life is SO important to me which is why I work. Full time is not enjoyable for me so I choose a healthy balance vs making more money.” Figure 23. CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Time" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CD-RISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Figure 24. Relationship between CD-RISC (work) scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Time” theme (r2 = -.0221, p = .0307). Figure 25. Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Time” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0299, p = .0121). 217 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 218 Figure 26. Relationship between TSI (total) scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing a statistically-significant correlation for the “Time” theme (r2 = .0612, p = .0003). Theme 6: Family. The smallest of the themes was “Family,” comprised of 207 stories. While this category could have also fit into “Relationships,” I decided to keep family relationships separate from friendships, collegial, and other less intimately related relationships because of my specific examination of the interactions between work and family using the WFC/FWC scales. This is not to say that this theme would not have arisen in the absence of that survey measure or that it would have been evident had the PNI groups not categorized the data as they did. All the stories that had been uploaded into Tableau were flagged for the word “relationship” using that software’s search function. Because of the potential for relationships mentioned in the stories to refer to participant’s home or work experiences (or both), and as this theme was focused on family relationships rather than in general, I read each flagged story to determine if references were regarding work or personal relationships; after the overview of the theme in Table 14, Table 15 summarizes these word frequency findings. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Table 14 Sixth Major PNI Group Theme: Family Theme Archetype Representative quote Family “It looks good on paper” (it’s total BS) “I was working all day, taking an hour and a half break to eat, and then working until the early hours of morning. My principal was upset that I had begun to tell her no on things I’d volunteered to do in the past… Getting through it came down to grit mainly. I slept an average of 3.25 hours/night during that time, got comfortable with telling people ‘no’ and learned to make quick decisions and not agonize over them.” Burning out your support network “I'm thankful for a super supportive husband & mother. They, combined with excellent child care and a job close to home, make my working fulltime possible. I'd love to do more and work harder, but I realize my family needs me too. It's a balance.” Challenges: the grey area “I had a sense of a ‘high’ that I had achieved two very important things to me (a family and a great career). I feel that way a bit right now, as I have been offered an admin role, which feels good but I am terrified of my new role taking precious time away from my family life.” Family is put on the back burner “This year has been challenging on most fronts. We are living 20 mins out of town, the kids are in ‘everything’ and I am teaching new courses. I am regularly just getting through the day, rather than enjoying the children.” Family life “My son left the school grounds before school. I felt hopeless because I can't drop him off at school. I spoke to daycare to come up with a plan and discussed it with son.” 219 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 220 Table 15 Relationship References: Frequencies of Personal Lives Compared to Work Word Overall frequency child kid parent son daughter 70 63 74 87 17 Frequency of personal relationship references 57 45 43 86 17 Frequency of work relationship references 12 15 29 1 0 Other unrelated references 1: “child of God” 1: “kidding” 2: “not a parent” 0 0 As mentioned in the “Working with People” theme, the collected qualitative data contained 87 references to a spouse, partner, or husband (no mentions of “wife” or “significant other”). Since this was not a work-relevant term, I did not include it in the systematic search that resulted in Table 14. For words that could have also formed roots of other words (e.g., child and kid), I included all incidences; this decision is why I also made note of unrelated terms in Table 14: these were usages that were flagged in the search but not relevant to either home relationships or work. Perhaps “child of God” could be considered a family relationship but, as it was the only occurrence of this kind, I limited this theme to corporeal families only. Although many of the stories included in this theme talked about challenges in family life, there were also references to using family as a means of developing perspective and, subsequently, priorities. The sense that family was used as a support and a means of centering priorities came through even though they were not always named directly. I will explore this idea further in the next chapter, the Discussion. Even though there were fewer stories included in this theme than in any of the others, there was still enough data to sort the data based on the CD-RISC scores in each of the theme’s component archetypes (Figure 27) and to test the data for correlations—of which there was only one for this theme: more confirmation that as their children get older, teacher/mothers experience less time-based FWC (Figure 28). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 221 Figure 27. CD-RISC (work) scores for survey participants whose stories were included in the "Family" theme. The number of records in each archetype is shown by the height of each bar (see left axis), while the colours of the bars indicate each archetype’s proportions of the CDRISC scores arranged according to the legend on the right. Figure 28. Relationship between FWC scores and ages of participants' youngest children showing statistically-significant correlation for the “Family” theme on the FWC Time scale (r2 = -.0721, p = .0009). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 222 Summary of Qualitative Findings In this section, I presented an overview of the most noteworthy of my qualitative findings. These results were based on data that were collected over a space of five months with a sample of female teachers in one Canadian province. The original data were gathered via story-eliciting questions on a survey that also included quantitative measures. These data were analyzed by four groups of teachers from diverse backgrounds who summarized and then analyzed the data to develop archetypes, which I then collected into six themes. Based on the different levels of data (Figure 3), I undertook catalysis methods to discern quantitative trends and patterns within the grouped qualitative data, which I have reported in this chapter. While seven teachers shared that they have never felt like they have “had it all together,” the majority of the stories clearly described or suggested some of the ways in which so many women are able to sustain themselves while working with people all day and simultaneously raising their own children. There were also stories from women who, while they were not currently raising children of their own, still used similar strategies to stay resilient in the face of challenging teaching conditions. One very important qualitative result that I have not yet shared but will comprise a substantial portion of my Discussion chapter was the response of this work’s participants to their inclusion in this work. This appears to be a topic about which people want to talk: 193 of the 235 survey packages handed out were returned for a response rate of 82% and 136 of the returned surveys included answers to at least one story-eliciting (short answer) question. Additionally, at least 10 of the PNI group participants volunteered to come to subsequent groups to repeat the group-based data analysis process; almost all the group participants gave effusive thanks for being asked to participate. As I will describe in some detail in the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 223 Discussion, this enthusiasm for my research topic might signify a rich potential direction for helping teachers and other HPs to build and sustain their resilience through a formalized process that repeats this type of work. Chapter Summary From developing and describing my research questions, theoretical orientation, methodology, and an overview of the literature that underlies this work, I have now also shared the findings that resulted from the data collection that I completed in consideration of the aforementioned factors. In alignment with my feminist orientation, I have been able to include multiple voices throughout the research process by inviting stories and interpretations of those stories from women who were teaching across BC. As hoped for based on my data transformation triangulation strategy of MMR, many of the results from the two phases of this work were complementary and mutually supportive, the potential meanings of which I will explore the next chapter. An important part of PNI is the consideration of observations from multiple perspectives. In this chapter, I have shared the results of my statistical analyses of the numerical survey data as well as the findings from the qualitative group analyses of the stories shared on the surveys. I have also summarized the observations I made regarding the story data’s connections to my research questions. In the next chapter, the Discussion, I will provide my interpretations for these findings. Having found both statistically-significant quantitative results and notable qualitative results, I will discuss the potential implications of these findings in the next chapter, before summarizing my research and making suggestions for future directions in the final chapter, the Conclusion. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 224 Chapter 5 – Discussion It is clear there are relationships between teacher/mothers’ (and non-mother teachers’) resilience and factors such as their experiences of stress and WFC/FWC. What is not yet clear is the significance of these relationships and how they might be connected to the extant literature. Having collected and analyzed data in a variety of ways according to the descriptions in the Research Design and Results chapters, this current chapter will be dedicated to an analysis of the findings to elucidate these data’s significance and contextual connections. In alignment with the data transformation triangulation strategy of MMR developed by Creswell and Plano Clark (2007) and described in this work’s Research Design chapter, I transformed my qualitative data into quantitative (using methods summarized in the Research Design and Results chapters) in order to integrate the two types of data. Without integration, this work would not be mixed methods as integration is an important and necessary part of MMR (Morse, 2010a; Tashakkori, 2009). In this current chapter, the Discussion, I will explore what the significance of these results might be in consideration of the existing literature that I summarized in the Literature Review. Based on my results, I expect that this research might help catalyze the development of meaningful interventions for teachers and other HPs; I explore this possibility in this chapter and in the final one—the Conclusion. In considering the significance and implications of my findings for resilience, I am choosing to arrange my work to echo the order in the survey: teacher stress and WFC/FWC. As it is the overarching theme to which I am connecting all the findings of my work, implications for resilience will be woven throughout the chapter before comprising a standalone section just ahead of the recommendations. I will first consider the lack of statistically-significant differences in stress for teacher/mothers compared to non-mothers. Next, I will analyze the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 225 significance of the differences in FWC found between teachers who are actively parenting their own children and those that are not simultaneously teaching and parenting. In each section—in consideration of my feminist theoretical orientation and my selected MMR framework—I will unite the findings related to each aspect, thereby incorporating participants’ voices and interpretations to the fullest extent possible. I will then describe the consequence of the methods used, which will lead into an exploration of potential applications of this work. Finally, I will position this work within a specific model of occupational health and revisit the feminist underpinnings of this work to encourage readers to place the findings and interpretations within those contexts. I will also re-examine the goodness of fit between this research and complexity theory. This will be followed by the last chapter, the Conclusion, which will focus on potential future directions for this research and will elucidate some of the strengths of this current work. Resilience and Teacher Stress There were no statistically-significant differences between the total self-reported teaching-related stress scores of the teacher/mothers and the non-mothers who comprised this sample. Although the stress levels of the teachers in this sample were not of concern per se, they did vary based on participants’ self-reports of resilience at work where increasing workrelated stress was associated with decreasing resilience at work. It is unclear whether experiences of stress are more frequent or noticed when resilience is lower or if lowered resilience is a result of increased work-related stress. Besides its connections to coping strategies—such as those for which I provided an overview in the Literature Review and will revisit in this chapter—human resilience has underlying mechanisms that depend on “a combination of genetic and nongenetic factors that interact in complex and consequential ways but… remain not fully understood” (Franklin, Saab, & Mansuy, 2012, p. 747). Due in part to RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 226 the biological underpinnings of resilience, it seems that participants with lower resilience likely reported experiencing higher stress levels than their more resilient counterparts rather than the increased stress leading to decreased resilience. In line with the characteristics of a complex adaptive system (CAS) and as defined by Pfau and Russo (2015) in reference to the human nervous system, resilience is an integrated and adaptive process that promotes psychological resistance to stress via coordinated action across multiple systems. Taking the most parsimonious path through such a complex systemic response would be to assume that it is pre-existing limits within the system that lead to reduced resilience and that it is in response to elevated stress levels that these deficits become apparent. This could explain the correlation between the increasing TSI scores and decreasing CD-RISC scores that emerged in my quantitative analysis. It is unlikely, however, that this relationship is unidirectional. The more likely scenario is that there is feedback between the experiences of stress and the engagement of resilience so that these two processes influence each other and the extent to which they then affect other systems—both internally to a person and externally. For example, it would not be unanticipated for there to be a scenario wherein a teacher experienced a stressful event at work and found herself feeling that she was ineffective in some way (i.e., experienced low self-efficacy), which could then cause her to question her career choice, which would engender further stress and potentially negative health effects (e.g., lack of sleep, low energy, and irritability) and also place strain on her relationships; in this scenario, health effects represent internal effects and social effects external. It would be less likely for a person to experience stress and various repercussions due to impaired resilience without those repercussions causing further strain. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 227 An additional finding in my fully quantitative analysis was that there were statisticallysignificant correlations between increasing scores on all the WFC/FWC scales and increasing TSI scores. Whatever the direction(s) of these relationships, these connections make sense intuitively. Stress (and irritability) may lead to WFC/FWC, and it is indeed stressful to experience conflicts between work and home, which is why these types of interactions are so frequently characterized as conflicts at all! As interference of work needs on home or home needs on work increase, people are obligated to then deal with the experienced conflict(s)—the awareness that things are out of sync somehow—in addition to the needs that precipitated the WFC/FWC. This then represents an additional demand on the person’s cognitive load and likely represents a stressor on top of those that were already contributing to the WFC/FWC, which very likely then sets up another bidirectional relationship wherein the experiences of stress and WFC/FWC create a resonant frequency that might result in increases in one or more of these experiences (i.e., stress, WFC, and/or FWC) even after the precipitating factors were no longer relevant or an issue. As the existence and influence of such reciprocal interactions have been noted in the resilience literature, it is likely that these interfaces could represent one of what Gu (2018) termed the “multiple reciprocating systems” (p. 20) that she sees as comprising teacher resilience—even though in this particular iteration the system appears to be one that would be working against rather than for resilience. Even though there was no quantitative evidence that teacher/mothers and non-mothers differed in their experiences of work-related stress, there was a significant relationship between work-related stress and the ages of the teacher/mothers’ youngest children—the most robust correlation measured for the tests that comprised this phase of my work. It appeared that teacher/mothers’ experiences of work-related stress increased as their children got older. This RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 228 could be reflective of the teachers’ changing career demands rather than any child-related characteristics. As teachers move through their mid-career years, it is not uncommon for them to seek out greater responsibility and/or new challenges. For example, some might take on positions of special responsibility such as being department head or leading a Professional Learning Community (PLC) group. This added challenge could help boost resilience by increasing the two internal motivations that Gu and Day (2007) noted were most influential in teachers’ resilience: sense of vocation and sense of efficacy. Although welcome, these new challenges may also contribute to the additional stress that these results reflect. Some teachers also take on increasing workloads as their children get older. Whereas a teacher might work part-time when her children are small, as the kids get older and more independent—and often involved in ever-more-expensive and time-consuming activities—she might find she has the capacity and/or desire to work more and return to a full-time position, which could then also bring with it the stressors inherent in the reduction of free time that might have previously been spent partly on work-related tasks such as planning, preparation of lessons, marking, etcetera. Although the paid hours increase, the amount of time available to complete those parts of the job that cannot be completed when students are present must now be squeezed into non-contact hours such as during prep times or during those times when teachers’ own children are also out of school (i.e., after school hours). This is not to say that there could not be a relationship between higher reports of workrelated stress and children’s ages. Stress was a common topic in the PNI groups’ analysis work. The relationship between increasing teaching-related stress and aging children was evident in correlations between the TSI total scores and the children’s ages for three of the six themes within which I analyzed the PNI data. For the “Working with People,” “Staying Healthy,” and RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 229 “Time” themes, the participant data associated with the themes’ stories reflected the correlation found in the fully quantitative analysis. Stress was mentioned in the names of four of the PNI archetypes, which were each sorted into a different theme. “Working with People” and “Staying Healthy” were two of the themes that contained archetypes with stress-related names. The remaining themes did not indicate any patterns or relationships to do with the TSI data even though constituent archetypes in two of them (“Emotion” and “Perspective”) referred to stress. What might be the meaning or importance of the correlation between increasing workrelated stress and aging children, given that it is significantly evident in the themes that deal with time, people-work, and staying healthy? Perhaps the common factor is the external nature of these themes? Relying on perspective or emotion as sources of resilience are clearly internal strategies. Even family might be considered an internal source of resilience given family does not necessarily require the reaching out for support that less intimate relationships might. One participant spoke of “finding solace” in her family—a description that encapsulates many of the stories included in this theme about family being a place to which one might retreat (as opposed to collegial or friendly relationships that might require a more active seeking out of support). As mentioned in the Results, many of the stories in the “Family” theme talked about relying upon family as a means of developing perspective and, subsequently, priorities. This particular focus on family as a means of developing and maintaining priorities provides further support to my supposition that this theme might represent a more internal means of resilience even though it refers to relationships, which are outside of the individual. There was one other TSI-related pattern in the quantized qualitative data, although perhaps it is more accurate to consider it a non-pattern: when the PNI groups scaled the stories from the surveys according to whether they were more suggestive of internal or external RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 230 sources of resilience, a majority of the teachers who reported higher scores on the TSI were placed closer to the external end of the scale. I consider these data to represent a non-pattern as they were largely inconclusive: two groups of PNI participants scaled more stories with aboveaverage TSI scores as indicative of greater reliance on internal sources of resilience, however, the third group perceived the majority of the stories with higher-than-average TSI scores to be suggestive of more external strategies. As this third group included more stories than either of the other two, it resulted in the overall total pointing towards external rather than internal sources of resilience. Because more people interpreted the various stories to indicate internal sources of resilience, but one group incorporated more stories from participants with higherthan-usual TSI scores, I consider this result to be inconclusive. Based on the work of Leroux and Théorêt (2014), however, it would seem more likely that the more resilient teachers were those that focused on internal factors—perhaps because internal factors are more controllable? To more accurately conjecture what resources teachers with higher work-related stress scores might rely upon requires further research as either scenario is reasonable. Depending on whether an individual tended to be more introverted or extroverted, she might begin to use more of whichever strategies best fit within her comfort zone: presumably internal strategies for the former and external for the latter as this has been the pattern described in the extant literature (e.g., Afshar, et al., 2015; Parkes, 1986). There is research that, besides preferred coping mechanisms and/or means of support, characteristics of personality may also be related to individual differences in human stress (e.g., Gelso & Carter, 1985). Some researchers have postulated that personality is related to the stress response to the extent that in future, “it will be possible to articulate neurobiological mechanisms for the effects of personality on stress responses over time” (Williams, Smith, Gunn, & Uchino, 2011, p. 241). Besides the personality RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 231 traits of extraversion/introversion, neuroticism has been repeatedly linked to coping styles and preferred means of support. For example, the neuroticism aspect of personality has been found to mediate the relationship between stress and burnout for caregivers in Japan, especially when combined with an emotion-focused style of coping (Narumoto, et al., 2008). As neither personality nor coping style were areas that I assessed as part of this work, their inclusion represents one possible future direction for this research. Besides those noted for work-related stress, this work also returned some interesting findings regarding WFC/FWC and their connection to resilience, to which I will now turn my attention. Resilience and Work-Family Conflict/Family-Work Conflict WFC and FWC represent potential resilience-requiring sources of stress specific to the interface of work and family. Just as the correlation between the TSI scores and ages of the teacher/mother participants’ youngest children were evident in half of the PNI-based themes, so too did correlations between aspects of the WFC/FWC scales and the children’s ages appear in the themes. In the fully quantitative analysis, increasing ages of the youngest children appeared related to decreasing time-based FWC. The suggestion that as teacher/mothers’ children get older, they [the teacher/mothers] experience less time-based interference of family with work was also evident in all six PNI-based themes. The possibility that home- rather than workrelated stress may be connected to at least some aspects of impaired health strengthens suggestions that reconceptualizing care roles—rather than further exploring ideas of “balance” between home and work—may be the most productive way to support families of all compositions. Based on my quantitative analysis of the PNI themes, it appears that participants whose stories fit within the “Working with People” theme also experienced increased strain- RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 232 and time-based WFC as their children got older; this possibility was not suggested in the fully quantitative analysis. It is possible that these stories affiliated in this way as the participants who contributed them attributed greater salience to the people-work aspects of their work. Also possible is that it is the people-work aspect that is behind the time- and strain-based WFC. Going back to the fully quantitative analysis, the observed correlations between