Presentation by: Shirley Giroux
Session: E | Time: 11:05AM – 11:45AM | Location: Room 208
As someone who has been a teacher longer than a mother, I have experienced first-hand the changes that having children can make to one’s pedagogical practice. Based in part on this observation and in part on a peripheral finding from my 2012 MEd thesis, I wondered whether there might be observable, measurable differences between the experiences of teachers who also are parents with children at home, compared to those who are child-free. Specifically, I wondered if there might be within-profession differences in measures of stress, work/life conflict, and/or resilience between groups of K – 12 teachers who identify as female, based on whether or not they had children at home. Through quantitative and qualitative methods, I have been collecting BC teachers’ self-reports of stress, work/life conflict, and resilience as well as their stories of challenging experiences and the resilience strategies they use to work through them. By approaching this work from a strengths-based (i.e. resilience) perspective, I expect that I will be able to more easily translate my research into suggestions of meaningful supports and strategies – both workplace and societal – to help facilitate equilibrium between work and home for teachers and other helping professionals. In this session, I will share the results of my dissertation research and facilitate discussion on where this work might best go next in order to be of maximum utility to BC teachers.
Abstract: 562