Collective care & mutual support in a ‘Burnout Culture’

Friday October 25th, 2019
2pm - 5pm
Dawson College, Colab, 3F.43

This workshop carves a space for care, comfort and trust for teachers to discuss how they are doing and feeling. Teachers yield to various pressures in their everyday work from being productive to efficient at all times regardless of the situations in their personal lives. In addition to workload and classroom management, masking of anxieties and dealing with other challenges are supposed to be part of a teacher’s “toolkit”. Given the pressures and demands of the profession a number of teachers burnout in a given year and quite a few barely manage to stay afloat. Many refer to this as a “burnout culture” where burnout is not a matter of if but when.
 
The workshop will be a space to reflect upon: what spaces and occasions do we have or can we carve to support each other, emotionally or otherwise given the isolating nature of teaching experience; how can we extend “same boat” solidarity to each other and collectivize the concerns in order to promote healthy and sustainable teaching community; what practices of care, both self and collective, can we put in place to survive and thrive given current realities?