increases on all three aspects of WFC and decreased resilience at work and between increased strain-based and behaviour-based WFC and impaired resilience at home may be somewhat illuminated by the finding within the “Working with People” theme. The suggestion that strain-based WFC especially might increase due to some aspect of people-work makes a lot of sense as “strain” refers largely to experiences of stress in one domain affecting function in another (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985) and there is evidence that having children in their middle and early teenage years may contribute to higher levels of stress for parents (Luthar & Ciciolla, 2016), much of which might realistically be connected to emotion and/or time. In contrast, the correlation between increased behaviour-based FWC and decreased reports of resilience at work does not so clearly fit with the observation from the “Emotions” theme that teacher/mothers’ behaviour-based FWC decreased as their children got older (another suggestion that only emerged in the analysis of the quantized qualitative data). This finding is particularly puzzling when one also considers the finding that the teacher/mothers in this sample reported diminishing resilience at home with older children. One way in which the apparent contradiction between aging children and decreased incidences of both behaviourbased FWC and resilience at home might be explained is that perhaps the teachers whose stories were included in the “Emotions” theme tended to teach younger grades so, as their children at home got older, they were better able to keep behaviours at home from interfering RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 233 with behaviours at work. Presumably, given the finding that decreased behaviour-based FWC is connected to increased resilience at work, the decrease in these behavioural overlaps may have contributed to participants’ increased resilience at work. As it was within the “Emotion” theme that I noticed the relationship between decreased behaviour-based FWC and older children, it is possible that these behaviours are also related to emotions and the emotional aspects of teaching. Alternatively (but in a related vein), possibly the FWC decreased due to increased experience. Most of the teacher/mothers in the sample were teachers before they were parents. As they would have been gaining teaching experience at the same time they were learning how to negotiate their home and work demands, it is possible that the increased resilience at work is due more to settling in to a more permanent position rather than being so much at the whims of seniority and new teachers’ frequent need to take teaching contracts that lie outside their areas of expertise and/or comfort (Naylor & White, 2010). With increased security and confidence at work could come decreased behaviour-based FWC as it would be expected that the teachers would start to rely more on those behaviours that they found most reliable and effective in their work rather than being so much at the caprice of their immediate situation; it is also possible that the reports of decreased resilience at home with older children could be in relation to this same career confidence. Maybe as they become more confident being in authority in their classrooms, teacher/mothers assume that similar expectations will be adhered to at home—at exactly the same time as their children are entering into those developmental stages that push them to become more challenging as they seek greater levels of responsibility and individuality. There was also a correlation noted between the increasing ages of the youngest children and decreasing scores on the time-based FWC scale when the data were analyzed RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 234 within the bounds of the “Perspective” theme. This finding aligned with the results of the fully quantitative phase of my research, but only turned up in the PNI analysis in this single theme. This makes intuitive sense as children do become less reliant on their parents for most things as they get older, leaving parents with more time to meet those needs at home rather than taking away from time meant for work. Significance of Parent Status The quantitative data provided by the teachers in this sample provided a pair of statistically-significant differences according to whether participants were mothers. The teacher/mothers’ scores on the time-based and the strain-based scales of the FWC measure were significantly higher than those of the non-mothers, indicating that women who had children at home and were teaching were more likely than non-mothers to report family responsibilities interfering with work duties in terms of both time and strain. Time-based interferences included any ways that time spent on family needs took away or otherwise impacted upon time needed for work. The strain-based aspect assessed the extent to which stressors in the home aspects of their lives influenced these teacher/mothers’ perceived, self-reported stress levels regarding their work. Given the documented resistance for people to acknowledge that family responsibilities may contribute to disturbance at work—a phenomenon that typically leads to lower reports of FWC than WFC (Colombo & Ghislieri, 2008)—this result was surprising. It is likely that the statistically-significant differences between teacher/mothers and non-mother teachers on the FWC scale were at least partially due to the wording of the questions on that measure. As pointed out by Waumsley, Houston, and Marks (2010) the specific wording of questions on family-work conflict measures may exclude those people who do not have children or partners RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 235 at home—an assertion supported by the observation of Tetrick and Buffardi (2006) that there is no reference to personal life (i.e., areas of life that are extra-work and extra-family) on many measures, including this one. The scale that I used asked participants to quantify the conflict they experienced between family and work; wording that was perhaps irrelevant to those participants who lived alone or did not otherwise conceptualize their living arrangements as comprising “family” (i.e., a partner but no children). This does not explain why there were not similar differences found for the WFC scale as the items were worded similarly, but where both mothers and non-mothers reported similarly high levels of work interference with family. All participants reported higher incidences of WFC than FWC. Teacher/mothers’ reports of WFC were higher for both time- and strain-based interference of work on family than they were for the FWC scales assessing these same aspects. As visible in Table 3, means for the WFC scales were 2.91 for time-based interference and 3.11 for strain-based interference of work interference with family; FWC values were 2.54 for time-based family interference with work and 2.12 for strain-based. For non-mothers, these same values were 2.76 and 2.89 on the WFC scale and 1.80 and 1.72 on the FWC scale. This result suggests that teacher/mothers and non-mothers both experience significant interference from work responsibilities on their home and family lives but that the teacher/mothers simultaneously experience time- and strain-based challenges to their work from their family responsibilities. Whether because of wording that referred specifically to family rather than life or because they did not have the responsibility of children of their own at home, the non-mother participants in this sample appeared not to have the same levels of family interference with work as the teacher/mothers. Besides the possibility that non-mothers did not find the FWC questions relevant to them, it is also possible that this difference is related to differences in coping style such as those RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 236 that have been noted in comparisons of men’s and women’s FWC where gender has been nonsignificant when coping style was controlled (Kirchmeyer, 1993). In other research comparing the WFC/FWC experiences of men and women, Colombo and Ghislieri (2008) found perceptions of work interference with family to be similar for men and women but found selfreports of family interference with work to be greater for men than women. Suggestions such as these perhaps point to the high levels of competence that women tend to have in continuing to work in challenging HP positions in such ways as they are able to simultaneously manage (and perhaps minimize) family interference with work more effectively than men in similar positions: this supposition clearly requires additional study, especially since other researchers have found the opposite (Higgins, et al., 1994). The finding that teacher/mothers’ time-based FWC scores decreased as the ages of their youngest children increased fits with findings from Higgins et al. (1994) who also noted parents’ reports of FWC and WFC decreased as their children grew older. While it is possible that this decrease is related to the changing needs of those children (and for a parent to be the one to meet them), it might also be possible that it is when children are entering into their teens that their mothers feel they have the “psychological capital” (Allen, et al., 2012) to avoid experiences of conflict, although that particular conclusion is maybe not supported by this current set of results. For the sample of teacher/mothers included in this work, self-reports of resilience in the home domain decreased as the ages of their youngest children increased (r = .193), suggesting that even as they reported decreased levels of time-based interference of family needs with work, their sense of resilience at home was decreasing. It appears that as children get older they may have fewer time-based needs that interfere with time their teacher/mothers need for work, but that these teacher/parents also feel less resilient at home as RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 237 their children get older. This may be because resilience as assessed by the CD-RISC is focused on psychological aspects of resilience, while the relevant reports of FWC had to do with time. From a developmental perspective, it makes sense that as children get older they begin to rely less on their parents to meet all their needs (which would correlate with decreased time-based FWC) and, simultaneously, that their drive for individuation—a primary goal of adolescence— might wear on parents to the extent that teacher/mothers feel their resilience at home is compromised. According to the ways in which the PNI group participants saw the survey stories as describing predominately external or internal sources of resilience, there were some mild trends that correlated with the WFC/FWC scores: higher scores on the WFC/FWC behaviour-based scales tended to be found more to the external side of the scale, suggesting that the story summaries shared by the teacher/mothers responsible for those scores utilized more external than internal resilience strategies. For the strain- and time-based scales on these measures, teacher/mothers’ stories were organized in such a way that higher scores affiliated more with internal sources of resilience than external. I characterized these trends as mild as the distributions of high and low scores were interspersed across the internal/external continuum rather than clustered at one end or the other, which meant that interpretations were based on the quantity of notably high scores on either side of the scale’s halfway point rather than based on relative extremity. As behaviour-based conflicts would necessarily involve people—even if just the teacher herself—it seems reasonable that the most effective means of support could also be an external support such as other people. For pre-service teachers, external resources in the form of supportive relationships in the working context are essential (Le Cornu, 2009; Le Cornu 2013; Mansfield, et al., 2012; Mansfield, et al., 2016; Leroux, 2018). Given that the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 238 training period would also be a time when teachers would be learning how to minimize problematic behaviours by mimicking and receiving support from more experienced colleagues, this could then set a pattern for future interactions that were similarly challenging to be dealt with in similarly relational ways. As both time and strain pressures might be made more acute by interactions with other people (e.g., due to the requirements of social niceties, the potential for other people to introduce new needs, etc.), the tendency for resilience in those cases to rely on internal sources of resilience also makes sense. Suggested Patterns Regarding Resilience and Teaching/Parenting Compared to two random samples of American adults, the mean resilience scores of this sample were lower but (barely) within one standard deviation of larger samples taken in the United States. Referring to Table 3, sample-wide (N = 193) resilience in consideration of work had a mean (and standard deviation) of 27.80 (5.47) The at-home reports given by the 122 teacher/mothers who completed that part of the survey had a mean of 27.07 (6.17). As reported in the manual to the CD-RISC (Davidson & Connor, 2016), mean scores on the CD-RISC (10)—the same version that I used—were 32.1 (5.8) for a 458-person national American random-digit-dialed sample and 31.8 (5.4) for a 764-person community random-digit-dialed sample in Memphis. Similar means have been reported for samples taken from parts of the world outside of North America. Although I do not have any comparable statistics for Canadians nor teachers specifically, this comparison could indicate that the sample of teachers (and teacher/mothers) who participated in this research felt slightly less resilient than other North Americans. In this section, I will summarize the trends and relationships that came to light and were associated with resilience but were not specifically connected to either teaching-related stress or RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 239 WFC/FWC scores. I will first describe the remaining patterns that I shared in the Findings chapter but have not yet considered and will then deliberate the extent to which the indications of resilience that I expected to find were indeed indicated by these results. Indications of Resilience Patterns in the “Emotion” and “Time” themes suggested a meaningful connection between increasing child age and decreasing resilience: at home within the “Emotion” theme and at work within the “Time” theme. Perhaps impaired resilience is most logical in parents of younger children because they are so dependent on caregivers for all their needs—although consistent, reliable, satisfactory care during the day may help to alleviate some of the need for resilience on the part of parents except in those cases where children are sick and unable to attend daycare. However, as children get older, they start to have busier schedules of their own—schedules that require parents to arrange their own schedules to be able to provide transportation and supervision for these extra-curricular activities, which likely then takes away from time available for work demands. Teenagers demonstrate yet another aspect of need as they are at a developmental stage during which they are individuating and, as such, more prone to challenge expectations while they are also growing physically and emotionally. As such, this developmental stage likely contributes to additional strain on parents’ resilience regarding time and emotion. Further supporting this possibility, the “Time” theme also had the fewest number of CD-RISC scores above 29—as visible in Figure 23, only 24% of the scores in this theme were above this score. The proportion of high resilience scores in the “Time” theme was 12% lower than that of the “Staying Healthy” theme (Figure 19), which at 36%, was the theme that had the highest proportion of CD-RISC scores above 29 (i.e., red, orange, or blue on the bar graphs). Tied at RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 240 31%, “Emotion” and “Family” had the second highest proportion, while 28% of “Working with People” and 27% of “Perspective” scores were above 29. “Time” had the fewest scores above 29 (24%). Although these proportions are similar, it appears that perhaps the stories in “Staying Healthy” were most indicative of high resilience as it had the highest proportion of high scores. Looking at Figure 19 where these data are displayed, this theme appears to not only have a relatively high proportion of scores in the top range, but also a roughly even distribution of the scores between its five archetypes. There are a few possible reasons why the “Staying Healthy” theme might have had the greatest proportion of high CD-RISC scores. It was composed of archetypes that the PNI participants created based on the stories’ inclusion of specific strategies that helped the storytellers’ resilience. As per the examples in Table 11, many of the stories included references to being deliberate in taking personal time and using distraction and other coping strategies. While not absent from other themes, it is likely that the bulk of this collective awareness and implementation of specific coping strategies is related to the trend in question. Other stories referred to teachers’ struggles to cope, which could be indicative of a greater need for resilience and therefore a greater proportion of high CD-RISC scores to explain their continuation in the education field. Finally, perhaps there is a connection between the focus on health and the higher resilience scores. Although “exercise” was mentioned in only 11 stories, references to “staying fit” or specific exercises such as walking and yoga also appeared in the data. In general, these physical exertions would likely have the fastest and most reliable physiological effects of any of the various other coping strategies that helped the teachers in this sample to sustain their resilience. Based on the extant literature, I suspect it is likely that this theme taps into a connection between wellness and “intentional healthiness.” Although not a psychological RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 241 factor and so not included in my list, exercise is well-recognized as helping to sustain resilience—operationalized as resistance and/or reduction in mental health symptoms (e.g., Deslandes, et al., 2009; Epel, Prather, Puterman, & Tomiyama, 2018; Mikkelsen, Stojanovska, Polenakovic, Bosevski, & Apostolopolous, 2017). Awareness of specific strategies may have also been behind the observation that archetypes in the “Emotion” and “Family” themes had high proportions of greater-than-average CD-RISC scores. These themes made frequent reference to feelings, often with similar, familyrelated referents. Like the “Staying Healthy” theme, the “Family” theme had a relatively even distribution of high scores among the various archetypes; this was not the case for “Emotion,” where there were two archetypes that had at least double the number of high scores as all but one of the other five. As “Emotional Baggage” and “Internal Pressure” had the most stories in this theme, this preponderance of high scores was not overly surprising, however, it was a trend not seen in any of the other themes. This is perhaps a reflection of the greater reliability of certain emotion-focused strategies over others and the greater variability of strategies within that theme. Mansfield et al. (2012) found that the majority of graduating and early-career teachers in their research included some aspect of emotion-related resilience in their descriptions of a resilient teacher. Just as the “Emotion” theme in my own work referred to a variety of ways in which this aspect of resilience might be enacted, so too did Mansfield et al.’s sample enumerate a multitude of emotion-related skills—many of which were reflective of emotional regulation and equilibrium-promoting skills. It is possible that a similar phenomenon was behind the trend noted in my own work—perhaps although many emotion-related skills were shared in the survey answer stories, the majority of those that most supported resilience affiliated within the two aforementioned archetypes. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 242 In the sample of “Family” stories, I chose to include excerpts that referred to the storytellers’ awareness that they were experiencing challenging feelings. According to Stanton and Franz (1999), when females use this type of emotional approach coping during stressful encounters, they tend to become less stressed and more satisfied with their lives. They posit that “gender appears to be a prime candidate as a moderator of the relation between emotional approach coping and adaptive outcomes in stressful situations” (Stanton & Franz, 1999, p. 101), wherein women experience this strategy as beneficial and men as detrimental. As all participants in this work were female, there is a possibility that the type of emotional awareness demonstrated in excerpts such as “I felt hopeless because I can’t drop [my son] off at school” may be evidence of successful emotion-focused coping strategies that contributed to the higher resilience scores. As I did not select the representative stories based on their associated CDRISC scores, it is also possible that none of the stories selected for a particular archetype were from participants with high resilience. Perhaps participants in the “Family” group reported higher levels of resilience because they relied on what Hochschild (1997/2000) termed the “potential self.” In this idealized version of the future self, obligations and responsibilities are no longer sources of stress and it is possible to do things out of desire rather than necessity. In “Family” and most of the other themes, there were stories from participants focused on “just getting through” the immediate school day, term, year, etcetera so that they might engage in desired personal and/or family activities at that future time wherein they were no longer just “surviving.” This strategy could be associated with higher resilience in the present if people were idealizing the future and minimizing potentially negative effects that might still be highly salient at that future time (i.e., using avoidance). It may have been a demonstration of what Whyte (2001) describes as “speed” RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 243 (i.e., “busyness”). Whyte describes potential repercussions of this strategy, warning that if “it becomes all-consuming, speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal” (pp. 117-118). While it is very possible that this is a good fit for many teacher/mothers’ experiences, it is also possible that— rather than avoidance—the anecdotes in question described an actual resilience strategy related to optimism and/or sense of significance, wherein the storytellers were confident that they would meet their aspirations but not necessarily in the immediate future. Perhaps this was evidence of what Mogilner, Hershfield, and Aaker (2018) described as taking an “elevated perspective” of time, wherein individuals consider goals, behaviour, and time-use over an extended span of time that does not dichotomize present and future. Individuals who planned from this perspective might experience enhanced resilience as “the elevated perspective might help reduce the stress, guilt, and regret from not being able to spend time in a desired and worthy way, just because it is not possible to do it all right now (italics in original)” (Mogilner, et al., 2018, p. 46). With a shift from trying to fit everything in all at once in the present to recognizing that there have been opportunities to take advantage of opportunities in the past and will be again in the future, teachers may be more readily able to focus on “when” rather than “whether” a dilemma will be resolved—taking a long view of their timespan. As family is a facet of life that can be particularly prone to thoughts of past, present, and future due to the constant reminders of continuity and change inherent in long-term relationships, it is unsurprising that this suggestion of the potential self emerged in this theme. In general, relationships are often taken for granted in the present in favour of nostalgia about the past or impatience for the future; however, their importance in resilience is undiminished. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 244 Sources of Resilience There were indications that data collected during this research fit into the sources of resilience described in the Literature Review. To finish this discussion of specific results (before moving on to recommendations based on the findings and their significance), I will explicate connections between this work’s qualitative data and the sources previously outlined. Even limiting this overview to the quotes shared in Tables 8 through 14 (not including Table 13), I expect that links between this work and that of important sources such as Reivich & Shatté (2002) and Palmer (1998) will be evident. Self-efficacy. Just as it is significantly represented in the resilience literature, so too was the importance of self-efficacy clear in the data shared by this work’s participants. For example, representative quotes from within the “Emotion” theme (Table 8) refer to disagreeing with a fellow teacher even though it was difficult (evidence that she thought her input would lead to change), thinking of potential future options (evidence that she was maintaining sense of control over her life), and reducing the time spent being paid for teaching work (taking deliberate measures to stay effective—although taking a reduction in teaching time is frequently only a reduction in student contact hours, not overall work, and is indicative that the work of teaching requires systemic alteration so that teachers do not need to reduce their personal income to feel they are able to manage and enjoy their lives). Six of the seven stories from “Working with People” (Table 9) showed particularly clear links to self-efficacy via reference to taking charge of a situation. Whether to keep a class safe, reassure a parent, help cope with grief, or have an EA moved, each of the six stories were told from the apparent assumption that there was a way for the storyteller to effect change in her situation. The seventh story in this theme also evoked self-efficacy: the progenitor of that story RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 245 shared how her view of her self was challenged when she was not able to do things according to her regular (and regularly successful) methods and what an effort it was (with the support of coworkers) to move through it without letting it permanently affect her self-efficacy. “Perspective” (Table 10) and “Staying Healthy” (Table 11) had many references that signified self-efficacy in action via persistence. In the former theme, one teacher/mother talked about “staying the course” due to confidence in her knowledge and abilities, while another made reference to “kicking butt” as a teacher to get through a challenging time. Stories from “Staying Healthy” included one teacher’s reference to staying busy to avoid over-thinking, and another’s assertion that she was “sticking to her guns” regarding a parent disagreement. Also in this theme, one participant made a particularly powerful reference to self-efficacy when she referred to her “strong voice at school.” Perceiving that her “voice” was strong was a clear indication that she felt she had agency at work and was influential in the school community. Stories in Table 12 (“Time”) were less obviously connected to self-efficacy; the recounting of ways in which teachers deliberately manipulated their work and home situations to sustain their feelings of satisfaction could be considered suggestive of agential action as they did what they thought they needed to do to sustain themselves. One story recounted feelings of accomplishment in being able to manage time and complete tasks, one described practicing “radical acceptance” in appreciating things as they were, and one explained a choice not to work full-time as it was not enjoyable (fortunately for the participant, this was a choice she was able to make—a reduction in take-home pay not being a viable option for many workers due to financial concerns). Each of these stories intimated a sense of empowered self-reliance wherein the tellers were able to plan for and take ownership of their successes. The stories in the “Family” theme (Table 14) demonstrated similar links to self-efficacy. In “Family,” recognition RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 246 that goals were achievable and that challenges did not equate to impossibilities might be equated with a sense of strong self-efficacy as they appeared to rely on an assumption that things were changeable and that it was possible for the storyteller to be a person to have a hand in that change. Interpreted in this way, these last excerpts also had clear links to optimism. Optimism and attributional style. Besides the aforementioned stories from the “Family” theme and assuming that optimism reflects a general disposition and operates from an assumption that “human behaviour is goal-oriented and that the value of a goal and confidence about reaching it keep individuals motivated to move toward it” (Sorenson & Harris, 2012, p. 344), there were a few other indications of optimism as a source of resilience in the collected stories. In Table 8, the “Emotion” theme had links to optimism in one storyteller’s reference to thinking of future plans—presumably as a more desirable option than whatever her current situation happened to be. In the “Family” theme (Table 14), one story made reference to relying on “grit” as key to getting through challenging times and expecting things to get better, while a second one talked about looking forward to a new challenge as she prepared to start a new position in a leadership role. In the “Perspective” theme (Table 10), one contributor’s description of “staying the course” due to confidence in her knowledge and abilities could also be interpreted as indicative of optimism: why would one wish to stay a course that was not anticipated to yield a positive result? Given the reference to challenging parents, this last story was also linked to attributional style; choosing to be confident in her abilities and “stay the course” rather than succumbing to doubt because of challenging parents showed awareness that the challenges in question were externally located—at least in part. There were other indications that teachers’ attributional styles and causal analyses were helpful in sustaining their resilience. A second story in the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 247 “Perspective” theme referred to recognition that it was possible to make a student’s trauma her own and of being mindful not to allow this to happen. In the “Working with People” theme (Table 9), accurate assessments of challenges as external to the storytellers were evident in one teacher’s recognition of an EA’s role in her lessons falling flat and another’s recognition that home stressors (i.e., a separation) was contributing to her mind not always being “100% there.” Finally, from the “Family” theme (Table 14), one teacher/mother’s admission that she felt hopeless because she couldn’t drop her son at school was demonstrative of attributional style as she attributed the source of her feelings of hopelessness with the specifics of the situation, not with a perception that she was somehow inadequate as a mother. This ability to recognize and name her specific emotion could also be indicative of another source of resilience: emotion. Emotion. Having developed an entire theme devoted to the suggestions of emotion and empathy, it should not be surprising that many stories indicated teacher/mothers’ use and/or awareness of emotion-focused strategies in their resilience. These indications were primarily to do with empathy and emotional regulation, although—to a lesser extent (assuming that one counts its use as part of emotional regulation as just emotional regulation)—impulse control was also featured. Being able to accurately identify emotions as demonstrated by the teacher/mother in the “Family” theme’s “hopeless” story (mentioned the last section) is one aspect of emotional regulation and one way that appropriate supports might be mustered to aid in a resilient response—including sharing with others to increase social supports. Emotional regulation was further evident in stories such as that from the “Families” theme (Table 11) that talked about learning to be comfortable telling people “no,” which suggests that the storyteller was able to use emotional regulation to avoid becoming preoccupied with a sense that she was inconveniencing or bothering others due to her newfound abilities to set and maintain clear RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 248 boundaries. In the “Working with People” theme (Table 9), emotional regulation was implied in stories that talked about dealing with challenging students and parents without becoming upset, as well as in the multiple stories that related finding ways to deal with challenging personal situations (e.g., feelings of inadequacy, loss of a parent, departure of a spouse). Emotional regulation was also evident in the story about being patient while advocating for a traumatized student (Table 10—“Perspective”) and in the story about managing feelings of not doing enough by noticing and appreciating the present—shared as part of the “Time” theme extraction in Table 12. Besides emotional regulation, use of empathy was also evident in the stories. In “Working with People” (Table 9), there were stories telling about empathy for a difficult parent and a sabotaging EA. In Table 8 (“Emotions”), empathy as a source of resilience was especially evident in the story about finding ways to use self-care to help work through the feelings of helplessness that arose from a sense of not being able to do enough for students. Without empathy for the children in her charge, it is likely that this teacher would not have been able to continue effectively working with them as their needs could have become overwhelming. In a related vein, it is significant that this teacher was able to recognize that there was potential for her students’ needs to affect her personally. Had she not been clearly taking care to avoid compassion fatigue (i.e., using self-care), this teacher’s concern could have been worrisome, but—as it is—it appears that she was taking appropriate steps to protect herself as she also worked to do her best to meet the needs of her students. Besides these examples, empathy was also apparent in three of the other themes: • “Perspective” (Table 10) included one story that referred to empathizing with a student enough to continue advocating for him and taking steps to avoid letting RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 249 his trauma become hers. Two other stories talked about being patient while advocating with parents and for a traumatized student. • “Staying Healthy” (Table 11) included recountings of recognizing emotionally draining contexts (i.e., students in need of physical care) and the challenge to stay empathic; it also included a story about (sort of) empathizing with an angry parent by letting them know “I’m sorry you feel that way.” • “Family” (Table 14) had a story that talked about one teacher/mother’s empathy for her family in choosing not to work as much as she wanted. While empathy and other emotion-focused strategies were widespread, they were not the most commonly mentioned source of resilience; that distinction belongs to relationships. Relationships. As is the case in much of the resilience research, relationships featured significantly in my findings and were frequently mentioned or referred to in each of the six themes. While frequently mentioned, there was minimal variation in the ways is which relationships were characterized as sources of resilience. There were references to asking for support from school support teams and/or administration and/or EAs in the “Emotion” and “Working with People” themes, and from unspecified colleagues/coworkers in “Working with People” and “Perspective.” There were also additional school-specific mentions that did not involve EAs, support teams, administration, or colleagues: “Perspective” (Table 10) included an example of avoiding interactions with colleagues to focus on student relationships (i.e., teaching), and “Staying Healthy” (Table 11) had stories that made reference to reliance on being welcoming to build relationship and win over a hostile father who disagreed with a teacher’s methods. Friends (which could have included colleagues) or a non-specific “support RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 250 network” were two other types of potentially work-related relationships featured in the “Emotion” and “Working with People” themes. There were also multiple mentions of important supports outside of the work-specific sphere: family—and specifically husbands—both featured significantly in the “Emotion,” “Working with People,” and “Family” themes. “Perspective” also included references to family relationships (without mentioning husbands) as a source of resilience; similarly, “Staying Healthy” included specific reference to a husband, but not family in general. Finally, “Emotion” and “Working with People” also included references to the importance of support from friends, and two stories in the “Family” theme (Table 14) made mention of daycare as an important relational support, referring to excellent child care and reaching out to daycare to help develop a workable plan. Of all the sources of resilience proposed in the Literature Review, relationships (in all their various iterations) had the most mentions. As I will describe in detail later in this chapter, this could make relationships an ideal focus for supporting teachers’ resilience. Along with relationships and self-efficacy, helping teachers to connect with their sense of vocation may be another fruitful avenue. Vocation and sense of significance. Some researchers have suggested that more intrinsically motivated employees have greater adaptability and well-being (Lohbeck, 2018) and see a greater effect on the extent to which their satisfaction with work roles contribute to daily family satisfaction (Ilies, Liu, Liu, & Zheng, 2017), which might connect to the idea of vocation. Perhaps teachers who gain satisfaction from the work itself do so in part because they see their work as valuable and meaningful, (i.e., as a vocation). Each theme had references to teachers’ sense of vocation and of seeing their work as significant in the stories shared on the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 251 surveys—although many of these references were not as easily teased out as the other potential sources of resilience I have named. Sense of significance was the more easily elucidated of these two aspects. The reference to “awesome students” in the same story that referred to students’ challenges in the “Emotions” theme (Table 8) could be one way that teacher contributors’ awareness of their work’s importance might be noted; in being able to see the good and the potential in her students despite the challenges they may have brought to the classroom, the teacher is indicating that she saw her specific contributions as having value. A similar sense—along with a suggestion of vocation—is apparent in the “Working with “People” (Table 9) in the stories that demonstrate their progenitors’ confidence in their choice of career: one teacher’s mention of her teaching skill set as her “thing,” another’s confidence that she was in the right role in spite of EA sabotage, and a third’s insistence on going to work as she worked through a separation. Regarding this last point, it is again possible that this story might also be problematic in that it appears to be indicative of using work as an avoidance strategy. However, without a broader context within which to position it, I am accepting the story at its face value as an answer to a question that asked participants to talk about how they maintained their resilience. The sense of confidence from the “Working with People” theme was also evident in “Perspective” (Table 10) and “Staying Healthy” (Table 11). The former included stories with mentions of “staying the course” due to confidence in knowledge and abilities and a sense of significance as an advocate (i.e., focusing on interests of children to advocate for them). The latter theme has stories that make reference to teachers’ convictions in their work as a “strong voice at school,” as being a person who ”stuck to [her] guns,” and as someone who knew that she “found working was best for [her].” In Table 12—“Time”—three of the four stories suggested that the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 252 women’s recognition of their significant worth at home and at work was something that guides them in their wellness-sustaining decision making: to take the time to manage their time; to recognize that there is only so much that they can change on their own and that it is important to accept and appreciate what “is;” and to work an amount that is sufficient for her to feel balanced at work and at home. The “Family” theme (Table 14) included one teacher’s lamentation that she would “love to do more and work harder” at her teaching job and another’s feeling “high” at having a great career and the offer of an administrative position. While these are not necessarily indicative of vocation, they so suggest a sense of significance at work through the positive emotion that appears to be associated with these participants’ work-related achievements and even just the work itself. Summary of the Findings’ Significance Relationships emerged as a key theme when teachers (mothers or not) talked about the ways in which they were able to sustain their work and home responsibilities. As suggested by the patterns displayed in Figures 6 through 9, as teacher/mothers’ children get older, the importance of relationships and “reaching out” as a central source of resilience may increase. Stories from teacher/mothers who had children 15 years or older tended to be placed towards the “external” end of the scale (the one that asked the PNI participants to determine whether each story was more suggestive of internal or external sources of coping). This is not to say that relationships are not important sources of resilience for teachers who are non-mothers or who have children younger than 15 years old. While parents whose children were between 0 and 14 years old tended to be found slightly more often on the “internal” than the “external” side of the scale (Table 5), the distributions of their stories’ inclusions on the scale suggest that they use internal and external strategies relatively equally. This finding supports previous suggestions RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 253 that life stage influences the ways in which people assign salience or importance to their various life roles (Cinamon & Rich, 2002; Cinamon & Rich, 2005a; Day and Gu, 2014; Day, Kington, et al., 2006). Luthar and Ciciolla (2015) found that satisfaction with close personal relationships such as friendships was of the utmost importance to mothers’ well-being. Perhaps as children get older, their mothers rely more on these external supports (i.e., relationships) as they have better developed social networks or because they no longer feel their children are as close to them as the family navigates the years in which individuation is paramount (thereby seeking out more contact with other close personal relationships). Another possibility is that there is a shift away from internal sources of resilience as children get older and emotional exhaustion takes a toll on internal resources, leading teacher/mothers to rely more on external sources. Self-reported scores of resilience at work appeared negatively related to five of the other measures from the survey: increasing levels of teacher stress, time-based WFC, strain-based WFC, behaviour-based WFC, and behaviour-based FWC were all correlated with decreasing levels of resilience at work. This suggests that as scores on the stress and conflict measures increased, the resilience at work scores decreased commensurately. While self-reports of resilience at work were requested from all participants, similar reports for participants’ home/family experiences were only asked of the teacher/mother participants. For this measure, decreasing resilience at home was noted to be significantly correlated with increasing strainbased and behaviour-based WFC scores. Not surprisingly, the home and work resilience scores were highly correlated with each other, indicating that increased resilience at home was strongly related to increased resilience at work. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 254 For both aspects of resilience assessed—that at home and at work—it is unclear if the decreasing resilience scores’ correlations with increasing scores on the stress and conflict measures is indicative of increased challenge leading to decreasing resilience or decreased resilience leading to increased challenge and/or impairment. As with many things in life, it is most likely that the answer to this question is “it depends.” It appears certain that there are bidirectional influences in the interactions of resilience and situations that are requiring of it (Davydov, et al., 2010; Doney, 2013; Ebersöhn, 2014; Gu, 2018; Mansfield, et al., 2012), particularly given the variable nature of teaching wherein flexibility—an ability to react in resilient ways given unfamiliar challenges—is crucial (Day & Gu, 2014; Pretsch, et al., 2012). Day and Gu (2014) emphasize that resilience is neither innate nor static, but rather “a construct that is relative, developmental, and dynamic, emphasizing the positive adaptation and development of individuals in the presence of challenging circumstances” (p. 11). This definition—especially in consideration of Doney’s (2013) observation that there is a need for mildly stressful interactions to stimulate increases in a person’s capacity for resilience so that future responses to other stressors are increasingly effective—implies that resilience is built in reaction to increasing stressors that need to be endured. In alignment with the DCS model of occupational health (Karasek & Theorell, 1990), it is possible that the relationship that emerged in this research was indicative of teachers’ experiences of “challenge stressors,” (Dawson, et al., 2016) wherein the diminished resilience was indicative of a growth phase in that area of functioning. Whether indicative of growth or not, the relationship between lower resilience and increased challenge is likely a reflection of the specific contexts in which the survey respondents found themselves at the time of their responses and that future responses (i.e., follow-up research) with the same sample would return different results. Speaking specifically RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 255 of teachers, Day and Gu (2014) affirm that resilience is a combination of dynamic processes in specific contexts so that as situations change, so might resilience—at least until adaptations and/or changes are made so that a resilient response is once again possible. Within the context of the DCS model of occupational health (Karasek & Theorell, 1990), it is when workers have high levels of control and support to buffer those job demands that are hindrances that strain is avoided; it is possible that the relationship in question is indicative of challenge regarding control and/or support. Perhaps the noted relationship between decreased resilience at work and increased challenge was related to strategies employed by the teachers in question wherein they utilized their resources to the point that they started to require replenishment (e.g., intensive self-care and/or time away from work) but that this replenishment was not forthcoming. It would not be surprising to find that as teachers continued to experience elevated stress and conflict that their resilience would be impaired: there is no such thing as an infinite resource. Perhaps the biggest question that arises from my research is: how might this finite resource be supported and optimized for teachers and other HPs. Recommendations for Reinforcing Teacher Resilience The data collected in this work signpost multiple potential interventions in the work of those who propose to support teachers and other HPs. I am confident that the strongest indication of a potential avenue for such supports was signalled by participants’ reception of and reaction to this research. Multiple surveys were returned to me with personal notes to thank me for investigating this topic. Also, after handing out the surveys to potential participants, many of the teachers that helped me with the distribution reported being privy to participants’ reflections about the experience and some were asked for additional copies to be passed on to RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 256 interested friends of participants who had already completed ones themselves. This enthusiasm was not limited to the quantitative data collection; although the number of participants was fewer, the teacher/mothers who partook of a PNI group were also unfailingly positive in their evaluation of the experience. Teachers’ enthusiastic responses to both phases of my data collection indicated to me that this is something that people care about and about which they wish to share. Feedback from the women who took part in the qualitative PNI groups was particularly significant as it indicated the potential usefulness of extrawork teacher groups as one means of bolstering teachers’ wellness. As teacher resilience is so significantly mediated by contextual and interpersonal factors (Day, et al., 2006; Day & Gu, 2014; Ebersöhn, 2014; Gu, 2018; Gu & Day, 2013), strong support networks comprised of people who understand the challenges inherent in the work of teaching are vital resources for resilient teachers (Compton, 2010; Gu, 2018; Gu & Day, 2013; Howard & Johnson, 2004; Le Cornu, 2013; Schwarze, 2018). By providing even the limited opportunity for teacher/mothers to meet and work through emotion-laden stories alongside colleagues as was provided by the PNI groups, it was evident that there is potential for similar meetings to be useful in augmenting teacher wellness by helping to build the aforementioned dedicated support network. Developing appropriate supports and/or interventions for teachers who need them is an important first step in working towards better resilience. There are already a variety of supports and interventions available to support the health and wellness of teachers; however, many of these existing supports make it incumbent upon the individual to seek them out and implement them. While I am not advocating for mandatory system-level supports for teachers and other HPs who do not already have access to a forum within which they might explore and process some of the ramifications of the emotional aspects of their work, I am strongly promoting their RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 257 availability (and, ideally, ubiquity). Based on the overwhelmingly positive response to my data collection methods, I expect that teacher process and/or peer supervision groups would be one meaningful way in which systems could better support their HPs. To help provide context for this expectation, I will review the aspects of teaching that would make this approach particularly useful for educators—including salient indications from my own research—after which I will provide suggestions for the development and implementation of teacher peersupervision groups. The Need to Support Teachers’ Mental Health Teaching is a challenging profession; it is about far more than managing classroom behaviours whilst helping students to achieve curricular goals—although this in itself is a substantial challenge. Teachers are typically required to manage multiple caregiving, instructional, assessment and organizational demands while under time pressures for each. In doing so, they are “frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes, and interests. Teachers are faced with pressures for increased efficiency in the context of contracting budgets, demands that they rigorously ‘teach the basics,’ exhortations to encourage creativity, build citizenship, [and] help students to examine their values” (Schön, 1991, p. 17). Because of these often-competing demands, teachers frequently report stress from role conflict or ambiguity— finding themselves required to do far more than they feel they are trained to do or are supported in doing (Chang, 2009; Dunham, 1992; Troman, 2000; Van Maele & Van Houtte, 2015). Besides the stories that were shared in the course of my own research, the myriad stressors one faces as a school teacher were nicely summarized by a former Ontario teacher who wrote: To be listened to and understood by management, to be respected and valued for one’s efforts, to be adequately funded and supported to be able to do your job RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 258 well: these are some requirements for job satisfaction. When budgets for educational services and support are cut, teachers are left to do more, with a more vulnerable student population, with fewer resources and less assistance. A lack of Educational Assistants, lack of timely educational testing for students who are struggling academically, and limited budgets for materials (causing teachers to feel compelled to spend out-of-pocket) are examples of stressful impacts of inadequate budgets. Funding cuts to services that support youth and families are also felt in the classroom, since teachers are on the front lines of support. Teachers know that kids who are hungry don’t learn well, that students who don’t have community activities to connect with feel alienated, that cuts in social services affect families in need (Krop, 2013). While appearing to be exhaustive, this list does not touch upon the personal, socioemotional aspects of teaching—the phenomena for which I am advocating for formalized supports. Covered thoroughly in the Literature Review, I will provide a succinct summary of some of these socioemotional