Moral injury and moral traps in teaching: Learning from the pandemic

ABSTRACT

The construct of moral injury is usually utilized to understand cases in which individuals perform or witness actions they consider morally wrong. In this paper, we suggest the construct of moral trap, which entails circumstances in which teachers face pressure to act but are unable to simultaneously meet the demands of care, justice, and truthfulness because of systemic conditions. Using grounded theory, we present the analysis of ten semi-structured interviews with teachers from four U.S. states. We found three different types of entrapment: teachers attempting to enact and/or advocate for social justice, attempting to care for their families, and attempting to care for their professional identities. Implications for teacher education include a need to prepare teachers for navigating multiple moral demands and for coordinating with other teachers to advocate for social change. Implications for policy include a need to provide greater wrap-around supports for educational equity.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics of care
• moral injury
• moral trap
• teacher education
• COVID-19

Introduction

This study explores the concept of moral traps within education. We examine the experience of ethical and moral conflicts through the experiences of educators teaching within the Coronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and draw on these to develop the concept of moral entrapment. Among the teachers interviewed for this study, the COVID-19 pandemic made conflicts between an intrinsic desire to care for and advocate for students (Bastik, 2000) and structural and institutional realities more common (and often more acute). Therefore, these moments became more visible, providing an occasion to look at what are usually called ‘moral dilemmas’ from a more systemic perspective.

In this study, we look at how moral conflicts and dilemmas experienced during the pandemic created moral injury for teachers, experiences that hurt them emotionally and caused unwanted changes to their self-concept and sense of ease in the world (Shay, 1994). Specifically, this paper introduces the concept of ‘moral trap’ to describe how resources, policies, and institutional arrangements set teachers up to experience moral dilemmas and injuries. It ends with dual calls: first, for greater collective responsibility for designing our schools and the work of teaching in ways that do not create as many interactions that lead to moral injuries. Second, for specific ways, we might begin to prepare teachers explicitly for such a teaching environment while working collectively to ameliorate moral entrapment.

Literature review: Caring ethics and moral injury

This study draws on caring ethics literature developed in the late 20th century by feminists such as Gilligan (1977) and Noddings (2013, 2015). This theory has been influential in education and other caregiving professions. It describes the relation between teachers’ caring work, with its attendant emotional and personal investments, and the structural impediments to acts of caring (Beasely & Bacchi, 2005; Bullough, 2011; Wilder, 1999). The ethics of caring maintains that morality originates in moments of empathetic engrossment in the experience of others. It is a felt relation. Within this frame, discourses of duty and rational principles are cultural practices that bridge the moments of engrossment that breathe life into our moral connection to others. According to this view, classical moral theory mistakes those bridges for morality itself (Noddings, 2013).

We also build from educational literature concerning ‘moral dilemmas’ and ‘moral conflicts’ and put these in conversation with literature on ‘moral injury.’ ‘Moral injury’ (Shay, 2014) conceptually originated in mental health literature on veterans and military members (Shay, 1994). Shay initially gave the concept ‘a three-part definition: (a) betrayal of “what’s right,” (b) by someone who holds legitimate authority, (c) in a high-stakes situation’ (Currier et al., 2021, p. 7). The concept was refined by Litz et al. (2009) to mean ‘perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that threaten to transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations’ (Currier et al., 2021, p. 7). We extend this work to focus our unit of analysis on moral traps rather than the moral injuries they produce. Moral traps entail the systemic set-ups and societal arrangements of policies and other affairs that create circumstances that instantiate moral dilemmas and moral conflicts, thus producing moral injury at the individual teacher level.

Moral dilemmas and moral conflicts

Within the field of education, the scholarship on moral dilemmas and moral conflicts are closely related to the concept of moral trap. Oser (1991) claimed that ‘moral conflicts in educational settings arise when three types of moral claims cannot be met at the same time: justice, care, and truthfulness’ (p. 191). When a situation also entails pressure to act, normative ‘rules’ about ‘what’s right’ become contextually embedded, and situational judgment is called for. This, in our estimation, can result in moral stress.

Tirri (1999) built upon Oser’s model to describe how justice, care, and truthfulness create a sense of accountability. In her work, Tirri (1999) revealed four main categories of educational moral dilemmas: (a) matters related to teachers’ work, (b) students’ behavioral morality regarding school and work, (c) common rules in schools, and (d) rights of minoritized students.

