Empowering, Honoring, and Elevating Through Storytelling: Teachers on Self-Care

This Dissertation in Practice was designed to explore teachers' experiences with self-care individually, interpersonally, and in their schools. Teachers are dealing with at-work risk factors such as compassion fatigue and burnout (Farber, 2000; Figley, 2017; Garcia & Weiss, 2019; Goldhaber & Gratz, 2021; Hammel, 2021). A review of the literature showed that self-care for teachers can have positive benefits that mitigate and buffer at-work risk factors (Ansley,2021; Jensen, 2019; Kearney et al., 2009;Lee & Miller, 2013;Yang et al., 2021;Smullens, 2021). The purpose of this qualitative narrative inquiry was to elevate, honor, and empower teachers' voices as they shared their personal self-care stories (Barth, 2003;Clandinin & Connelly 1985; Clandinin & Connelly 2000). This study emphasizes the value of self-care to teachers and spotlights the role organizations have in facilitating or hindering self-care. Teachers reflected on self-care at many levels during data collection. This study provided self-care support to teachers through storytelling. The data suggests that self-care is a valuable practice for teachers professionally and personally and can buffer against burn-out and compassion fatigue. Each of the teacher's self-care stories suggests that self-care support is valuable at the organizational level. Each teacher participant shared their positive experiences sharing their self-care stories.