aspects again to ensure the rationale for my recommendations is unmistakable. The Socioemotional Work of Teaching Regardless of their years of experience or the grades they teach, in the course of each school year teachers typically build and maintain relationships with the students in their classes, teaching colleagues, school support staff and administrators, and students’ parents; it is intensely social work. Being able to foster and maintain these myriad relationships as positive is an important part of teaching well as poor work relationships can be very stressful and may adversely affect teachers’ well-being (Grenville-Cleave & Boniwell, 2012). Seibert and Seibert RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 259 (2007) postulated that these adverse effects on well-being may be partly due to teachers’ reluctance to admit that there are circumstances in which they need help. In building a classroom community, teachers often invest themselves heavily in their work in order to effectively build and maintain relationships. As their personal and professional selves become enmeshed, admitting to needing help may threaten their sense of professional and personal selfefficacy (Day & Gu, 2014; Nias, 1996; Siebert & Siebert, 2007). Besides being strongly social, teaching is a form of emotional and/or caring labour: teachers are held to standards of practice that dictate how they may express emotion and may require them to perform as if they feel a certain way regardless of their actual feelings as students are always to be treated with respect and dignity (according to the 2014 BCTF Code of Ethics among other sources). While teaching, it is frequently necessary to suppress one’s actual emotions by either hiding them behind those that are more “work appropriate” (surface acting) or working to actually change them (deep acting); the former strategy has been found to take a toll on people’s emotional well-being (Hochschild, 1983/2003). While deep acting may actually be protective against emotional exhaustion (Phillip & Schupbach, 2010), research suggests that surface acting increases teachers’ risk for the emotional exhaustion and depersonalization aspects of burnout (Akm, Aydin, Erdogan, & Demirkasmoglu, 2014; Chang, 2009; Naring, Biet, & Brouwers, 2006; Wrobel, 2013). Work as an HP—such as a teacher—often involves caring for those who are distressed in some way. Given that many children have challenging home situations and bring the consequences of these challenges with them to school, the potential for secondary trauma leading to compassion fatigue is endemic in the typical classroom. Teachers regularly work with children who are coping with a variety of traumas and stressors at home and bringing the feelings engendered from their home situations with them to RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 260 school. These feelings (and the ways in which they are displayed at school) may influence behaviours in such ways that the class is disrupted—a situation generally left to the teacher to rectify or at least minimize lest these social and emotional needs derail the entire day. The potential for teachers to experience compassion fatigue and other negative effects of caring for others is particularly high when they do not have adequate social support (AbrahamCook, 2012). Conversely, the benefits of encouraging teachers to support each other extend far beyond the individual. Bedard asserted that to best support children’s resilience “we must support those outside of families who serve as children’s caregivers” (2004, p. 51), while Fullan (2007) has stated that teachers need to have a variety of opportunities to support and be supported by other teachers in order to bring about and sustain positive, continuous improvements in terms of their work. Mulholland, McKinlay, and Sproule (2017) asserted that teachers “are in need of the physical and emotional space to reflect on and make sense of the changing context of work before they reach the point where their wellbeing is compromised” (p. 181), especially those with ten-plus years of teaching experience (in Ireland and Scotland anyways). This experience-specific recommendation was due to rapid and drastic changes to the contexts of teaching in those countries; however, given the regular shifts that frequently characterize a change in government or direction in educational theory, it is not unreasonable to suppose that teachers with a decade or more experience might benefit from the time and space for reflection in many places. I suggest that teacher peer supervision groups might accomplish this while also helping teachers maintain good mental health through increased self-awareness. Psychological strain in teaching. While often very collaborative when working towards what they perceive to be best practices in supporting positive outcomes for their students, teachers appear not to be so proactive when it comes to taking care of themselves and RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 261 their own needs as human beings (e.g., Abraham-Cook, 2012; Beltman, Mansfield, & Price, 2011). Staffroom gripe sessions aside, it is uncommon for teachers to share with colleagues struggles that they may be having with particular students or with aspects of their professional practice in any meaningful way, especially once they are no longer pre-service or early career teachers. As such, psychological supports for teachers have been earmarked as one area in need of improvement in the field of education (Leroux, 2018). Uncertainty regarding the ethical implications of discussing students may stifle some teachers’ willingness to share in groups, although this need not be the case. While the BCTF code of ethics states that teachers must respect the confidential nature of information concerning students and refrain from acting in ways that might be viewed as exploiting teacherstudent relationships, it also allows for teachers to review their practices with colleagues. Not knowing that others’ classroom challenges may be similar to their own, teachers may be reluctant to seek support out of fears they may appear weak or unable to manage (Dunham, 1992; Hayes, 2006)—a fear that was echoed in the survey stories and PNI group conversations. One mid-career teacher/mother (“Teacher A”) talked about her frustration with a challenging student, saying: I have a student (no designation) who has quite oppositional behaviour. Despite several conversations with his parents, they do not really see what I see. Daily, I never know if he will be “on” or “off.” Our EA time is almost none so I get no support. He is really beginning to affect the learning in my class. I really try to stay calm, but it is really hard. I am much more open now with SST [School Support Team] and admin (than I would have been before my M.Ed.) about what is going on and my challenges. I am asking for help (not receiving much RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 262 so far?) but I keep asking. In the past I would have just tried to deal with it on my own so I didn’t appear unable or “weak.” As she indicated, it was because of her experience and possibly her graduate studies that this teacher felt comfortable asking for the support that she so clearly needed. Had she been earlier in her career, it is not unlikely that she would have stuck to her initial non-strategy of trying to provide for the student in question—along with the remainder of her class and her own children at home—without asking for help because of her concerns about appearing insufficient. The opportunity for teachers at different stages of their careers to share their experiences in a group setting could help new practitioners more readily recognize the full extent of their chosen careers and prepare them for circumstances such as those in which Teacher A found herself. A story excerpt from “Teacher B” helps illustrate how this might be helpful: When I first started teaching, I felt I had it more "together" than I do now. I attribute some of that to ignorance (I didn't know what I didn't know) and having more energy. As the years progressed, I definitely did not have a balance. I have made a concerted effort over the last few years to regain that balance. It is a constant struggle. I often feel guilty that I'm not doing enough. Again, this teacher expressed feelings of insufficiency even though she was also an experienced educator who clearly had reflective capabilities. Perhaps if she had access to a group of others with whom she could share her experiences and have them normalized (and her feelings validated), Teacher B could begin to be less concerned that she was not doing “enough” and find support to accept herself and appreciate the ways in which she undoubtedly was “enough.” As Dunham (1992) suggests, “acceptance is difficult for people who associate stress with personal weakness and professional incompetence. For them, admitting to classroom RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 263 difficulties is tantamount to admitting that they are bad teachers” (p. 1). As long as specific students’ names were not used, and teachers were comfortable that they were not acting against their professional code of ethics, the systematic and sustained use of facilitated peer supervision groups is one way that teachers might support each other through shared challenges without fear of appearing weak or incompetent; they would not be alone. Psychological strain in the larger context. Teachers are not unique in their need for mental health support, especially for concerns related to stress, anxiety, and depression. Some American reports estimate that stressed employees have 46% higher health care costs than nonstressed peers (Goetzel, et al., 1998). In Canada in 2010, 27% of working adults reported having “quite” or “extremely” stressful lives on the General Social Survey, with professionals being one of the groups most likely to report being highly stressed (Crompton, 2011). In 2012, one in six Canadians over the age of 15 reported having had a need for mental health care within the previous 12 months, with counselling reported as the need that was least likely to be met (Sunderland & Findlay, 2013). Even for Canadian workers with access to Employee and Family Assistance Programs (EFAPs), paid coverage for counselling is typically limited to between three and six sessions—a benefit out of reach of the majority of Canadian workers as employees covered by EFAPs make up less than 50% of all workers in every province and territory in Canada (Institute of Health Economics, 2010). With such a gap between access to services and perceived needs, interventions that do not rely on a one-on-one relationship with a mental health professional may help to address the problematic access to mental health care for individuals in all areas and rural or isolated areas—where the lack of qualified, professional personnel may be especially problematic—in particular (Ryan-Nicholls & Haggarty, 2007). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 264 Why Use Groups to Support Teacher Mental Health? Given the noted challenges in accessing supports, providing group-based support for teachers is a cost-effective strategy that might pay dividends far greater than just helping to provide normalization for common lived experiences. As there is ample evidence that group therapies can be more effective than individual self-guided therapies in particular, I expect there would be psychotherapeutic benefits to providing this type of forum for teachers, especially if in a form such as a monthly peer supervision group, rather than as weekly group therapy. A monthly meeting would not only be an easier commitment for individual teachers to meet, it would also be more feasible for school systems to provide the time and the space for them to happen. Having this type of support in place for teachers might have similarly positive effects as group therapy given that teachers are HPs for whom, even under optimal conditions, teaching is a stressful job that takes a toll on mental health (Borg, Riding, & Falzon, 1991) and for whom this type of profession-specific support is not currently widely available. One exception to this gap in resources is the recently developed ENTREE program (Silva, et al., 2018). This six-module workshop is one way in which a group model of teacher resilience enhancement has begun to be tested. While pilot participants largely gave positive feedback regarding the content of the workshops, they did suggest groups smaller than the 20 – 25 participants from the pilot and asked for more opportunities to share and discuss real-life scenarios to be able to learn from each other and enhance their practical skills. While this model undoubtedly has promise, I suspect that a less rigid, peer supervision group could be equally beneficial—especially as it would incorporate the aspects identified by the ENTREE pilot project participants as lacking. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 265 Benefits of a Peer-Supervision Model The benefits of peer supervision have been described for psychotherapists (Clark, 2007; Osofsky, 2009), school counsellors (Agnew, Vaught, Getz, & Fortune, 2000; Benshoff & Paisley, 1996), and early childhood educators (Bove, et al., 2018; DuBois, 2010; Sharmahd, Peeters, & Bushati, 2018). While K – 12 teachers do not typically belong to any of these groups, they are similarly engaged in work that requires attunement to others. Building and sustaining this attunement can be just as draining for teachers as for other HPs, especially given the greater number of children with whom they are simultaneously working. Leroux (2018) suggested that psychological training for teachers overall needs improvement so that preservice teachers especially are “supported in developing their well-being and work satisfaction; managing their emotions, stress, and workload; finding a work-life balance; and maintaining realistic expectations” (p. 125)—a proposal supported by recent work by Beltman, Mansfield, Wosnitza, Weatherby-Fell, and Broadley (2018), who proposed using online modules to accomplish this goal. Outside of very remote locales, I am convinced that in-person groups would be more beneficial than an online support. Geddes (2006) and Herman and Reinke (2015) provide suggestions for developing a group model wherein teachers could support each other in exploring their challenges in working with students with a disorganized attachment history (Geddes, 2006) and a variety of other common teacher stressors (Herman & Reinke, 2015). This mutual support could provide multiple benefits including increasing their protective resources, capacity for reflexivity, and social connections—each of which I will describe at some length. Increased protective resources. Having a group of peers with whom they were familiar and comfortable and with whom regular meetings were scheduled could provide teachers with a RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 266 sense of security. Just the awareness that this group was available to access in a sustained manner could act as a protective resource for teachers seeking productive ways to cope with the various demands upon them and better cope with the challenges (Ebersöhn, 2014). Participation in the group could provide further supportive resources by providing opportunities for validation and interpersonal connections, which might also help teachers tap into their resilience so that they could cope more effectively when on their own and without the immediate support of the other group members. Knowledge of this availability of time and space for teachers to share their experiences and frustrations with peers has been shown in other work to provide shared comfort (Bos-Wierda & Barendsen, 2012), while also promoting reflectivity at the individual and team levels (Sharmahd, et al., 2018). Increased reflective capacity. Reflexivity is another important skill that could be incorporated into a group model to help teachers improve their self-protective behaviours (Hamilton, 2008) and maintenance of personal boundaries (Rothschild, 2006). A support group that helps teachers to “accurately label their emotional experiences, identify ineffective patterns of judgments of classroom events, and reflect on the emotions they feel and the judgments they make that underlie the emotions” (Chang, 2009, p. 212) could help participants to normalize their experiences and to understand how their emotions affect and are affected by their work. Given the complexity of a typical teaching position, feelings of desperation, isolation, and distress are normal and make sense. Without denying or minimizing these or any other emotions, this proposed model of group work would provide teachers with the opportunity to figure out how to accept and live with their emotional responses in ways that did not disrupt their professional practices or their lives. By sharing authentic, challenging, emotional situations with others in similar roles, teachers might raise their awareness and understanding of RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 267 the origins of those feelings and start to explore alternative ways of thinking and behaving (Hayes, 2006). As envisioned by Barlow and Phelan (2007), the group could act as “a respite from ‘performing emotions’ and a place… to explore the dissonance that can occur between performed emotions and those that are kept secret” (p. 14). This type of group could supplement programs already available through organizations such as the BCTF, as it would allow teachers to benefit from exploring their particular “dissonances” in ways that were both social and ongoing. Regular meetings with a group might help teachers hone their abilities to engage in what Schön (1991) terms “reflection-in-action,” essentially, being able to reflect upon one’s practices whilst in the midst of them and to use these insights to inform and modify subsequent methods. Self-reflection is a crucial element for those seeking to improve their resilience and there are specific tools available to help teachers enhance this practice on their own (Wosnitza, Delzepich, O'Donnell, Faust, & Camilleri, 2018). However, Schön emphasizes the “awareness of one’s intuitive thinking usually grows out of practice in articulating it to others” (1991, p. 243), as could happen in a supportive group. Russell (2006) echoed this sentiment, noting that “fostering reflective practice requires far more than telling people to reflect and then simply hoping for the best” (p. 203), it requires explicit and thoughtful instruction—another possible direction that could be undertaken as a group or within a group and one that has been successful for continuous professional development for early childhood educators who have undertaken that work within the framework of “a coherent pedagogical framework or learning curriculum that builds upon research and addresses local needs” (Sharmahd, et al., 2018, p. 59). Silva, et al. (2018) suggest that the ENTREE modules could also be used for continuous professional development. During the PNI groups convened as part of this work, reflection was a natural RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 268 response for many of the teacher/mothers as they read through the stories and compared them to their own experiences. Making these comparisons within the group provided validation and normalization by the others in the group, resulting in a sort of group reflection or peer supervision experience. Peer supervision in a support group may help teachers to undertake effective selfreflection practices and, in doing so, learn how they are shaped by their experiences. By understanding how they are affected by their lived experiences, teachers might also begin to understand the experiences of others (Walton & Alvarez, 2010). In their study focusing on the experience of a single teacher in a facilitated peer group of teachers, Kaunisto, Estola, and Leiman (2013) noted that being able to achieve a position of self-reflection enabled the teacher in question to increase her awareness of her own specific problems and, subsequently, to change her attitudes towards herself and her problems wherein she recovered some agency over them. Besides an increased sense of agency, the teacher also demonstrated “steps towards a more empathic, reflective understanding of her self… [as] when the denying and idealising positions vanished, [the teacher] could give attention to her experiences and start to recognise and reflect on them in a new way” (Kaunisto, et al., 2013, pp. 415-416). In Kaunisto et al.’s work, the peer group members’ responsiveness and support were essential to the subject’s selfreflection process and the increased emotional awareness that led her to a greater understanding and approval of herself; the supported self-reflection helped her to let go of positions of denial and/or idealisation and helped her to pay attention to her experiences in new ways. As empathy is one of the ways resilience is built, its enhancement as part of the group experience may pay multiple dividends. The mechanism behind this enhancement may in part draw from improved ability to reappraise others’ intentions, the ability to do which makes it possible to empathize RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 269 with another’s plight and excuse their behaviours. Reappraisal itself can also be a remarkably effective technique to cope with stressful situations (Lazarus, 2012). Being able to discuss people’s motivations directly in a group setting can lead to practice with reappraisal and building empathy as participants use each others’ experiences to build empathy and understanding in a specific context, which may then extend to more generalized ones. Kaunisto’s (2013) description of the group supervision results is in alignment with my observations of the normalization experienced by the PNI group participants during my own research and with the way that Collin and Karsenti (2011) described the process by which interactional reflective practice might operate in peer supervision groups: interpersonal and intrapersonal levels interacting in ways that fuel further reflective practice and lead to results that are ultimately used to inform professional practice. By sharing their difficulties with a group of emotionally supportive peers, teachers may be able to find commonalities that unite their seemingly diverse challenges at both the individual and the group levels. When individuals’ issues are reframed through the alternate lenses supplied by group members and commonalities are recognized, seemingly disparate concerns may coalesce into a coherent narrative that may then be more easily compartmentalized and dealt with once the formerly isolated incidents no longer appear as atypical or pervasive. Through this group experience— including reframing—teachers’ sense of agency and self-determinative potential may be somewhat restored, which are themes that have been liked to mental health (Adler, 2012). Related to reflexivity, self-awareness and introspection are important personality traits as they help to maintain self-protective behaviours; without these, a person may lack the insight necessary to notice and deal with the signs of imminent psychological distress (Hamilton, 2008). Rothschild (2006) suggests that working on increasing self-knowledge and self-care are RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 270 especially effective methods to help HPs such as teachers to separate themselves from workinduced stressors as these types of activities may help to strengthen a person’s boundaries. Walton and Alvarez (2010) suggest that self-reflection is particularly important when one seeks to understand the experience of another person, arguing that it is first necessary to understand how one is shaped by one’s own experiences before subsequently trying to understand the experiences of others. Teacher uncertainty (low sense of efficacy) and threats to self-esteem are reduced in collegial atmospheres such as those that would be built through the establishment of peer supervision groups. Through practice relating to others in the group and questioning what one’s own and others’ reactions might signal for them, participants learn at an emotional level what they may previously have only suspected or known intellectually about themselves. In this way, they are simultaneously building self-knowledge (Yalom, 1975), enhancing collegial relationships (Walton & Alvarez, 2010), and reconfiguring problematic neural pathways (Badenoch & Cox, 2010) leading teachers to greater understanding of themselves as both teachers and human beings through the power of the group process. Increased social connection. It is not just in learning and practicing self-reflection that psychosocial groups may benefit teachers. For teachers—who may spend long stretches of time isolated from other teachers as they toil in their individual classrooms—perhaps one of the greatest benefits of sharing within a safe peer group would be the experience of universality: the common denominators that frequently tend to link human problems (Yalom, 1975). Feeling supported by colleagues was fundamental to one theme identified by Brunetti (2006) as being conducive to teachers’ willingness to stay and even thrive in challenging work environments. As he pointed out, this benefitted students too as “the more that a school is able to retain such RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 271 dedicated, experienced teachers, the greater likelihood that it has of providing a quality education for its students, who certainly deserve the best” (p. 822). There is further evidence that when teachers are able to connect with others and to deal with their anxiety in supported ways it benefits students as well as teachers. As Hayes (2006) points out, “when a teacher is aware of her own anxiety and is relaxed about this she is less likely to project her fears onto her students. Instead she can acknowledge her fears, make sense of them, take responsibility for them and do something proactive to cope” (p. 79). This acknowledgment is particularly important when a teacher is working with children who have experienced trauma as these children can provoke particularly intense feelings from helping adults (Osofsky, 2009). By seeking out and accepting support from other educators, it is easier for teachers to maintain appropriate boundaries and avoid inappropriate responses when working with children that might be especially needy and/or provocative (Geddes, 2006; Osofsky, 2009; Sitler, 2009). Educational researchers have noted that as teachers become more socially-emotionally competent, they also become better able to more effectively relate to and work with their students in general. As Jennings and Greenberg (2009) point out, “[a] teacher who recognizes an individual student’s emotions, understands the cognitive appraisals that may be associated with these emotions, and how these cognitions and emotions motivate student behaviour can effectively respond to the student’s individual needs” (p. 493). Being capable of this type of classroom management better supports students and also helps teachers to avoid undue frustration and conflict from dealing with behaviours “blindly” without