Colnerud (2015) argued that teachers experience moral dilemmas that arise from conflicts between laws and professional commitments; overload, frustration, and guilt result in unresolved dilemmas. We conceptualize unresolved moral dilemmas that result in moral injury via the pathway of moral stress. In other words, the system as it exists sets teachers up for moral failure (the triangular space of moral entrapment in Figure 1, below). Teachers are left to come to unsatisfactory moral resolutions on their own, without training or supports to guide or validate their decisions.

Figure 1. Conceptual model of moral trap.

Similarly, Shapira-Lishchinsky (2011) identified five repeating ethical dilemmas in the literature on educational ethics: (a) caring climate (looking at individual needs of teachers) vs. formal climate (solidarity and authority), (b) tension between distributive justice and school standards (distributive justice refers to the fairness of students’ outcomes), (c) confidentiality versus school rules (when a teacher has information about a student that students asked to stay confidential and the obligation to report), (d) loyalty to colleagues and school norms (e.g., protecting pupils) and (e) educational agenda of the pupil’s family is not consistent with the school’s educational standards.

Shapira-Lishchinsky (2011) also defined ‘critical incidents’ as incidents that function as a turning point for teachers–many of which occur because of the ethical dilemmas described above. Critical incident training has been used in teachers’ supervised field experience. Shapira-Lishchinsky also developed ethical guidelines for teachers–which may in fact prove quite useful in teacher training; however, the onus for coping with these circumstances is still placed on individual teachers.

Likewise, Koc and Buzzelli (2016) delineated caring vs. power relationship dilemmas and explained teachers’ conceptions of these dilemmas as moral because they involve children’s needs, children’s feelings, and issues of fairness and honesty. This conceptualization of teachers’ moral dilemmas indicates that teachers see these dilemmas as moral because they are about being in relation with their students. Being in good relation involves both how they (the teachers) treat and interact with the students as well as ‘recognition of and respect for the unique personhood of each student’ (Koc & Buzzelli, 2016, p. 39). While it is important to identify power dynamics as part of what creates moral dilemmas, we also draw attention to how hegemonic power structures surface in these micro-interactions in our conceptualization of moral traps.

Similarly, Ehrich et al. (2011) suggested a model for helping teachers work through ethical dilemmas and state that as a field, teacher education is already well aware that training in ethical decision making is important (p. 20). They continue:

Programs would do well to use problem-based learning processes … whereby a set of ethical dilemma scenarios would be devised with structured, guided questions for teachers to answer and share with others … . Rogers and Sizer (2010) support this notion when they say that teaching ethical reasoning to teachers is best achieved by using authentic case studies emerging from the teachers’ own experiences (pp. 20–21)

While we go on to agree with this recommendation for teacher-educator preparation, we add that no amount of problem-based learning, however well-executed, will ameliorate the entrapping circumstances that continue to circulate and create the need for teachers to practice with such scenarios. We acknowledge that, to some extent, teachers will always face certain ethical dilemmas and conflicts; however, we aver that many of the most egregious entrapping systemic situations can only be alleviated via systems change.

Glazer (2022) argued that the ethical dilemmas most common in research are dilemmas that occur within an individual classroom. We claim that though some of the dilemmas we describe seem as if they are moral dilemmas that individual teachers face, our point in conceptualizing moral entrapment is to draw attention to the systemic similarities and over-arching structures that create similar experiences of entrapment from site to site and context to context among educators. While Glazer similarly drew attention to teachers’ recognition of their choices being embedded ‘within a system of unequal schools’ (p. 125), thus far, this phenomenon has gone unnamed and thus under-studied at the structural and systemic levels instead of the level of individual phenomenological experience.

Moral traps, in our conceptualization, are situations where teachers face ‘pressure to act’ (Oser, 1991), but social and institutional dynamics (structural circumstances) inhibit their ability to meet the demands of justice, care, and truthfulness simultaneously (see Figure 1). The concept encapsulates constellations of structural circumstances that contribute to the inability of teachers (who are authority figures) to do ‘what’s right’ in high-stakes situations.

We draw on Hedayati et al. (2019) to delineate that moral dilemmas are a specific subset of moral conflicts in which ‘a moral decision needs to be made using the right value; however, in a moral dilemma [as opposed to moral conflict] no clear-cut decision is possible. This means that the decision might hurt one or even both sides of the conflict’ (Hedayati et al., 2019, p. 465). This type of dilemma, of course, can induce moral stress and thus cause moral injury (see Figure 1). However, when the larger circumstances that produce the moral dilemma which invokes moral stress and causes moral injury are structural and systemic (particularly structural and systemic injustices in society), a moral trap/entrapment (the triangular space) is produced (we use the terms moral trap and moral entrapment synonymously).

