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Education, and especially the life of a teacher, is constantly evolving. Teachers' roles and responsibilities have become more complicated and multifaceted over time. Therefore, they have to invest a great deal of time, energy, and effort to navigate the demands and complexities of their role. In the last 20 years, education has changed in response to increased workload, the rise of high-stakes testing and accountability, social-emotional and behavioral challenges among students, school safety concerns, equity concerns, and now the coronavirus pandemic. These factors have been linked to high stress and teacher burnout, which leads to more teachers leaving their jobs (Arvidsson et al., 2019). Nonetheless, those who endure the flames of burnout do so because they are resilient in the face of adversity and persistent in their commitment to the call of teaching and learning. This chapter examines the effects of stress and burnout among three alternatively certified teachers and the behaviors and strategies these educational first responders employ to build resilience and persistence in their service to the students who shape our future.

Teacher burnout is a persistent challenge for school principals, complicated by the lack of a proven, repeatable strategy to mitigate burnout. If left unresolved, burnout can adversely affect school culture and student learning, leading to turnover that can compound these harmful effects. Since burnout can vary in severity and frequency, principals can work to mitigate burnout in the moment, seizing the opportunity when burnout is first observed. In this narrative sketch, I provide an overview of my experiences in my development as a principal and how this informed my approach to supporting teachers. I also discuss my experiences as principal in working with teachers at different stages of burnout severity, sharing specific stories and reflecting on both the successes and failures of my efforts, including the use of chocolates and tissues to create an individualized safe space to initiate open dialogue. The title, “Chocolates or Tissues,” is a metaphor that represents my momentary burnout mitigation strategy but may also serve as a metaphor for the need for principals to seek individualized opportunities for resolution in a burnout moment when working with teachers.

Stress and burnout in public school teachers and principals have been well documented for the past 40 years. Sources of stress and burnout are often systemic and include numerous factors from low pay to student behavioral issues to accountability pressures. Additionally, stress and burnout in the educational workforce have implications on both the efficacy of individuals' work and their intentions to leave. In a postpandemic era where record numbers of teachers and school leaders are leaving the profession, mitigating burnout and improving the sustainability of the education workforce is essential. This chapter provides strategies at multiple levels, including the individual, school, and district, to reduce negative psychological impacts of educational work and inform structural changes. Policy recommendations at both the state and federal level are also provided. And lastly, implications for educator and principal preparation programs are detailed. Approaching burnout and well-being from a multilevel perspective can rectify both direct and indirect causes of burnout, and a systematic approach is more likely to lead to meaningful, sustained change to better working conditions. Improving the US educational system in a postpandemic era will require concerted efforts to support the head, the heart, and the health of public education professionals.

The current study examines developing racial attitudes among a group of African American adolescents. Data for this study include 28 open-ended, qualitative interviews with African American adolescents (64% girls, 36% boys) in Detroit, Michigan, and were drawn from a larger study in which these adolescents and their mothers were interviewed about racial socialization. Data analysis shows adolescents' racial attitudes to be ambivalent and influenced by the dissonance between “color-blind” rhetoric – the idea that “race doesn't matter” – and their everyday experiences, in which race does matter in important ways. Adolescents' reports of racial attitudes and experiences with racism frequently include travel anecdotes, which reveal how place, travel, and negotiating the color line influence their developing ideas about race. The findings suggest that sources beyond parental socialization strongly affect adolescents' developing racial attitudes and identities and that young people's voices should be further utilized in studies examining these issues.

For students who are blind or visually impaired, technology enables greater access to the educational curriculum, immediate and independent access to information, and full participation in community and citizenship. This chapter reviews research on technology use by students with visual impairments, and highlights effective practices, promising developments, and ongoing challenges. The authors discuss the implications of these advancements on policy, instruction, professional development, and future research.

Much of the research associated with organizational politics has focused on negative outcomes such as stress, burnout, and turnover intention. Only a limited amount of research has focused on identifying the psychological mechanisms that explain the influence of negative organizational politics on individual and organizational outcomes. In this chapter, we propose a more positive conceptualization of organizational politics and explore potential associations between both positive and negative politics and employee engagement. More specifically, we propose a model showing how the psychological conditions of psychological safety, availability, and meaningfulness explain the relationship between perceptions of positive and negative politics and employee engagement. We conclude by suggesting practical interventions to assist organizations develop a more positive organizational political climate.

There has been a reduction of arts funding the United States educational system, even though research has identified the need for socioemotional learning policy/guidelines/requirements in the US Ed. and more school teachers and counselors. In Texas, geopolitical issues and natural disasters impact learners in the state and corporal punishment is still allowed in some districts, such as Pampa Independent School District (ISD). A study of six art teachers across a large urban school district was conducted to better understand this conundrum vis-a-vis semi-structured interviews with art teachers working in public Middle and High Schools. This chapter investigates the impact of art practices and art teachers on socioemotional self-regulation of students, as we consider the impact on teacher retention using the Heuristic model of child self-regulation and reactivity and school outcomes (Liew, Erbeli, Nyanamba, & Li, 2020). Finally, the ironic finding that teaching art classes is financially emotionally draining for teachers to the point of decreasing retention, yet some are still impassioned to teach art classes, is juxtaposed with attachment theory. Recommendations for art education policy and pedagogy are made using the lens of socioemotional learning, art therapy, empathy, and emotional self-regulation.

This chapter presents the lived experience of 10 doctoral students and recent graduates from a North American University, who like graduate students elsewhere, have faced upstream battles against excessive faculty entitlement. The six sections of this chapter, each by different authors, explore how entitlement in the University, is experienced from different perspectives. The first four sections explore the deleterious effects of excessive faculty/teacher entitlement which can lead to competitiveness, selfishness and aggression. Section five focuses on student entitlement as experienced by an immigrant graduate teaching assistant, and section six explores how both faculty and student entitlement may be experienced at different stages of the immigrant experience. It is hoped that this chapter will create a platform with which to highlight these topics for ourselves and other doctoral students attending other universities, so that relationships and opportunities may improve for everyone.

In high-end interactive service work settings, asymmetries between workers and customers are typically reflected in the service interaction. Workers must carefully control their emotional and aesthetic displays towards customers by relying on protocol provided by management. Customers, in turn, need not reciprocate such acts. By contrast, this paper theorizes service interactions that, paradoxically, aim to narrow the social distance between those on either side of the counter. Drawing on ethnographic data from a higher-end Los Angeles restaurant, I introduce the concept of proximal service as performed relationships in which server and served engage in peer-like interactions in a commercial setting. I show how management structures this drama through hiring, training, and shopfloor policies, all of which encourage select workers to approach customers using informal, flexible, and peer-like performances. I close by discussing how a branded experience of service amongst equals relates to symbolic exclusion and social inequality, and suggest that proximal service may be on the rise within upscale, urban service establishments seeking to offer a more “authentic” consumption experience.

At the virus' US epicenter, New York City, teachers experienced the impact of the pandemic firsthand in real time. Consistent with intensification (Apple, 1986), as school struggles to adapt to a rapidly changing social and educational landscape, socioemotional stressors and occupational responsibilities increase. Through the metaphoric (Craig, 2018) image of a candle, and using the tools of narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) – broadening, burrowing, storying, and restorying – we surface four teachers' lived experiences in a year filled with incredible grief and loss, socio-political-cultural trauma, racial strife, and personal-professional challenges to show their resolve and resiliency to persevere through and beyond burning out.