context. Providing teachers with the opportunity to connect with other teachers in a supportive atmosphere is a highly ranked professional development priority for many teachers regardless of their level of experience (Compton, 2010). Although peer support was not a significant RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 272 response in her survey exploring teachers’ perceived benefits of a study group model of professional development, Fox-Mallory (2011) noted that teachers spoke at length about how this time set aside for group meetings with coworkers led to decreases in feelings of isolation at work by allowing them to build stronger connections and deeper feelings of trust with their peers. In building these relationships, not only were the group members’ confidence in one another increased but they were more likely to subsequently reach out to other teachers as well. Again, I saw evidence of this aspect’s potential application in this current work’s PNI group experiences. Even though the group work took place in two relatively small school districts within which many teachers might ostensibly know each other, there were new relationships formed in both locations. These new connections provided opportunity for the teacher/mothers to share their stories with people who had not previously heard them—typically with the input of others who were already familiar with the storytellers. As this sharing was somewhat limited to the times that participants were allowed to talk (although a group of teachers is rarely fully quiet when working), there was ample opportunity for reflection between the social visits. I believe that this combination of task focus and social opportunity was one of the strengths of this type of data collection/analysis and that it would be equally beneficial and fruitful were it to be implemented on a larger scale. There is not currently any comparable model of teacher support in BC, however, there are other options. Currently, BCTF members (which include all public school teachers in the province) are able to access mental health support through two union-provided programs: an online, selfdirected cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) program and a six-week lifestyle-focused group program that is not widely available; neither program includes explicit exploration of the effects of teachers’ emotional labour on their well-being. Participating in a psychosocial group where it RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 273 is safe to reveal and explore the feelings engendered (and hidden) in teachers during their daily work would likely have multiple benefits, including support in moving from the more harmful practice of surface acting to that of deep acting. Chang (2009) suggests that only when teachers understand the range of intense emotion that typifies their work can they engage in effective reflective practices meant to help them regulate and reappraise their emotions rather than suppress them. Groups dedicated to exploring this range of emotion might help support and enhance these reflective practices. By sharing their experiences with others in similar situations, teachers might undergo what group psychotherapists term therapeutic change, including shifts in perspective that lead to a better understanding of what triggers certain emotions, as well as increased awareness of ways to maintain effective emotional separation between themselves and their work (Chang, 2009; Wrobel, 2013). Due in part to the greater difficulties in regulating physiological arousal when under the constant, regular influence of strong emotion and the adverse long-term effects of such continued arousal, there are direct and significant associations between a greater ability to maintain emotional separation and decreased chances of developing compassion fatigue or burnout (Hamilton, 2008; Rothschild, 2006; Thomas, 2011). Besides having physiological and psychological effects on the teachers themselves, teachers’ emotional regulation abilities and the ways in which these abilities inform their appraisals of student behaviours also influence classroom management and discipline practices (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). As such, involvement in a support group could have effects extending throughout a teacher’s professional practice. By exploring personal attributional styles in a group setting, teachers could help each other to reframe their interpretations of common misbehaviours in ways that were less likely to escalate troublesome behaviours from students RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 274 and/or increase anxiety in teachers. They would also be supported in becoming more socially and emotionally competent teachers—a designation that Jennings and Greenberg (2009) noted is connected to the likelihood that teachers develop supportive and encouraging relationships with students, build on student strengths when designing and delivering lessons, rely on discipline strategies that promote intrinsic motivation, coach students through conflict, encourage cooperation, and model respectful and appropriate behaviours. Whatever the specific form(s), the therapeutic changes experienced by teachers in these proposed groups would likely be a reflection of many of the 11 curative factors in group therapy proposed by Yalom (1975), especially the instillation of hope, the recognition of universality, the imparting of information, and interpersonal learning. Besides bringing about and supporting therapeutic change, the use of a psychosocial peer supervision group might also help strengthen those aspects of teachers’ inner strengths that enable them to thrive by helping them tap into their resilience. Bedard (2004) identified peer support groups as a source of resilience for teachers; by participating in peer groups, teachers might more readily find ways to reframe problems as resolvable and controllable as they also become more adept at planning and adjusting coping strategies. While the benefits of peer groups have been linked to increased resilience for new teachers in particular (Castro, Kelly, & Shih, 2010), seeking out and receiving help from others in this way can act as a lifeline out of the isolation of one’s classroom for teachers at any stage in their career (Leroux & Théorêt, 2014; Van der Klink, Blonk, Schene, & van Dijk, 2001). It could also serve as a forum for teachers to explore and share ways that they feel they were succeeding since, no matter how small the success, celebrating progress is another way to support resilience (Collin & Karsenti, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 275 2011; Skovholt & Trotter-Mathison, 2011; Thompson, Amatea, & Thompson, 2014) and another activity that is difficult to accomplish in isolation. Considering that teachers’ difficulty asking for help has been the second most frequent risk factor named as contributing to impaired resilience (Beltman, Mansfield, & Price, 2011), it seems logical that an intervention that negated the need to ask for help might then work to support teachers’ resilience. A regular psychosocial peer supervision group based on the precepts of clinical supervision used in other helping professions is one way that this might be accomplished. Whatever the specifics, engaging teachers in peer supervision groups could have myriad benefits for teachers, students, and even entire systems. The self-reflection processes sustained and strengthened by such groups may provide teachers with opportunities to reframe their experiences and alter their connections to their work environments by helping them to develop new strategies as well as learn from the experiences of others (Castro, et al., 2010; Fullan, 2007; Kaunisto, et al., 2013; Sharmahd, et al., 2018; Toman, 1996). The next section will explore what this could look like in practice with teachers. A “New” Model of Support Development and implementation of a peer supervision group for teachers could easily be based on an existing model: that of clinical peer supervision in health care settings (and especially mental health). Clinical peer supervision is a process through which peers provide support and guidance for each other’s professional development and efforts to maintain and enhance standards of practice—often with regards to the feelings engendered by their professional practice in particular (McNicoll, 2008). As summarized by Bogo, Paterson, Tufford, and King (2011), professionals in a variety of fields perceived the support of clinical supervision as conducive to enhanced professional competence, increased job satisfaction, and RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 276 feeling protected against stress and burnout. Although not directed at or specifically inclusive of teachers, Bogo et al.’s research highlights concerns that are just as applicable to a classroom as to a mental health setting. In particular, their observations that the “complexity and challenging nature of the work [leads] practitioners to question their competence, with lowered self-esteem and self-confidence” (p. 211) and that participants’ perceptions about their professional competence are influenced by the complexity of their jobs are clearly applicable to teachers. As illustrated in the earlier example of Teachers A and B, this perception was evident in the stories shared as part of this current research. It was also a common topic in the PNI group conversations. Additionally—in her work that focused specifically on teachers—Hayes (2006) too touched on similar issues and identified clinical supervision for teachers as a means of providing professional support of the highest level. While it is not typical for teacher professional development to focus on aspects of practice that emphasize the evaluation and management of interpersonal dynamics and difficult student encounters in particular, there are instances of clinical supervision counting as professional development in other non-counselling helping professions such as nursing. HinesMartin and Robinson (2006) advocated for this type of professional development to assist nurses in working through intrapersonal issues they might be having with patients; by working to develop awareness about their personal feelings in a safe supervisory setting, they are better able to maintain their boundaries in challenging situations. Similar outcomes might be observed with peer support or supervision, particularly if it took place in regularly scheduled groups. The use of groups in psychotherapy is well-established. They are vehicles through which people can come together and work through their personal struggles to reactivate and provide support for each other’s inner worlds in a safe, rich interpersonal environment RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 277 (Badenoch & Cox, 2010; Yalom, 1975). As with other non-directive process groups, peer supervision groups are primarily intended to act as sources of support and self-awareness for participants. With teachers specifically, such groups could “undergird professional education by producing deeper and fuller awareness on the part of the prospective teacher of his (sic) own personality and its probable interaction with the realities of the teaching role” (Peck, Bown, & Veldman, 1964, p. 324). In peer supervision, the group in question is a gathering of professionals (peers) who meet to discuss and debrief their professional struggles—particularly those that are bringing up emotional material for the participants. Similar to the nurses interviewed by Bogo et al. (2011), teachers are members of a regulatory college and “view themselves as autonomous and self-reliant with the expectation that they would initiate consultation with team members [i.e., other professionals in the same field] when they feel a task is beyond their scope” (p. 212). Given this culture, the equitable nature of a peer support group modelled on the tenets of peer supervision would likely fit the needs of teachers as it does nurses. “Intervision” is a promising avenue for this type of group model. Intervision. The “intervision” model of peer supervision used by psychologists in parts of Europe could be one upon which a similar support might be developed for teachers. Defined as “an ‘intercolleagial’ (sic) learning method in a group of equals guided by a chairperson, focusing either on improving personal functioning of staff or on improving treatment/care work” (Trautmann, 2010, p. 5), intervision groups use case conferences conducted without participants needing to have a vested interest as they would if they were speaking with a group of co-workers or a supervisor. Participants in intervision groups “come for what they want to give and hope to get from each other” (Toman, 1996, p. 389). This type of supervision centers on groups of equals providing each other consultation and mutual support. Typically, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 278 individuals who do not necessarily know each other outside of the groups meet regularly to provide each other with clinical supervision regarding issues that have come up since their last assemblage. Advocates of intervision have noted that session content regularly includes exploration of work-related emotional problems/stress (Trautmann, 2010) as well as feelings and self-experience (Toman, 1996), which could make them a particularly appropriate forum to explore the emotional aspects of teaching. Comparable kinds of support have been used for continuous professional development by early childhood educators using a face-to-face model (Bove, et al., 2018; Sharmahd, et al., 2018) and for teachers in an online forum (Bos-Wierda & Barendsen, 2012; Wierda & Barendsen, 2011). According to Bos-Wierda and Barendsen, intervision—which they describe as discussion of workplace dilemmas during the training process—is an important part of the Dutch teacher training program as it is assumed to bridge academic and workplace learning. This same bridging might be possible for more experienced teachers to link theory and practice to explore the emotional contexts of teaching. Trautmann (2010) specifies that intervision is helpful for professionals to “check if colleagues share the same problems, how colleagues deal with these problems, and if and what they can learn from the way colleagues are dealing with these issues” (p. 6) including exploring alternatives through discussion and sometimes role play. A major strong point of the method is that “it helps to use all the potential of expertise, experience and skill available in a team or in a group of experts” (Trautmann, 2010, p. 7) in an effective and cost-effective way. Although not necessarily referring to intervision, continuous professional development has been linked to teachers’ resilience (Day & Gu, 2014), which provides further support for the application of this type of support. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 279 The question of facilitation. Just as other psychotherapeutic groups utilize a therapist, so too would these peer supervision groups benefit from a skilled guide. The participation of a facilitator is an important part of the intervision groups described by advocates such as Trautmann (2010). While the ultimate goal for such groups might be to have peers supporting peers without inclusion or identification of a specific facilitator (as this requirement can become a barrier to the creation or continuation of groups), early iterations would likely need to include a group facilitator—preferably a teacher-counsellor trained in group dynamics—so that participants would understand what it meant to experience safety in a group of this kind. Further into the implementation process, I envision that initial group members might help form and participate in groups that were truly peer supervision groups—where reciprocal arrangements between members focused on self-evaluation with group feedback and support (McNicoll, 2008). To be sure, the presence of a facilitator could be beneficial in numerous ways. In their research investigating the experience of a single member in a facilitated peer group aimed at promoting the well-being of teachers and supporting them in their work, Kaunisto, et al. (2013) highlighted the importance of noting and exploring turning points in group members’ progress—the noticing and importance of which a skilled facilitator could help to underscore. The selection of appropriate facilitators is important given that peer supervision is premised on there being an equal, nonhierarchical relationship in which each participant is seen as offering a significant contribution to the group according to their differing temperaments, styles, skills, and knowledge (Barlow & Phelan, 2007). According to Barlow and Phelan, the strengths of these types of collaboration are: RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS • 280 they help to make what was implicit explicit through dialogue-informed reflection, • they enable participants to build upon each others’ talents to do what they otherwise would not accomplish themselves through the creation of insights that are distinct from the knowledge brought by each person, and • they provide a stable and supportive learning context even as a workplace shifts and changes. In addition to ensuring that safety within the group was sustained, a skilled facilitator might help to draw out some of these insights and, as such, further contribute to the group’s experiences of change. In providing such experiences to group members, the facilitator would also be creating a framework for how later peer-only groups could be run by participants. Creating and maintaining safety within a group is of paramount importance to any group’s success. This need would be fulfilled in part by the inclusion of a group facilitator who would start setting expectations before the group even started by meeting with participants ahead of time to prepare them for the group: addressing personal concerns and discussing the safeguards that would be in place to protect members (e.g., confidentiality). The facilitator might initially be a trained counsellor with experience teaching or working with educators— comparable to how the BCTF contracts out for its six-week “Living With Balance” groups (BCTF, personal communication, April 22, 2015). As more teachers became comfortable in the group setting and more experienced in the processes involved in running an effective group, I envision that some former participants might undertake training to become facilitators themselves, which would help them further internalize the aims of the group in their roles as facilitators (Gentry, Baggerly, & Baranowsky, 2004). Alternatively, facilitator training could be RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 281 provided to all potential group members and the groups could be truly peer supervision groups without anyone singled out as facilitator—although group-wide training might also be accomplished in the initial stages of the group through modelling by the facilitator. As mentioned earlier, the ultimate goal for these types of groups is for them to be true peer supervision groups where there is not one, identified facilitator but an equitable sharing of the facilitation work. Barlow and Phelan (2007) identified the need for intentionality in the work of peer collaboration: by ensuring that all participants were conscious about group structure, norms, and expectations, it is possible to minimize “meandering” and to keep the specific goals of the group at the forefront. Naig (2010) suggested that providing group members with training in how to support one another effectively also helps reduce interpersonal stress in early childhood teachers’ day-to-day interactions with each other, thereby helping to build the social connections at work that Miller, Buckholdt, and Shaw (2008) identified as being key to countering workplace stress. Once formed, these connections might well continue to provide supportive relationships well past the end of formal group meetings, as was the case with the early childhood educators studied by DuBois (2010). Even with the ample precedence for the use of peer supervision groups to support HPs, it is likely that there would be challenges in getting these types of group operational for teachers. Challenges to the Establishment of Teacher Peer Supervision Groups For teachers to commit to a process of personal support, peer supervision for teachers would have to be in line with the participants’ perceived needs. For example, the inclusion of school administrators as facilitators or group members might limit the willingness of many teachers to participate. Bogo et al. (2011) found that participants may feel subtly criticized and undermined when supervision focuses on administrative issues, time management, or RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 282 productivity—leading participants to find themselves caught in a dilemma if they felt they needed the support of supervision but did not want to either feel that they were wasting their time or risk appearing less competent. This is not to say, however, that this model could operate without administrative involvement. For this type of intervention to succeed, there must be organizational support including a recognition of the importance of such work in maintaining and enhancing employee well-being (Barlow & Phelan, 2007). In their study of 1,790 British teachers, Travers and Cooper (1996) noted that sources of stress in teaching were often related to organizational aspects of the work environment rather than the actual work with students. By recognizing that work stress belongs to both an individual and the organization for which s/he works and by reframing work stress as an organizational issue rather than a personal problem, the effects of the stress could be addressed across multiple levels of school district organization, thus creating an environment of support rather than one of blame (Campbell, 2013). The use of peer supervision groups such as those proposed here would provide a time and space for teachers to work on ways to cope with these stressors in a supportive environment. Administrative issues notwithstanding, interest and willingness to participate in a group—at least initially—would likely be a barrier to establishing the use of peer supervision groups with teachers due especially to the time commitments and the potential perceptions of insufficiency as a teacher. Perhaps a shift in interpretation would help to overcome this latter barrier in particular: writing specifically about compassion fatigue, Gentry (2004) suggested that symptoms be interpreted as a message regarding the strength of caring provided by a professional caregiver rather than as a pathological condition. By viewing the pursuit of peer supervision as evidence of a teacher’s great commitment and dedication to her/his work, the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 283 likelihood that this same pursuit would be interpreted as an indication of weakness or defect could be minimized. For some groups, an external focus might be helpful, at least to begin. Perhaps such supportive groups could even take the form of a book club where, as group members became more comfortable with each other and with working as a group, they could become more comfortable shifting to internal foci as well. Besides encouraging teachers’ participation, there would likely also be challenges in preventing attrition. To build engagement quickly and prevent excessive rates of attrition, it is likely that these types of group would not be “pure” process groups but rather, that they would have at least some agreed-upon structure via the involvement of a facilitator. In testing the effectiveness of teaching a pre-service education course using the principles of group psychotherapy, Forst and Matthews (1964) suggested that it was helpful to “structure a session to secure success in some way, to accomplish something concrete [as] the students, just as [the facilitator] must experience success and soon” (p. 406) in order to stick with the process. These researchers also found it useful to ask students to keep personal records of their experiences in the class and between the classes (where they noted any experiences they had that related to the topic and/or process from the class). This task orientation may be one reason the PNI groups were so successful—they provided participants with stories on which they could direct their attention as they spent time together. As the stories were about the experiences of colleagues in different contexts but similar situations, they also provided an external focus around which the teacher/mother group members could scaffold their personal concerns and find reassurance that their own experiences were not anomalous. It is possible that there are individuals who perceive fewer barriers to participation in mental health interventions or supports when they are able to do so through self-directed means, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 284 positively impacting subsequent effects of said methods. Self-help options may also help their subscribers to allay some of the feelings of being stigmatized—feelings that frequently accompany a person’s diagnosis and/or experiences of impaired mental health. Although they were looking explicitly at therapist-involved modalities, Leibert, Archer, Munson, and York (2006) determined that participants in an online anxiety and depression study chose online mental health services because of concerns around privacy (including a desire to remain anonymous) as well as for the convenience of that particular modality. As suggested by Lingley-Pottie, McGrath and Andreou (2013), “[it] is possible that some individuals who perceive fewer access and psychological barriers with distance treatment are less stressed and more comfortable” (p. 57), which may then also result in higher rates of participation in such treatments. HPs such as teachers often have highly idealistic role identities and role expectations framed by the notion of giving rather than needing to receive help (Siebert & Siebert, 2007). When put into the position of needing help themselves, these professionals may have trouble seeking out supports for themselves; a conveniently accessible and anonymous online intervention, however, might be especially appealing for this group. An important caveat to considering self-directed therapy is the high rate at which people often discontinue their “treatment.” In considering the elevated dropout rates often seen with self-help interventions, Nordin, Carlbring, Cuijpers and Andersson (2010) point out that the lack of therapist support means that there are few to no opportunities for participants to gain therapeutic assistance in managing issues that may arise while they self-treat. Whereas emergent issues in face-to-face therapy often present new opportunities for the therapist-client relationship to strengthen and become longer-lasting in the process, there is no equivalent opportunity in self-help and so motivation to continue may be harder for a client to muster. This dual lack of support and RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 285 accountability represented by the lack of therapist and group members is