Moral injury and moral traps

Many of the experiences teachers described in our findings were occurring before the onset of COVID-19 and were only magnified by it, and we expect similar situations to continue to arise in the future. Research that has emerged from the pandemic thus far indicates that teachers experienced a great deal of uncertainty regarding districts’ and schools’ expectations during the initial move to remote instruction, followed by concerns about lack of district and administrative support (Chan et al., 2021). Furthermore, while not unique to the teaching profession, many teachers’ well-being was impacted by the compression of personal and professional responsibilities into a single space during lockdown (Adkins-Cartee et al., 2023; Jakubowski & Sitko-Dominik, 2021; Kaden, 2020; Kim & Asbury, 2020). Many teachers also had deep concerns for vulnerable students such as students living in poverty, students from marginalized and oppressed groups including but not limited to LGBTQIA+ students, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners (ELLs; DeRosia et al., 2021; Jones, 2021; Kim & Asbury, 2020). Teachers were left on their own to learn how to transition to distance learning platforms which heightened the levels of stress teachers experienced (Ibna Seraj et al., 2022). In addition, research indicates that teachers report higher levels of burnout since the beginning of the pandemic, a trend that is still in effect even after the third year (for some places) of returning to in person teaching (Daniel & Van Bergen, 2023). This article focuses specifically on the situations in which teachers could not meet student needs, and the effect such situations had on teachers. These situations arose in the context of COVID-19 but bear relevance far beyond the pandemic circumstances. To help understand these impacts, we also draw upon the literature of moral injury.

Moral injury refers to damage to a person’s conscience and sense of self resulting from their own actions or witnessing others engaging in an action they consider morally transgressive (Gilligan, 2014). This term, first coined by psychiatrist Shay (1994), was used to describe experiences of military veterans who were put into impossible situations by military leadership and consequently engaged in actions that violated their moral sense of self. These experiences produced lingering feelings of guilt, shame, betrayal, anger, and disillusionment (Sugrue, 2020). Subsequently, closer attention has been paid to the long-lasting effects of moral injury, which can lead to burnout, depression, disruption of self-regulation, and even self-harm (Gilligan, 2014; Koenig & Al Zaben, 2021). In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have applied the concept of moral injury to teachers’ work, especially as it relates to the ethics of caring (e.g., Keefe-Perry, 2018; Koenig & Al Zaben, 2021; Levinson, 2015; Sugrue, 2020). This body of literature acknowledges that educators interact daily with a system that holds contradictory values (Keefe-Perry, 2018). Teachers face situations where their values cannot be acted upon (Levinson, 2015; Sugrue, 2020). According to Levinson (2015), moral injuries result from the societal betrayal of a person’s values, leaving an individual to salvage their moral identity from within the institutionally imposed contradictions.

Teachers in other studies report encountering contradicting situations in which they are expected to adhere to rules they feel may be detrimental to their students (Keefe-Perry, 2018). In a recent study, Sugrue (2020) supported Keefe-Perry’s framework and indicated that most PK-12 professionals experienced moral injuries at their schools.

Sugrue also suggested that the student body’s racial composition in schools was a strong predictor of a higher frequency of teachers’ moral injury. A closer examination of this predictor indicated that educators serving historically marginalized groups experienced disproportionate professional discipline (similar to the disproportionate disciplining of their students), often due to advocating for students’ well-being. The ultimate consequence of such circumstances, as predicted by the moral injury literature, is a reduction in teachers’ motivation and efficacy, as well as an increased rate of burnout (Keefe-Perry, 2018; Koenig & Al Zaben, 2021; Levinson, 2015), particularly in the most vulnerable school communities (Sugrue, 2020).

Our study takes the concepts of moral dilemma, moral stress, moral conflict, and moral injury and emphasizes that the sources of moral conflict are not merely internal, idiopathic, or individual to the teachers or their immediate circumstances but are structurally, institutionally, and socially created. The concept of moral injury begins with individual moral experience and focuses on how institutional arrangements constrain individual moral action and cause moral injury (Levinson, 2015; Sugrue, 2020). Our study adds to moral injury literature by making the institutional and social arrangements that contribute to moral injury the central unit of analysis. Teachers frequently work in conditions that make this kind of injury inevitable. We refer to these sets of conditions as moral traps.