another reason a group model is preferable to individually undertaken work when supporting teachers. A final reason encouraging mutual support in this way is desirable is because it promotes equity and, as such, better aligns with a feminist orientation. One of the most prolific researchers in the realm of online CBT, Gerhard Andersson (2010) cautioned against putting too much stock into online interventions in case they should start to be funded at the expense of regular clinical services. Teghtsoonian (2009) also voiced concerns that policy makers have a particular interest in shaping clinical practice so that the need for actual therapists is curtailed and overall costs for mental health supports are minimized, regardless of the repeatedly demonstrated importance of relationship for much successful lasting therapeutic change (e.g., Corey, 2009). Although these concerns are not unfounded, the reality is that individualistic models of service delivery “[reflect] the type of changes that are needed if treatment is to significantly reduce the burden of mental illness” (Kazdin & Blase, 2011, p. 25). While online interventions will not be appropriate or even accessible for everyone, the sheer numbers that are still reachable in these ways (and that have been reached already) makes this option impossible to ignore for future population-level therapies especially. Even so—based on my own research, my knowledge of teachers and teaching, and my reading of the extant literature—I am confident that intervision or another model of teacher peer supervision/support is the epitome of teacher (and HP in general) support and merits further study and swift implementation. Chapter Summary In this Discussion so far, I have described the significance of my findings. In order to keep these findings in context, I wish to now reposition them within three aspects of my RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 286 theoretical orientation: feminist theory, a theory of occupational health (P-E Fit), and complexity theory. This repositioning is important to avoid misinterpretation of my findings as suggestive that women are somehow ill-suited to make choices that see them privilege their home and work roles equally, while also highlighting the omnipresent nature of work-related challenges to health, and the multifaceted nature of the work of teaching—work that would require any provisions put into place to support it to be equally multifaceted and adaptable. Revisiting the Feminist Framework As I explained in the Literature Review and will briefly revisit in the Conclusion, I chose to focus solely on the experiences of women as I wished to extricate resilience strategies that teacher/mothers found most useful and/or used most commonly and because focusing on a single gender helped control for confounding factors while also contributing to the greater body of research examining the lived experiences of women. There are suggestions that women’s and men’s experiences of WFC/FWC may be more similar than not (Carvalho, et al., 2018; Koura, et al., 2017; Marchand, et al., 2016). As women comprise a majority of teachers in Canada (Turcotte, 2011), questions to do with work-life issues of teachers may apply to them more readily than to men, even though—as pointed out by Schloehofer (2012)—by treating work/life balance and any related workplace policies as a women’s issue, the belief that women might need special workplace considerations and accommodations is systematically perpetuated when the need to balance work with personal life and familial responsibilities is really a human rights issue. In this section, I endeavour to illustrate exactly how and why my research is suggestive of a need for better supports for all HPs even though it is solely focused on women. Biklen (1995) noted that early analyses of teaching women suggested it was not possible for these women to simultaneously “commit” to work and family and that work would suffer RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 287 because of family obligations, while McGoldrick (1991) noted similar concerns were raised regarding the potential for family to suffer due to teaching-related commitments. These ideas were clearly challenged (and often contradicted) by my own research: teachers’ dual commitments to work and family shone through in their stories, and family matters were characterized as challenging but also a source of solace. The teachers in this sample demonstrated attitudes and beliefs that appeared to be in line with Grönlund and Öun’s (2018) observation that women highly value their family and career roles and—to a greater extent than men—tend to adopt professional strategies that enable them to be engaged and satisfied in both. As Braverman (1991) highlighted, “the very question of how to ‘balance work and family’ for women is a graphic example of … the inherent assumption that women are hurting their children at some level by working” (p. 234). This same assumption is not typically applied to men. Whereas the women in my sample expressed feelings of concern that they were somehow insufficient as parents, teachers, spouses, etcetera—likely due in part to the continued perpetuation of fears such as those described by Braverman (1991)—their stories did not bear out any reasons for concern that their children were disadvantaged in any way. Encouragingly, even when identity as a teacher and/or a parent may be threatened due to feelings such as these, there is evidence that effectiveness as a teacher may still be untouched (Day, Kington, et al., 2006)—a demonstration of the dedication to their craft that teachers often display. In the early 1990s, Holder and Anderson (1991) posited that societal norms regarding the ways that families divide work and family responsibilities and policies regarding parental leaves and childcare may have made working outside the home difficult for women—even at that time. This supposition was partially explained by schools of thought that assumed that women tended to be more vulnerable to life cycle stresses due to their greater emotional RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 288 investment in the lives of those around them (McGoldrick, 1991). Although these types of suggestion have never begotten any evidence that women or men were more “suited” to work as teachers or caring professionals in general; even today, educated men are more likely than women with similar backgrounds and experience to have uninterrupted careers regardless of their parental or family circumstances (Baker, 2012). Part of this difference may be due to the ongoing existence of the “second shift” that still sees women responsible for 14 24-hour days more time than men spent on household responsibility each year (Hochschild, 1989/2012). The stories shared for this current research spoke mainly of husbands in terms of the ways in which they were perceived to contribute to their partners’ resilience, for example: “My husband is the one on whom I heavily rely when times are stressful. He is able to ‘talk me off the ledge’” and “I am extremely lucky to have a husband (who is also a teacher) that empathizes with me but also supports my needs.” Even so, there were definite indications and passing references to the ways in which these relationships also sometimes posed challenges that might not otherwise have been. For example, “…realistically, having no one around me is the only way to feel ‘caught-up,’ then when everyone is home it feels like a big juggling act to keep all the puzzle pieces together” and “When my husband is away working and I am forced to do it all I run my days (and my kids) like a well-oiled machine! Not that I don’t love and appreciate my husband but when I am forced to do it all I sometimes feel it goes smoother.” Given that these stories have so much ambiguity regarding even this most personal and heavilycited support reiterates the need for research such as this, which helps provide a more detailed picture of the context in which resilience operates. As such, it is aligned with Metcalfe, et al.’s (2014) suggestion that “further work could be done to understand what women perceive as RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 289 workplace support or lack of support, and what strategies, both workplace and societal, would facilitate work/family balance” (p. 1679), which was a primary goal of my research. As summarized by Hensel (1991), whereas women may be criticized for appearing to be overly dedicated to their work at the perceived expense of their families, men are typically praised for any time that they spend with their families as their work outside the home is seen to be meeting the expectation of being a good provider. Fels (2004) views declarations such as this dedication criticism as evidence of the ways in which women are penalized for having ambition. It is partly in consideration of perceptions and misconceptions such as these that I was (and still am) convinced that it was appropriate for my current research to focus solely on women as it sought (and—I would argue—managed) to contribute a more detailed understanding of the mechanisms through which so many women successfully cultivate vibrant work and home lives that are frequently challenging, but ultimately sustainable. Kirchmeyer (1993) proposed that it is coping strategies rather than gender that influence the extent to which home and work affect each other. This means it might be possible for all people to improve their situations by modifying their abilities to evaluate and respond to their environments, particularly when provided with employer-supported means to do so in groups— as I have explored in this chapter. It is important that employers and other worker-supporting agencies (i.e., government bodies) take on at least part of the responsibility for buoying teacher wellness in this way so that individuals and their families are not left solely responsible: such a neoliberal approach to supportive techniques would be contrary to a social justice (i.e., feminist) approach (Teghtsoonian, 2009). There were also health-related reasons that it was preferable to include only women in my research. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 290 Although there are various health outcomes that appear to affect women and men differentially, some outcomes may be due more to culture than biology. In terms of well-being including incidence of WFC and FWC, Mullholland et al. (2017) found no gender differences in well-being in their sample of 399 secondary school teachers. Rollero, Fedi, De Piccoli (2016) found that “when the relative salience of both gender and status is considered to understand well-being at work, status counts more than gender” (p. 467), although they caution that gender remains a significant dimension in determining other aspects of job satisfaction. Davis et al. (2011) posited that gender-linked roles can confer risk or resistance to depression: as women tend to by more socially integrated than men, they may then be at lower risk of depression due to the loss of an important interpersonal support such as a spouse as they have a broader network of other supports from which to draw. In this way, gender-linked social roles and/or aspects of personality may provide resources for women to help them mitigate potential harms. Although I did not assess depression in my participants, the prevalence of relationship-related sources of resilience that arose in this current work seems to support the observation that social networks act as a protective element for women dealing with psychological strain. It is possible that differences between women’s and men’s development of depression are linked to precipitating events that compromise highly-valued gender-linked social roles and cause humiliation or a sense of loss. For women, these events appear to lie in network conflicts, wherein their social connections are threatened or damaged—even if the damage or threat is to people in the network other than themselves (Davis, et al., 2011). One teacher in the survey stories talked about how she “felt a lot of judgment and that [she] had to continually defend [herself]” when she had to take a medical leave and was unable to teach for a time. There were also references to difficulties reaching students and the emotional repercussions of the RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 291 challenge: “Struggling to get through to certain students. I’m feeling helpless as all strategies seem to fail. Trying to work through not taking it personally.” While there were stories of struggles with health and struggles at home, there were not any references that specifically linked the two in any way that might be interpreted as causal in the stories from this work. However, this was health-related research; so, as such, besides re-locating my work within its feminist framework, it is also valuable to underscore its connections to health science, which is perhaps best done by tying the work into a specific model of occupational health. A Best-Fit Model of Occupational Health Although I have previously referenced Karasek and Theorell’s (1990) DCS model of occupational health and noted definite applicability to this work, the P-E Fit model of occupational health (French, Caplan, & Harrison, 1982) appeared to be the best fit to these data. Its previous use in work-life balance research (e.g., Edwards & Rothbard, 1999) also makes this model an appropriate choice. Kirchmeyer (1992; 1993) researched the potential place of “spillover” in workers’ experiences managing home and work roles. She suggested that it is satisfaction with one’s various roles that leads to perceptions of increased benefit and decreased burden across the domains of work and home (Kirchmeyer, 1993), an observation that has also been noted regarding intrinsically-motivated employees’ greater satisfaction with the extent to which they see their work roles as contributory to daily family satisfaction (Ilies, et al., 2017). This fits within the P-E model’s assumptions that it is not any specific feature of an environment that leads to strain, but a person’s appraisals of the various features and her/his sense that s/he has the resources to capably deal with them (French, et al., 1982). A link between appraisal style and resilience has already been established (e.g., Schwarze, 2018). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 292 The P-E Fit model might serve to explain how satisfaction within one’s roles (i.e., fit within a work environment, etc.) and one’s personal wellness-sustaining strategies might fit together to contribute to coping and even—potentially—thriving. As Kirchmeyer (1993) appeared to support, it is not the presence or absence of specific features—including overlaps between home and work—that lead to strain and potential burnout, but mismatches between a people’s abilities and the demands of her/his environments. Assuming that the demands upon a person and the personal resources available to meet them have interdependent effects, it is discrepancies between these factors that predict a person's adjustment and, ultimately, their experience of strain (Conway, et al., 1992). According to this occupational health model, a poor fit between an employee and her/his environment is when the amount of control required of the person is either much greater or much less than the person’s desired amount. A good match between abilities and demands is the key to low strain and high satisfaction (Conway, et al., 1992; Dewe, et al., 2012). This appears to fit with the stories shared by participants in this current research (although I did not measure satisfaction): teachers tended to remember as most positive those times when they were autonomous yet supported (i.e., they were not solely responsible for “everything”) and they were working within subject/grade areas that were desirable to them. In line with a P-E Fit hypothesis, they appeared to demonstrate that “the quality of the intellectual, social, and organisational conditions in which [they worked] and the people with whom [they worked had] significant impacts, positively or negatively, on their capacity to be committed, resilient, and effective” (Gu, 2018, p. 19). Rather than conceptualizing the interface of work and home in terms of conflict, Kirchmeyer (1992) talks about “spillover,” which may be negative or positive and which has been defined as the carryover of internal states from one setting to another (Repetti & Wang, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 293 2017). In her 1992 research, Kirchmeyer found that research participants enumerated multiple ways in which their work and home lives enhanced each other: how the rewards of parenting provided buffers for other domains; how community involvement provided ideas and a perception of being valued at work; and how recreation provided a source of reenergization and a way to help forget work problems. As proposed by Colombo and Ghisleri (2008) and echoing the work of Claesson and Brice (1989) who also noted positive overlaps between teachers’ home and work responsibilities, it is important to determine what processes are involved in enrichment (i.e., positive spillover) to more precisely define what kinds of support and management levers might best help reduce critical situations and enhance sustainable equilibria—for women and for men (who may very well have different needs). It is likely that the mechanisms behind the spillover hypothesis are linked to Dumas and Stanko’s (2017) finding that high identification with the family role and a blurring of boundaries between work and home may enhance work roles. Although it is intended to assess the interference of family with work, perhaps the teacher/mothers’ increased FWC scores were simply indicative of greater involvement at home. Dumas and Stanko (2017) suggest that policies designed to foster and encourage more family time might be helpful in increasing family-to-work enrichment so that employees are comfortable sharing their family role involvements. One of their suggestions is that managers adopt supervisory behaviours such as emotional support, role-modeling behaviours, and encouraging creative work-family management. Implementation of a peer group supervision model to help facilitate these supports could offer similar outcomes for the participants, while removing the onus upon individual managers to provide them, thereby making it more likely that they would indeed be implemented. As I have explored at length already, providing the resources to allow such RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 294 groups to convene would further increase the likelihood of implementation and could even be beneficial as it would help relieve some of teachers’ time pressure and be considered a salutogenic resource (Nilsson, Blomqvist, & Andersson, 2017). Perhaps the decrease in burden suggested by the spillover hypothesis is also connected to the observation that increased resilience and decreased strain (teaching-related stress and/or conflict at the interface of work and home) appeared to vary together in my sample. Could decreased burden be indicated by decreased TSI and WFC/FWC scores? Could increased satisfaction be indicated by increased resilience? These are questions that require further investigation. Kirchmeyer suggested that “with increasing levels of domain satisfaction, the burdens of that domain seem to become less pronounced and the negative spillover to the other domains reduced” (1993, p. 533). Similar to my own research goals, Kirchmeyer worked to identify strategies busy managers (both female and male) used to cope with responsibilities in multiple domains. She found that coping strategies more than gender were predictive of spillover experiences and that both genders relied most heavily on similar strategies: establishing personal priorities, developing positive attitudes, considering demands fulfilling, increasing efficiency, and working hard to do everything. This capacity to maintain stability despite a plurality of roles has also been observed in teachers who reported staying positive despite multiple overlaps in their personal and work domains (Day, Kington, et al., 2006). Making the space for peer supervision meetings (physically and temporally) is one way in which teachers’ P-E fit might be enhanced as it represents a manipulation of the environment in service to the needs of the person. Williams, Berdahl, and Vandello (2016) were adamant that part of the issue preventing a restructuring of professionals’ workplace time norms is being stalled by two psychological processes: that critical social identities are forged in relation to RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 295 one’s work, and that any proposal to restructure work will be threatening to those whose identities were shaped by the “traditional” ways of doing things. Sharing insights with workgroups “so that lessons learned can be shared and applied more widely” (thereby improving the fit between person and environment) was suggested by Dumas and Stanko (2017, p. 621). This type of sharing could help build a culture of emotional support through which teachers might explore their shifting identities en masse. Incubating this culture starting in teacher training programs might be one way to start shifting these processes so that teachers’ identities are formed in recognition of and relation to each other’s shared emotional contexts rather than solely in relation to the “traditional” ways in which work has been structured— supporting these practitioners as they learn to focus attention on managing feelings in order to negotiate tensions between home and work (Garey & Hansen, 2011). It might also be valuable for teachers (and those in charge of the various systems in place to support and manage teachers) to recognize that this work is characteristic of and being accomplished within a complex adaptive system. Connections to Complexity Theory Although the assumptions of complexity theory may seem diametrically opposed to those of parametric statistics given that the former assumes predictability to be nigh on impossible and the latter relies on it as a fundamental assumption, I am confident that complexity theory provides a useful lens through which my work might be interpreted. Given the number of stakeholders and the range of needs that comprise a system of education, it seems plausible that—when done well—any education system might aim to be characterized as a “poised” system, wherein ability to evolve is high (Schneider & Somers, 2006). Gu’s (2018) research on teacher resilience appears to bear this out: she contends that, RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 296 From a social-ecological perspective, it is important to note that these processes in which teachers learn, develop and enact their capacity to teach and teach well over time are embedded in the multiple contexts of their everyday professional lives—which are inherently featured with uncertain and unpredictable circumstances and scenarios (p. 24). This ubiquity of uncertain and unpredictable circumstances might be interpreted as characteristic of at least two poised complex adaptive systems: the system of education itself and the mechanisms through which teachers manage to meet the expectations put upon them in that system (i.e., their resilience). Schneider and Somers contend that, “highly chaotic systems cannot maintain their behaviors… [as] they have too few stable or ‘frozen’ components and tend to fail due to too little buffering and low adaptability and evolvability… [while] highly ordered systems are too rigid to coordinate new behaviours and likewise tend to fail” (Schneider & Somers, 2006, p. 355). When a system is poised, it incorporates chaos and order: it is flexible enough to be responsive to inputs and yet solid enough to ensure that change can be managed and does not tip the system into unrecognizability; it is capable of adaptation and evolution. Resilience appears to meet all of these criteria. Constructs like resilience are “composed of several elements working synergistically to protect the individual” (Sorenson & Harris, 2012, p. 339). Besides education, I conceptualize resilience too to meet the complexity theory criteria of a poised system—particularly when visualizing the interactions of work and home to constitute an equilibrium rather than a balance as the former implies dynamicism and the latter “as much as being stuck and immovable, as much as to harmony” (Whyte, 2009, p. 6). As suggested by the work of Davydov et al. (2010) and Day and Gu (2014) among others, resilience cannot be conceptualized in terms of easy-to- RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 297 implement supports and strategies because it is so highly circumscribed by context, particularly when contexts are as variable as teaching and parenting. As expressed by poet David Whyte (2009) in his consideration of work and life: Work is a constant conversation. It is the back-and-forth between what I think is me and what I think is not me; it is the edge between what the world needs of me and what I need of the world. Like the person to whom I am committed in a relationship, it is constantly changing and surprising me by its demands and needs but also by where it leads me, how much it teaches me, and especially, by how much tact, patience and maturity it demands of me (p. 27). Given these dynamic and iterative processes and the evidence from my own research (that confirmed teachers’ time strains in particular), it is evident that any meaningful supports for HPs would have to be flexible and adaptive to ensure that they were appropriate and useful for a wide demographic. Starting from a salutogenic model that “views individuals as constantly in situations of challenge, response, tension, stress, and resolution” (Horsburgh & Ferguson, 2012, p. 184) is one way to do this and encompass both the shared contexts and the individual characteristics of teachers. Part of this shift in perspective—which would add another layer of complexity—might also involve adoption of an alternative, “elevated” view of time wherein stress, guilt, and regret may not so readily result from not being able to spend time in a desired and worthy way just because it cannot be spent as such in the immediate present (Mogilner, et al., 2018); a revisiting of the therapeutic possibility of Hochschild’s idea of the potential self. By adopting an acceptance of teaching and resilience as complex adaptive systems and taking an elevated view of time, it might be possible for teachers to more easily allow themselves to enjoy (or at least RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 298 accept) the inherent messiness of lives teaching and parenting. In this chapter, I have proposed ways in which such cultural shifts might be accomplished. I have also expanded upon the various relationships between teachers’ sources of work- and home-related strain (i.e., as indicated by their TSI, WFC, and FWC scores) and how the data suggested that these women might be operationalizing their resilience to stay actively engaged in their work and home lives. In the next and final chapter, the Conclusion, I will highlight some of the strengths of my research and provide suggestions as to what further research in this vein might entail. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 299 Chapter 6 - Conclusion Herman, Hickmon-Rosa, and Reinke (2018) point out that “teachers often bear the brunt of criticism in the modern era of accountability. They receive pressures from administrators, parents, and society at large to increase student outcomes while in many cases receiving fewer resources to do so. If efforts only focus on promoting individual coping, we will neglect the broader social context that influences teacher adaptation and coping” (p. 97). By working to understand what might comprise this broader social context for BC teachers and delineate ways in which these HPs are already staying resilient, I hope that this research might help others identify and boost their own existing strategies with the backing of increasing systemic supports. Over the course of this dissertation in which I have argued for an increases in these types of supports, I have introduced the purpose of my research and the theory that guided its completion; I have summarized and evaluated the extant research to do with resilience, WFC/FWC, and teacher wellness; and I have described my methods and summarized the significant results that emerged during my data collection procedures, which I then positioned within the research literature in the Discussion. To conclude this work, I will now consider some of its strengths and elaborate on potential future directions. Research Strengths Although there were numerous limitations and delimiters to this work, including many aspects of teaching and parenting that I did not consider, there were also features that helped make this exploratory research relatively thoroughgoing. I will summarize four of these features in this section: the use of a mixed methods methodology, the community-inspired rationale and community-based nature of the work, the sample’s diversity, and the demonstration of potential applications as part of the research process. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 300 Mixed Methods MMR requires rigorous quantitative research to assess the magnitude and frequency of constructs of interest combined with rigorous qualitative research to explore the meaning and understanding of these same constructs (Creswell, Klassen, et al., 2011). By using an MMR approach for this work, I was able to incorporate both features mentioned by Creswell, Klassen, et al. in a variety of ways. By collecting multiple types of data and analyzing them individually and together, I am confident that the magnitude and the meaning of the data were revealed. Sample Diversity Another strength of this research was that it included teachers from a variety of backgrounds, locales, and years’ experience. A preponderance of the research that I reviewed for my Literature Review involved teachers who were pre-service (i.e., in training) or within their first five years of teaching (i.e., early career). As this research included teachers with between 0- and 49-years’ teaching experience and from a range of backgrounds both educationally and geographically, the conclusions drawn are more generalizable than they would have been if based on a more homogenous sample. Community Connections The idea for this work arose from conversations with others in the community of teacher/mothers in BC. Besides arising from a community-identified need, I engaged with a few of these same teachers and teacher/mothers for help getting surveys out to participants, completed, and returned to me via their follow ups with the many others who took the time to participate. Without the connections that I had previously built with colleagues around the province and their eager willingness to help, I doubt that this work would have been as fruitful as it was—I am certain that the enthusiasm of these teachers and all those who participated in RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 301 the PNI groups were key elements in its success and in making the data as comprehensive as they were. The productivity of both phases of data collection represents a final strength of this research: evidence that the methods used might themselves prove to be useful means of supporting teachers and other HPs. Demonstrating Potential Applications. The ways in which teacher/mothers were drawn together to work through stories from colleagues in a supported and organized way turned out to be far more than just a means of collecting data. Given the zeal with which participants undertook their work, I am confident that these groups were also a demonstration of a potential application of PNI groups to support teacher wellness. I am unsure how prevalent the adaptation of research methods for use as provisions in further supports might be; this is something that could be investigated to determine what might be best practice in such a reworking. Ultimately I wish for the learning that happened through my data collection methods to be implemented large scale to help take theoretical perspectives on work, life, emotion, and teaching and apply them to teachers’ lives in order to help them better recognize the ways that they might make to most of the socially situated nature of their work (Hesse-Biber, 2010a). This strength also represents the first in my list of potential future directions, which—along with a few other courses—I will delineate in the next section. Future Directions In this section, I will describe potential future directions that have been implied by my research including a brief reiteration of the reasons why peer supervision groups might be particularly salient, ways generalization might be improved, and recommendations for further delineation of the emotional and caring work of teachers. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 302 Developing Groups Based on the PNI Work As I have already explored at length, much of the strongest indication of potential future directions arose from the overwhelmingly positive response to my data collection procedures. From the outset of my research I was optimistic that the PNI groups themselves might constitute a means of teacher support. Based on the comments from participants, these types of group meetings could indeed be one way for educational systems to actively build teachers’ resilience, while also representing a first step in better understanding and honouring the work of caring for others given that this would comprise a substantial focus for the groups. Reiterating my argument from the Literature Review, I see it as vital that the conversation about “balancing” work and family responsibilities shifts to focus on ways that caregiving labour and/or work—no matter what the location or form—could be more highly valued and better supported; an argument also put forth by Slaughter (2015). I foresee teacher process groups to be one way that this conversation might be encouraged and fitted to reflect the lives of teachers with all kinds of caregiving responsibilities. By working together towards systemic change, teachers might also help to take on some of the work that Spar (2013) identified as being necessary to dismantle the tangible and intangible barriers that still operate to separate women (especially) from simultaneously feeling satisfied with their home and work lives. Undoubtedly, it would not just be women who would benefit from such a restructuring and from enhanced structural supports. Improving Generalizability Adding longitudinal data to this work would be highly informative and beneficial. Lazarus (2012) insists that to truly observe change and stability in coping processes over time requires that the same individuals be studied in different contexts and at different times using an RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 303 intra-individual research design nested within inter-individual comparisons. Looking for differences in resilience strategies and levels over a school year might reveal trends that could then potentially target supports to the times and areas they might most effectively influence. The work of the VITAE project (Day & Gu, 2014; Day & Kington, 2008; Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons, 2006; Day, et al., 2006; Gu & Day, 2007; Gu & Day, 2013) provides a starting point for how effective longitudinal research on teachers’ resilience might be accomplished. The VITAE project incorporated data collected at various levels (i.e., individual to system-wide) over an extended period of time, which provided insight into the contexts of its participants. Context is particularly important to the study of resilience: the evidence supporting the contextual natures of conflict and resilience is well-documented and it is clear that the one does not develop in the absence of the other (Davydov, et al., 2010; Doney, 2013; Mansfield, et al., 2012). Given that teachers may need to actively seek out ways to stay well and sustain their satisfaction with their work due to conditions that are typically variable and requiring of copious persistence and behavioural flexibility (Pretsch, et al., 2012), an expanded research scope (i.e., regarding context) could help teachers with their search for supports by providing more potentially-appropriate options. Another important direction for future research would be to broaden its scope to include people other than women. By including men and people who identify as trans rather than solely cis-gendered participants, the generalizability of this work would improve greatly. Although this work has focused on and included women only, systematic supports would undoubtedly benefit all workers, regardless of gender identity. Again underscoring the need for longitudinal work, Davis, et al. (2011) suggested that the field of stress science “would benefit from continued focus on generating theory to connect the operation of gender and stress in everyday RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 304 life” (p. 257). Taking into consideration that gender too is not a stable identity trait, but rather an ongoing enactment influenced by life stage and development, it could be fruitful for future PNI research to work with men’s, transgendered, and non-binary people’s stories and perspectives on events similar to those shared by the women in this current sample to help elucidate what strategies are most universal for teachers. It would also be helpful to expand the current scope of research into teachers’ experiences of emotional and/or caring work— particularly for Canadian teachers. Further Delineating the Emotional and Caring Work of Teachers I assumed that many of the teachers who participated in this research engaged in emotional labour and/or caring labour work as part of their regular practice. While it was not something about which I asked directly, there were definite references to different ways in which people managed their feelings in their attempts to simultaneously deal with home and work. By making time and space for supportive strategies at a systemic level, schools and districts might be able to strengthen teacher/mothers’ abilities to continue on in both their work and family roles, even as individuals reported feelings of overwhelm and exhaustion. This is not to suggest that anyone should be forced or even encouraged to work when they would be better advised to take time for rest and recuperation, but that systems might be more responsive to the expressed needs of its members. An ideal system of support would likely include systemic support for the individual needs of teachers that these teachers have determined and actualized through group work with others in similar contexts, especially since it has been demonstrated that seeking out and receiving support and feedback from others can help teachers at any stage in their career enhance their resilience (Bobek, 2002; Compton, 2010; Leroux & Théorêt, 2014; Van der Klink, Blonk, Schene, & van Dijk, 2001). RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 305 As noted by Castro, et al. (2010), some strategies that may be helpful in the maintenance of teachers’ resilience may have more to do with individual skills that promote good relationships rather than on any actual relationships. These behaviours include help-seeking, problem solving, seeking rejuvenation/renewal, and knowing how to manage difficult relationships. These researchers noticed that resilience in new educators is connected to a willingness to take and use her/his personal agency to enact change; they suggest that teaching teachers problem-solving techniques to deal with work-related personal (and personality) conflicts would help those teachers to then more fully concentrate on their pedagogy rather than having to worry so much about the ways in which they fit into their local cultures. Noor and Zainuddin (2011) echoed this call for specific training in their suggestion that teachers be provided access to training that helps them to recognize their need to manage the emotional demands of teaching—particularly for mothers who are similarly called upon with their own children at home. Herman et al. (2018) also suggested having teachers self-screen their levels of stress, coping and burnout to identify if they are in need of support—positing that teachers reporting a pattern of elevated stress levels and depressed coping are likely to require the most assistance and see supportive interventions yield the greatest results in terms of improved teacher mental health and student outcomes. As mild to moderate stress can provide an opportunity to build resilience (Doney, 2013), perhaps when teachers note that they are experiencing these low levels (ideally as part of a group check-in), they might be supported in reframing the mild stress in such a way that it becomes a source of strength to help manage the inevitable future stressors. Stories of challenge such as those that were shared by the teachers in my research could also provide insight into the types of mild to moderate stressors that some HPs have used to RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 306 build their resilience. In meeting with other teachers in a regular group setting, they could learn to actively reframe their inevitable work stresses as potential sources of growth and help others do the same. It may also help participants to identify the positive factors that Day, Kington, et al. (2006) saw as being so vital to teachers’ maintenance of stability of identity and health despite frequently overlapping and competing demands—and that it is resilience that allows them to sustain their motivation to stay in teaching. Le Cornu’s 2013 findings spoke to the essentiality of reciprocity in creating resiliencesupporting work communities and were echoed in the themes that arose in my own work even though the majority of participants in my own research were not early-career (defined as being within the first five years of teaching). Using reciprocity could help teachers recognize that caring labour, which “emphasizes the combined physical and affective characteristics of the work and the importance of attending to another individual’s personal needs or well-being” (Erickson & Stacey, 2013, p. 178) may have consequences for the carer even though the work might simultaneously be providing them with a sense of fulfillment as they help the children in their care to reach their potentialities as per Mayeroff’s (1971) definition of care. Other Future Directions Other directions that would benefit similar work of this type would be to investigate the relationship between teaching-related stress and WFC/FWC to see if a change in one is related to change in another in predictable ways. According to her review of the work-family literature, Kuschel (2017) suggested that the antecedent influences of genetics, personality type, and coping styles in the development of WFC/FWC remain understudied. Qualitative data from this current work could potentially provide insights into the third of these aspects and perhaps be a base for further research in that direction. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 307 Investigation into the relationship between satisfaction and resilience could also be fruitful. It could provide additional rationale for supporting resilience and potentially helping teachers increase their fulfilment in multiple spheres of their lives—another possibility that could be researched. As neither personality nor coping style were areas that I assessed as part of this work, their connection(s) to teachers’ resilience represent another possible future direction for this research. Given the positive response demonstrated by the teachers that participated in this research, I expect further investigation in these related topics might yield similarly rich datasets. Finally, this work has clear connections to that of Linda Duxbury and Chris Higgins, including their [Canadian] National Work-Life Conflict Study series that they completed in 1991 and revisited as a six-report series in 2001 (e.g. Duxbury & Higgins, 2003). Although some of their research does include work with teachers (e.g. Duxbury & Higgins, 2013), Duxbury and Higgins do not focus solely on that group of professionals. As such, this research represents a narrowing in and an extension of that larger, more comprehensive work. With its inclusion of only a single profession and gender, my work is narrower in scope than that of Duxbury and Higgins. This restricted scope could help explain some of the differences between the results here and the results of that larger study; for example, the latter found a low incidence of FWC, unlike the results reported here. Although more limited in some ways, my work also represents an extension of the larger work because it was completed using mixed methods. The incorporation of qualitative data helps provide a “thick slice” of teachers’ experiences simultaneously handling work and home responsibilities. Additional work collecting and working with stories from teachers and other HPs could further illuminate the experiences of Canadian professionals’ work-life equilibrium and represents a final future direction. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 308 Summary It is only when we understand what helps people stay healthy that we can start promoting factors to support them in doing so (Antonovsky, 1996; Horsburgh & Ferguson, 2012). I am optimistic that this work will have sufficiently developed an argument to reframe one goal of teacher support as encouraging work towards equilibrium rather than balance, recognizing that: “in the deeper, unspoken realms of the human psyche work and life are not separate things and cannot be balanced against each other except to create further trouble” (Whyte, 2009, pp. 12-13). Consistent with a neo-liberal propensity to position individuals and their families as holding the responsibility to maintain their health and wellness in the face of social pressures, secondary level occupational health interventions such as stress management programs are the most prevalent way organizations support their employees’ health (Weinberg & Cooper, 2011). These methods help individual workers identify and find methods to deal with strain in their lives—CBT and relaxation techniques are especially popular. When secondary interventions are not sufficient, tertiary level interventions in the form of Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) or Employee and Family Assistance Programs (EFAPs) allow workers to access health-supports such as counselling and other visit-based services such as acupuncture, massage, etcetera to help remediate the effects of occupational strain. Currently, secondary- and tertiary-level interventions appear to be the primary means of support for teachers in BC. Weinberg and Cooper (2011) recommend a combination of organizationallyand individually-tailored solutions to yield the best outcomes. I am arguing for an increase in systematic, primary-level supports to help teachers and other HPs stay healthy. As summarized by Gu (2018), RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 309 Building resilience in an organisational setting places a great deal of importance on the effectiveness of the organisational context, structure, and system and on how the system functions as a whole to create a supportive environment for individuals’ professional learning and development, to build a trusting relationship amongst its staff, and to foster a collective sense of efficacy and resilience and, through this, to sustain its continuous improvement (pp. 25-26). She goes on to note that this concept has not yet [as of 2018] been implemented within education. Also based on organizational research conducted outside the education sector, including all organizational levels and using multiple group and self-intervention strategies seems key to any workplace health promotion program like that which I am suggesting here (Hendriksen, Snoijer, de Kok, van Vilsteren, & Hofstetter, 2016). In their overview of the ways in which modern organizations address stress-related occupational health issues, Weinberg and Cooper (2011) suggested that realistic goal-setting, opportunities for team work, and increased autonomy accompanied by cognitive-behavioural supports to modify how individuals view their work are effective primary level intervention strategies: strategies that are incumbent upon the organization to implement to improve workers’ wellness. Regardless of specific strategies, they endorse a “participative approach that engages workers in its design, implementation, and evaluation [as one that] is more likely to yield positive results… [and that] where possible, [this includes] the effect of factors at the home-work interface” (p. 160). It is often an accumulation of relatively small things that wear down a person’s resilience; this gradual build-up of demands and can sometimes cause a person to feel as if she is being pecked to death by a chicken—whereas a single peck (or demand) might be tolerable and even unnoticeable, an amassment might lead to impaired health. By helping teachers to RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 310 better understand how their emotions affect their health and their work, and by supporting them in systemic and systematic ways to do so, schools and school districts would be helping their employees to improve their health, wellbeing, and quality of life, and promoting a culture of healthy learning (Lindström & Eriksson, 2011). The methods I used for this research provide one potential approach to do so. By engaging in this research process, the empowered participants and I made inroads to enabling each other and, ultimately, our respective communities, to fulfill the Ottawa Charter’s vision of health promotion as a process that increases individual and community control over determinants of health (WHO, 1986), particularly regarding mental health promotion, which is still one of the biggest challenges to contemporary public health (Lindström & Eriksson, 2005; WHO, 2005). The WHO has proposed that the identification and mitigation of workplace psychosocial hazards and the promotion of personal health resources in the workplace are two avenues of influence through which healthy workplaces might be encouraged (Burton, 2010). Burton’s (2010) WHO Healthy Workplace Framework and Model from which these suggestions were taken provides a template for strengthening leadership engagement and worker involvement in the same areas of occupational health that I have explored in this current work. Engaging teachers in dialogue that empowers them to suggest changes for possible implementation at systemic levels is a viable first step in actualizing such strengthening, while also acting as a primary intervention that could potentially utilize methods similar to those I used for my research. I look forward to the opportunity to further test these ideas with practicing teachers. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 311 References Abraham-Cook, S. (2012). The prevalence and correlates of compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and burnout among teachers working in high-poverty urban schools, (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs) database. (Paper No. 1814) Adkins, C. L., & Premeaux, S. F. (2012). Spending time: The impact of hours worked on workfamily conflict. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 80, 380-389. doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2011.09.003 Adler, J. (2012). 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New York, NY: Basic Books. Youssef, C. M., & Luthans, F. (2007). Positive organizational behavior in the workplace: The impact of hope, optimism, and resilience. Journal of Management, 33, 774-800. doi:10.1177/0149206307305562 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 354 Appendix A Collaborative Inquiry and Critical Analysis Framework (Cole and Knowles, 1993) Figure A1. Matrix for considering relationships and responsibilities in teacher development partnership research (Cole & Knowles, 1993). This figure illustrates how primarily-teacher participants and primarily-researcher participants might collaborate meaningfully at each phase of data collection and analysis. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 355 Appendix B Sample Survey Items Survey of Teacher Concerns & Experiences How many years have you have taught? What is the FTE of your current position? ______ In which school district are you currently employed? How many children do you have at home? What are the ages of your children at home? ______________________________________________ How do you describe your cultural/ethnic background? ________________________________ (e.g. Asian, Caucasian, Indigenous, etc.) Please circle the rest of your answers for this section. How old are you? 20 – 29 30 – 39 40 – 49 50 – 59 60 – 69 70 – 79 80+ What is your marital status? Single Married/Committed Separated Divorced Widowed What level(s) of students do you teach? Elementary Middle School Secondary In which setting(s) do you primarily work? Special Ed. Alternate Ed. Support services (incl. library) “Mainstream” What is your TQS category/highest level of education? Five (BEd) Five “plus” (BEd + 30 credits) Six (Masters) Six (with PhD) RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 356 Questions 1 – 49 describe a number of teacher concerns. Please read each statement carefully and decide how much (if ever) you feel this way about or because of your job. For each item, please mark an “x” in the box that best indicates how much you agree with the statements as they apply to you (i.e. to indicate how strong the feeling is when you experience it). If you have not experienced this feeling, mark number 0 (no strength; not noticeable). The rating scale is shown at the top of each page. not true at all (0) rarely true (1) sometimes true (2) often true (3) true nearly all the time (4) 1. I easily over-commit myself. □ □ □ □ □ 2. I become impatient if others do things too slowly. □ □ □ □ □ I respond to stress… 37. ...by becoming fatigued in a very short time. □ □ □ □ □ 38. ...with physical exhaustion. □ □ □ □ □ For the following section, please read each statement carefully and decide how much (if ever) you feel this way about your job. For each item, please mark an “x” in the box that best indicates how much you agree with the statements as they apply to you. not true at all (0) rarely true (1) sometimes true (2) often true (3) true nearly all the time (4) 50. My work keeps me from my family activities more than I would like. □ □ □ □ □ 51. The time I must devote to my job keeps me from participating equally in household responsibilities and activities. □ □ □ □ □ RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS For each item below, please mark an “x” in the box that best indicates how much you agree with the following statements as they apply to you as a teacher over the last month. If a particular situation has not occurred recently, answer according to how you think you would have felt. 357 not true at all (0) rarely true (1) sometimes true (2) often true (3) true nearly all the time (4) 68. I am able to adapt when changes occur. □ □ □ □ □ 69. I can deal with whatever comes my way. □ □ □ □ □ PLEASE SKIP THIS SECTION IF YOU DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN. For each item below, please mark an “x” in the box that best indicates how much you agree with the following statements as they apply to you as a parent over the last month. If a particular situation has not occurred recently, answer according to how you think you would have felt. not true at all (0) rarely true (1) sometimes true (2) often true (3) true nearly all the time (4) 78. I am able to adapt when changes occur. □ □ □ □ □ 79. I can deal with whatever comes my way. □ □ □ □ □ RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 358 Appendix C PNI Work Plans Setup of the workshop – day 1 Monday 15:00 – Setup of room ready 16:00 – Start. Welcome by Shirley 16:05 – This is NEW! Explanation of the work ahead by Harold. No tour, but some words about the stories. The tables. Breaks. Sanitary breaks, etc 16:10 – Digging in the stories • Each take a bundle • Read them in silence. • Select ones that you think contains information on how people deal with building up or losing resilience (whatever that may mean). • Lay aside others. • You have 15 mins. • After 10-15 mins: announce that if/when people want to add a story, there are more forms available. All tables 16:25 – Explanation on answering questions about stories on the tables per complexity driver 16:30 – Step 1 Introduce the exercise, form groups, and questions on all four tables. 16:35 – Step 2 Go to a table Try to get 4 or 5 answers per story for tables 1 and 2 Describe with a few words Put the # of the story on a post-it Work in silence Place a post-it with just the story # on tables 3 and 4 (but you can add a few words) Put the story back on the table for others to use it. Table 1 - ThemeElements: What it means What is this story about? How would you describe its subject matter? 17:15 – Step 3 Cluster the answers (15 mins) 17:30 – Ask to numbers the clusters 17:35 – Step 4 Describe the clusters (10 mins) “What is good and bad about this cluster of things?” Come up with 2-4 good things and 2-4 bad things 17:45 – Step 5 Cluster the descriptions and name them (10 mins) RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 359 17:55 – Step 6 Review story elements within groups (10 mins) 18:05 – Step 8 Finish the story elements (prep them for others to read (15 mins) Create a summary that describes, in their own words, what each story element means to them and what they have learned from it. 18:20 – Done / break Table 2 - ConflictElements: Tensions that appear Who or what stands in opposition in this story? Where do you see tensions? 18:30 – Step 3 Cluster the answers (15 mins) 18:45 – Ask to numbers the clusters 18:50 – Step 4 Describe the clusters (10 mins) “What is good and bad about this cluster of things?” Come up with 2-4 good things and 2-4 bad things 19:00 – Step 5 Cluster the descriptions (10 mins) 19:10 – Step 6 Review story elements within groups (10 mins) 19:20 – Step 8 Finish the story elements (prep them for others to read (15 mins) Create a summary that describes, in their own words, what each story element means to them and what they have learned from it. 19:35 – Done Afterparty until 20:00 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 360 Setup of the workshop – Day 2 Tuesday 15:00 – Setup of room ready 16:00 – Start. Welcome by Shirley 16:05 – This is NEW! Explanation of the work ahead by Harold. No tour, but some words about the stories. The tables. Breaks. Sanitary breaks, etc. There are more forms available. 16:10 – Digging in the stories.Each take a bundle. Read them in silence. (20 mins) All tables 16:25 – Explanation on answering questions about stories on the tables 16:30 – Step 1 Introduce the exercise Practice with 3 to 4 stories. Let the group find out and discuss. Don’t tell. 16:50 – Step 2 (one hour) Go to a table 1: ThemeElements: What it means What is this story about? How would you describe its subject matter? Try to get 4 or 5 answers per story Describe with a few words, a short sentence Put the # of the story on a post-it Work in silence Place a post-it with just the story # on tables 3 and 4 (but you can add a few words) Put the story back on the table for others to use it. Table 2: Resources Table 3: Turning point 16:50 – Round off. Discuss a bit with the goup Short break / dinner until 18:15 18:15 – Step 3 Cluster the answers (25 mins) 18:40 – Number the clusters (5 mins) 18:45 – Step 4 Describe the clusters (10 mins) “What is good and bad about this cluster of things?” Come up with 2-4 good things and 2-4 bad things 18:55 – Step 5 Cluster the descriptions and name them (10 mins) 19:05 – Step 6 Review story elements within groups (15 mins) 19:20 – Step 8 Finish the story elements (prep them for others to read (15 mins) Create a summary that describes, in their own words, what each story element means to them and what they have learned from it. 19:40 – Done / break Afterparty until 20:00 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 361 Appendix D Participant Confidentiality and Non-Disclosure Agreement Confidentiality and Non-Disclosure Agreement 19700 This study, Resilience and Work-Family Equilibrium in Teacher/Mothers, is being undertaken by Shirley Giroux (“Principal Investigator”) at the University of Northern British Columbia (“UNBC”). The study has four objectives: • • • • To assess indications of work-family conflict (WFC), resilience, and mental health in female teachers and examine differences and connections between these constructs in groups of female teachers stratified by children’s ages; To illuminate and elucidate female teacher/mothers’ experiences of WFC and work-family facilitation (WFF); To explore how teacher/mothers perceive their work and home demands to benefit from their resilience; and To develop recommendations in support of sustaining and/or increasing teachers’ resilience and their abilities to maintain their wellness while undertaking both work and family commitments. Data from this study will be used to elucidate ways in which women who are simultaneously teaching and raising children engage their resilience to sustain their various obligations at home and at work. I, (name of recipient), agree as follows: 1. To keep all the research information shared with me confidential by not discussing or sharing the research information in any form or format (e.g. disks, tapes, transcripts) with anyone other than the Principal Investigator; 2. To keep all research information in any form or format secure while it is in my possession and ensure that identifiable data is stored with encryption; 3. I will not use the research information for any purpose other than to help delineate themes to do with teacher/mothers’ sources of resilience; 4. To return all research information in any form or format to the Principal Investigator(s) when I have completed the research tasks; 5. After consulting with the Principal Investigator(s), erase or destroy all research information in any form or format regarding this research project that is not returnable to the Principal Investigator(s) (e.g. information stored on computer hard drive). (See back for signature lines) RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 362 Recipient: (Print name) (Signature) (Date) Principal Investigator: Shirley Giroux (Print name) (Signature) (Date) If you have any questions or concerns about this study, please contact: Professor Kitchenham, PhD Supervisor 250-960-6707 (office) and kitchena@unbc.ca This proposed study has been reviewed by the Research Ethics Board at UNBC. For questions regarding participant rights and ethical conduct of research, contact the Office of Research by email at reb@unbc.ca or telephone at (250) 960-6735. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 363 Participant Consent Forms Research Participation Consent Form for Focus Group Participants Resilience and Work-Family Equilibrium in Teacher/Mothers Fellow teacher: thank you for considering sharing your time and expertise as a participant in this study. Please read through this consent form in its entirety and sign it on the last page; once signed, a copy of this form will be provided to you to keep in your records. Who is conducting the study? Shirley Giroux, who is a UNBC Doctorate of Health Science student, is conducting a research study looking at sources of resilience in female teachers. This work is being conducted towards completion of her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Andrew Kitchenham in the UNBC Faculty of Education. For this focus group phase of the research, Mrs. Giroux will be working with a trained, experienced focus group facilitator who will be bound by a signed confidentiality/non-disclosure agreement. Mrs. Giroux can be reached by email at girouxs@unbc.ca or by text message or phone at 250-302-1207 for questions. Dr. Kitchenham can be reached by email at kitchena@unbc.ca or on his office phone at 250-960-6707. Why are you being asked to take part in this study? You were chosen as a participant in this study because you are a female teacher in BC and because you are a mother. Selection was also partly due to your geographic location as focus group participants are being recruited from four specific areas. What will I be expected to do if I agree to participate? If you decide to take part in this phase of the study, you will be asked to participate in two focus groups in your area. The purpose of these focus groups is to include teachers’ personal experiences in analyzing and interpreting trends from the previously collected survey data. You will be helping to develop and identify themes based on connections between the collected data your own experiences. Each group is expected to take approximately three hours. Is there any way that participating in this study could ham you? We do not think there is anything in this study that could harm you. Some of the questions we ask might upset you or seem sensitive or personal. You do not have to answer any question if you do not want to. If, at any point in the study, you feel uncomfortable or upset and wish to end your participation, please notify the researcher immediately and your wishes will be respected. If you find any of the questions to cause anxiety or discomfort, Mrs. Giroux can provide assistance finding contact information for counselling services in your local area through your Employee Family Assistance Program (EFAP) benefit provider or through the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), which can be reached from anywhere within BC by phone at 1-800-555-8222 or 310-6789 (crisis line) and by email at help@cmha.bc.ca. What are the benefits of participating? We do not think taking part in this study will help you. However, in the future, others may benefit from what we learn in this study as information from this study may be used to enhance future development of teacher support programs and interventions. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 364 How will your privacy be maintained? Consent for the inclusion of your data is given on the understanding that Mrs. Giroux will use her best efforts to guarantee that your identity will be protected and your confidentiality maintained both directly and indirectly. We encourage participants not to discuss the content of the focus group to people outside the group; however, we cannot control what participants do with the information discussed. As part of this effort, all focus group participants will be asked to sign a confidentiality/non-disclosure agreement before the start of the groups. All focus group responses will remain anonymous; if necessary, responses will be anonymized to shield respondents’ identities. After it has been fully anonymized, all participants will have the opportunity to review the collected focus group data before it is included in the eventual dissertation—this review will be upon request and fulfilled via email. For expediency, any participant comments to be taken into consideration for the final work must be received within one week of the receipt of the collected data. The data collected will be stored by Mrs. Giroux in a locked filing cabinet and on a password-protected computer at her private residence. Any identifiable electronic data will be stored in encrypted form. The data will be used only by Mrs. Giroux, and only for her PhD dissertation or presentation at learned conferences or publication in learned journals and books. Part of Mrs. Giroux’s use of this data will include presenting portions of it to the teacher focus group participants (including the focus group facilitator) for interpretation. The data may also be accessed by her supervisor, Dr. Andrew Kitchenham, in support of this PhD work. Paper-based data will be shredded at the end of the study (August 31, 2018) by Mrs. Giroux. Electronic data will be permanently erased at such time as it is no longer required for further presentation at learned conferences or publication in learned journals and books. Will you be paid for taking part in this study? All focus group participants will be provided with refreshments and meals during the focus groups. At the end of the second group, we will offer you a $25 gift card in appreciation of your participation. How will the results of this study be shared? The results of this study will be reported in a doctoral dissertation and may also be published in journal articles and books. Upon request and provision of contact information in the space below, interested participants will be sent a copy of the dissertation abstract or the full document by email in pdf form after the completion of this dissertation. I would like to receive a copy of the □ abstract □ full dissertation Email address: ___________________________________________________________________ Who can you contact if you have questions about this study? If you have any questions about what we are asking of you, please contact Mrs. Giroux or Dr. Kitchenham. Their emails and telephone numbers are listed at the top of the first page of this form. Who can you contact if you have complaints or concerns about the study?) If you have any concerns or complaints about your rights as a research participant and/or your experiences while participating in this study, contact the UNBC Office of Research at 250-960-6735 or by e-mail at reb@unbc.ca. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 365 I understand that if I have any comments or questions about this research, I may contact Mrs. Shirley Giroux at 250-398-7770 or Dr. Andrew Kitchenham at 250-960-6707. If I have any concerns about this research, I am aware that I may contact the UNBC Office of Research (reb@unbc.ca or 250-960-6735). Taking part in this study is entirely up to you. You have the right to refuse to participate in this study. If you decide to take part, you may choose to pull out of the study at any time without giving a reason and without any negative impact on you. Your signature below indicates that you have received a copy of this consent form for your own records. Your signature indicates that you consent to participate in this study. ______________________________________________ __________________ Participant Signature Date ______________________________________________ Printed Name of the Participant RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Research Participation Information Letter for Local Contacts Resilience and Work-Family Equilibrium in Teacher/Mothers 366 Fellow teacher, Thank you for agreeing to help me collect data for my doctoral research project investigating resilience in female teachers. Please find enclosed 30 copies of my data collection package, which includes an information letter and an omnibus survey. I am hoping to collect the same number of surveys from women who are working as teachers while simultaneously raising their own children at home, and women who are working as teachers and do not have any children – whether at home or not. Of the enclosed surveys, I am requesting that you try to give 15 to female teachers who fit the former description (teaching and parenting) and 15 who fit the latter (teaching and child-free). For this research, I am only including female teachers who are currently working as teachers (i.e., who are not on leave), regardless of the type or size of their current positions. Please also find enclosed 31 gift cards. The $25 card is for you in thanks for your assistance with this data collection procedure. The 30 $5 cards are included in each survey package and are meant as a thank you for each participant and as encouragement to return the completed survey to you according to these directions: • Please approach potential participants outside of work only (literally outside of the school building) as I wish to enroll them in their capacity as “private citizens” rather than school district employees. • Please ask each potential participant to read the letter and, if they agree to participate, complete the survey and return it to you as soon as possible. • Ask the participant to return the completed survey to you sealed in the envelope by whatever date represents two to three days time hence (writing this date on the envelope can be helpful). Each survey package contains clear instructions for the participant to follow to maintain the confidentiality of her data. • As each survey is returned, please let the participant know that the $5 gift card that was enclosed with the survey is in thanks for her time. • When surveys are returned to you, please collect them in the provided “Express Post” envelope. I intend to collect data until December 31, 2017, assuming that I have collected a sufficient number of responses at that time. If you have collected all of the surveys (or all that you know you will get back) before December 31, please send them back to me in the “Express Post” envelope as soon as you are able. Otherwise, please send me whatever surveys have returned to you by December 31 or shortly thereafter. Thank you again so much for your help with this process – I am deeply grateful to you for your generous donation of time. If at any time you have a question or concern about these surveys, this research, or this process, please call or text me at 250-302-1207 (cell) or email me at girouxs@unbc.ca. Gratefully yours, Shirley Giroux Candidate, PhD (Health Sciences) University of Northern BC RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Research Participation Informed Consent Letter for Survey Participants Resilience and Work-Family Equilibrium in Teacher/Mothers 367 Fellow teacher, Thank you for your potential interest in helping me collect data for my doctoral research project investigating resilience in female teachers. I am myself a teacher and a mother who lives in Williams Lake and who is working towards completion of a PhD in Health Sciences at the University of Northern BC (UNBC). I am asking women from all over BC to share some of their experiences as teachers with me via a four-part survey that typically takes no more than 40 minutes to complete. This survey consists of some brief personality and wellness assessments, three short-answer questions, and a demographic questionnaire. Besides discussing it directly in my dissertation, I intend to use the data collected via these surveys to develop questions for facilitated follow-up focus groups. All focus group participants— including the facilitator—will sign a confidentiality/non-disclosure agreement before they are provided access to the data and access will only be in my presence. My supervision, Dr. Andrew Kitchenham from the UNBC Faculty of Education, may also view the data as part of the supervision process. I will be collecting data in school districts throughout British Columbia. All research will be sent to me in Williams Lake, BC and all of it will be destroyed once it is no longer needed: paper-based data will be shredded at the end of the study; electronic data will be permanently erased at such time as it is no longer required for further presentation at learned conferences or publication in learned journals and books. The results of this study will be reported in my doctoral dissertation and may also be published in journal articles and books. If you would like a copy of the dissertation abstract or the full document by email in pdf form after the completion of this dissertation, please fill out and return the form at the bottom of the last page of this letter. For this research, I ask that you identify as a female teacher who is currently working as a teacher (i.e., you are not on leave), regardless of the type or size of your current position(s). You are being approached because you may fit these criteria. Participation in this study is entirely voluntary. You are free to withdraw from the study at any time and are also free not to answer any questions that make you feel uncomfortable. If you do withdraw from the study, any personally identifiable information that you have provided up to that point will also be withdrawn and securely destroyed unless you consent to that information being retained and analyzed. Although it is unlikely that anything in this study could harm you, some of the questions might upset you or seem sensitive or personal. You do not have to answer any question if you do not want to. If, at any point in the study, you feel uncomfortable or upset and wish to end your participation, please notify me immediately and your wishes will be respected. If you do find any of the questions to cause anxiety or discomfort, I can provide assistance finding contact information for counselling services in your local area through your Employee Family Assistance Program (EFAP) benefit provider or through the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), which can be reached from anywhere within BC by phone at 1-800-555-8222 or 310-6789 (crisis line) and by email at help@cmha.bc.ca. Besides being unlikely to cause you harm, it is also unlikely that taking part in this study will help you. However, in the future, others may benefit from what we learn in this study as information from this study may be used to enhance future development of teacher support programs and interventions. If you consent to participating in this research, please complete the survey that is within the manila envelope, seal the envelope with the completed survey inside, and return the envelope to the same person who gave you the paperwork. By completing and returning the survey, it will be assumed that you have given your consent to participate in this study. If at any time you have a question or concern about these surveys, this research, or this process, please call or text me at 250-302-1207 (cell) or email me at girouxs@unbc.ca. Alternatively, you can contact my supervisor, Dr. Kitchenham, by email at kitchena@unbc.ca or by phone at 250-960-2707. If you have any concerns or complaints about your rights as a research participant and/or your experiences while participating in this study, please contact the UNBC Office of Research at 250-960-6735 or by email at reb@unbc.ca. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 368 Thank you again so much for your help with this process— I am deeply grateful to you for your generous donation of time. Please accept a $5 gift card as a token of my appreciation for your input at such time as you return the survey to my local helper. Gratefully yours, Shirley Giroux Candidate, PhD (Health Sciences) University of Northern BC Please complete and return this portion to indicate your interest in receiving a copy of this research once the dissertation is completed. I would like to receive a copy of the: □ abstract □ full dissertation Email address: ______________________________________________________________ RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Appendix E PNI Sensemaking Summary Figure E1. Story and stereotype components of PNI archetypes. Part 1. Figure E2. Story and stereotype components of PNI archetypes. Part 2. Figure E3. Story and stereotype components of PNI archetypes. Part 3. 369 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Figure E4. Story and stereotype components of PNI archetypes. Part 4. Figure E5. Story and stereotype components of PNI archetypes. Part 5. Figure E6. Story and stereotype components of PNI archetypes. Part 6. 370 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS Figure E7. Story and stereotype components of PNI archetypes. Part 7. 371 RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 372 Appendix F Story Summaries Scaled According to Resilience-Precipitating Event (i.e. Gradual to Sudden) Figure F1. Story summaries scaled according to resilience-precipitating event (i.e. gradual to sudden moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated at the top of the column. Each line represents one participant’s CD-RISC (work) score (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child according to the legend on p. 192. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 373 Figure F2. Story summaries scaled according to resilience-precipitating event (i.e. gradual to sudden moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated at the top of the column. Each line represents one participant’s TSI score (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child according to the legend on p. 192. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 374 Figure F3. Story summaries scaled according to resilience-precipitating event (i.e. gradual to sudden moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated at the top of the column. Each line represents one participant’s WFC score on time-based WFC, strain-based WFC, or behaviourbased WFC as indicated by the labels above each column (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child according to the legend on p. 192. RESILIENCE & WFE IN TEACHER/MOTHERS 375 Figure F4. Story summaries scaled according to resilience-precipitating event (i.e. gradual to sudden moving from top to bottom). Each column represents one PNI group’s scale with the day (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday) indicated at the top of the column. Each line represents one participant’s FWC score on time-based FWC, strain-based FWC, or behaviourbased FWC as indicated by the labels above each column (longer lines indicate higher scores) and the age of her youngest child according to the legend on p. 192.