The term ‘trap’ can imply some degree of individual intention to capture or injure; to trap grammatically implies a subject, or an individual doer of the action. We do not use it in this sense. Instead, we use it in the sense of an aversive or harmful circumstance which is difficult or impossible to escape, such as the trap of a dead-end job or being trapped in a burning building. In this sense, the moral traps of which we speak are not the result of individually premeditated attacks but are the consequence of circumstances created by people that are codified into institutional arrangements and policies. As such, we, as educational researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, bear collective responsibility for the existence of these traps and the injuries they create. We also collectively have the agency to change these circumstances so that such injuries can be reduced or eliminated. Importantly, we emphasize that in calling attention to teachers’ moral injuries and the moral traps that produce them, we do not seek to center (particularly) white teachers’ ‘comfort’ or ‘mere feelings’ (indeed, teachers of multiple races and ethnicities experience such traps); instead, we emphasize that the circumstances of teachers’ entrapment produce teachers who are politically and materially less able to meet the demands of social justice in their practices.

Methodology

Social constructionist grounded theory, iterative engagement with data

This study took a social constructionist grounded theory approach to the analysis of the study data. According to Charmaz (2008), ‘a social constructionist approach encourages innovation; researchers can develop new understandings and novel theoretical interpretations of studied life’ (p. 398). This approach to inquiry is not a process of deductively testing hypotheses but is instead one of inductively identifying patterns in a data set. Those patterns are iteratively revisited in a manner that enables more intricate and often unexpected features of a phenomenon to emerge (Thornberg & Charmaz, 2014). As Charmaz observes, ‘Tacking back and forth between increasingly focused data collection and analysis promotes creating an original analysis’ (Charmaz, 2017, p. 2).

The material and social conditions that create moral dilemmas for teachers and put them at risk of moral injury were not the initial focus of this research project. Instead, ‘moral trap’ emerged in the context of analyzing other themes that the research group had anticipated would be present, and once noticed, was followed by revisiting the data looking for references to moral dilemmas and moral injury. Once we had this lens, it became clear these phenomena were alluded to frequently and described in detail in multiple interviews. This emergent approach to inductive analysis is in keeping with the norms of grounded theory research, as Charmaz (2008) explains:

Grounded theory is a method of explication and emergence. The method itself explicates the kinds of analytic guidelines that many qualitative researchers implicitly adopt. It also fosters explicating analytic and methodological decisions—each step along the way. By explicating their decisions, grounded theorists gain control over their subject matter and their next analytic or methodological move. The construction of the process, as well as the analytic product, is emergent. (Charmaz, 2008, p. 408)

Data gathering

Methods

While other studies (e.g., Hedayati et al., 2019) have researched moral dilemmas and ‘unfair situations’ deductively using sets of pre-written questions for students or teachers (e.g., Tirri’s, 2003 protocol; Tirri, 1999), our analysis takes cues from grounded theory because grounded theory ‘assumes that neither data nor theories are discovered, but researchers construct them as a result of their interactions with their participants and emerging analyses’ (Thornberg & Charmaz, 2014, p. 154). In this way, we also engaged Saldaña’s (2014) strategy of ‘to feel’ in qualitative data analysis and engaged our own positionalities as former teachers. Our positionalities attuned us to teachers’ experiences, how their experiences impacted their mental health and well-being, and how their well-being was impacted by larger structures and inequities in society that limited their capacities for moral action.

For the analysis presented in this paper, ethical dilemmas and moral injuries were identified as an unanticipated but recurrent theme related to teachers’ mental health, concerns for students with disabilities and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students (DeRosia et al., 2021), and family-school partnerships during the lockdown. In particular, we noticed that teachers often described the dilemmas and moral injuries they faced as being caused by features of schooling institutions and policies over which they had little or no control. The subsequent analysis utilized open and selective coding¹ to investigate the systemic elements creating what the authors name moral traps, which result in moral injuries. Coding was used as a form of data management. Codes were used to help locate examples that would help refine and deepen conceptual/analytic claims about particular features of the experience of teaching during the pandemic. We examined the circumstances that gave rise to teachers’ feelings of hurt and lack of agency to move the focus from individual moral dilemmas to social accountability for the creation of these circumstances (Glazer, 2022). In conceptualizing moral traps, we used open coding to examine social justice narratives including systemic racism and oppression, which led to more selective codes such as moral dilemma, moral conflicts, students’ well-being, teachers’ accountability, teachers’ mental health, teacher burnout, teachers’ emotional labor and the imbalance of teachers’ multiple rules in one space (Shapira-Lishchinsky, 2011). Constant comparison of the data allowed for the construction of three distinct traps we identified encompassing all our selective codes (Thornberg & Charmaz, 2014). Our coding was undertaken, not as a prelude to making claims about general features of the experiences of a specific population of teachers, but instead to help recognize similarities in the lived experiences of teachers working in widely varying circumstances (Charlesworth, 2005; Geertz, 1973; van Manen, 1995). We took a reflexive thematic analytic approach to coding, which built upon concepts and theories drawn from the existing literature (Braun & Clarke, 2020; Saldaña, 2014). Consequently, the empirical data permitted refinement and application of the concept of moral injury (previously discussed) but did not provide a foundational justification for the construct.

Unit of analysis

Our distinguishing of ‘moral trap’ from ‘moral dilemma’ or ‘moral conflict’ shifts our unit of analysis away from the individual as the sole source or location of the conflict to the constellation of material and social conditions that create or at least increase the risk of moral injury to teachers. We acknowledge that many of the individual examples we give illustrate what, on the personal teacher level, maybe a moral conflict or dilemma. However, we draw attention not just to individual situations that produce such moral conflicts and thus moral injuries, but to the systems and circumstances at play that set up moral injuries. When we shift the unit of analysis to the interplay of larger systems that produce situations that engender inescapable moral conflicts and injuries, we pay attention instead to moral traps. We note the importance of ethical dilemmas and moral traps as a feature of teaching practice. Our findings ultimately share the narratives of ten teachers who discussed the impact of moral entrapment as a source of mental and moral stress, injury, and strain.

Transferability

The fact that the Pedagogy of the Pandemic (PotP) project and this paper’s project specifically focused on teachers’ experiences during a pandemic (arguably an outlier circumstance) might seem to undermine efforts to extrapolate findings in this study to more general conditions. Although the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic made some ethical dilemmas more visible, there was little we found that suggested they were unique to the conditions created by the pandemic. In fact, teachers remarked on multiple occasions that the conflicts they faced were nothing new.

Insights gained from the teachers who participated in this study transfer meaningfully to many school contexts other than their own and well beyond the conditions of pandemic schooling. The concept of moral trap emerged as we analyzed the stories teachers shared. We identified repeated instances in which teachers felt morally obligated to act in ways that exceeded their ability or entailed conflicts with other competing professional, personal, and ethical obligations. The instances included in this study illustrated that teachers experienced frustration because efforts to fulfill their moral obligations were not supported by school institutions or were actively inhibited by them.

Trustworthiness

Smith (2000), drawing on the work of Guba and Lincoln, reconceptualized validity as ‘trustworthiness’ in qualitative research, drawing on the dual concepts of goodness and utility. ‘A trustworthy account is one “worth paying attention to, worth taking account of” … . A trustworthy account is one that demonstrates “the quality of goodness”’ (Smith, 2000, p. 142). Stahl and King (2020) also discuss the assumption in most qualitative research that we construct reality. ‘Therefore,’ they state, ‘the quantitative concept of validity is simply not a goal of qualitative research. It can’t be’ (p. 26). Instead, we rely on the qualitative construct of trustworthiness, particularly as regards our prolonged engagement with this dataset from 2020–2022 as well as prolonged engagement in establishing dependability via conversations among all the authors–particularly the first three of us–over the same time period.

The accounts we provide of teachers’ experiences of moral dilemmas in their teaching highlight morally and politically significant aspects of the work of teaching that, if not universally present in teaching, are quite common. As such, they also achieve the standard of ‘transferability’ articulated by Guba and Lincoln (1982, 1994) and Lincoln and Guba (1985), as transferability is more appropriate to the philosophical assumptions of a constructed reality than validity (Stahl & King, 2020).

Once examples of moral entrapment were recognized following our conducting follow-up interviews concerning teachers’ mental health and well-being, we began noting them in other interviews in the full data set. We report on a subset of the PotP interviews that featured teacher accounts of moral/ethical dilemmas and moral conflicts that met our criteria for the definition of a moral trap (i.e., they caused moral stress resulting in moral injury due to larger institutional and societal arrangements that prohibited satisfactory moral action). In what follows, we provide a detailed examination of instances of moral traps teachers faced before, during, and likely after COVID-19.² The experiences teachers shared with us varied in their focus but shared similar structures, elements, and narrative.

Participants

Participants in the study were all current classroom teachers, with experience ranging from three to 23 years in the classroom. Participants represented a variety of grade levels and subject matters (see Table 1 for more information). Although we did collect information on each teacher’s country, teaching experience, grade level, subject area, etc., our initial protocol for the project did not include specific questions about each teacher’s age, race, gender, or the socioeconomic status of the area of their schools, as these variables for teachers were not the focus of the larger project at its inception. Such matters were documented during the interview if they were salient to the experience teachers recounted. We did ask about a variety of equity concerns about the student populations that teachers served, which often illustrated general trends in the socioeconomic and demographic makeup of teachers’ schools. In short, we focused on teachers’ experiences as the pandemic unfolded. The nature of our approach led to a series of conversations aimed at an empathetic understanding of teachers’ general concerns about the profession and their students and lives.

Table 1. Participant demographics.

Pseudonym	Gender	Years teaching	Level	Subject	U.S. State	Page # of quote in the findings section	Length of interview (in pages)
Ainslee	F	14	Middle	History	OR	pp. 25–26	28
Paula	F	6	High school	History	OR	p. 27	26
Wendy	F	16	Elementary	First grade	WA	pp. 30–32	21
Mateo	M	3	High school	Spanish & World Languages	NC	p. 27	30
Millie	F	3	Elementary	Third grade	CA	p. 33	44
Ashley	F	7	Elementary	Fifth grade	OR	p. 29–30	50
Jaci	F	3	Elementary	Not specified	WA	p. 33	80
Elaine	F	23	K-8	History	CA	p. 34	19
Lucas	M	20	Middle	World History	OR	p. 32–33, 41	43
Graciana	F	4	Elementary	Not specified	OR	p. 28–29	23

Interviews

Interviews used for this study were drawn from the larger PotP project, in which 120 teachers were interviewed about their experiences teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic (Figure 2). The larger project included interviews with teachers across all PK-12 grade levels and all major subject areas. When the PotP project began, our research team (a full professor as PI, several Ph.D. students who participated in all phases of the research project, and over 3 dozen undergraduates who helped conduct and transcribe interviews) set out to understand what was happening concerning teachers and pedagogy as the sudden transition to remote instruction in the spring of 2020 was underway (DeRosia et al., 2021). The research team focused on the way teachers problem solved the challenges of transitioning to remote teaching. Interview questions concerned issues of equity for multiple marginalized student populations such as students with disabilities, students in poverty, ESOL students (DeRosia et al., 2021), LGBTQIA+ students, Indigenous students (Press, 2021), and more. After initial interviews, it became apparent that teacher mental health and wellbeing (Adkins-Cartee et al., 2023) were also being impacted in complex ways during the pandemic’s onset. The team then conducted follow-up interviews with fifteen teachers using revised protocols, and the team analyzed the data via thematic coding and ‘retroductive’ analysis (or reasoning backward to figure out how current conditions came to be; Saldaña, 2014, p. 588). Of the fifteen total follow-up interviews, three were conducted by the first two authors of this paper. These three focused on teacher mental health and well-being (Adkins-Cartee et al., 2023). The lead author of this paper noticed that among those three follow-up interviews, several teachers mentioned situations in which teachers felt there were no acceptable moral actions to take, and these situations were impacted by larger structural and institutional arrangements. The concept of ‘moral trap’ emerged from conversations among the first three authors of this paper; ‘moral entrapment’ (or moral traps; we use the terms synonymously) became ‘high-level inferences’ (ibid., p. 600) which generated the assertion of the concept of the moral trap. After this assertion was developed, we returned to the larger database of interviews (n = 120) in Dedoose qualitative data analysis software, and an additional seven of the 120 initial interviews were selected for analysis because they also contained evidence of moral entrapment. The three follow-up interviews conducted by the two first authors of this paper, plus the additional seven initial interviews selected, constitute the sample of ten interviews total included in this paper. We searched for terms such as ‘moral dilemma’ and ‘moral conflict,’ but found little explicitly using these words. However, when we searched within pre-existing codes around issues of student equity and social justice, we found more situations teachers encountered that exemplify the moral trap construct.

Figure 2. Iterative data selection process.

Purposeful snowball sampling was used for the larger project (Tracy, 2019). The ten teachers interviewed for this paper do not constitute a representative sample of any population. Nonetheless, similarities in the structure of complex relational experiences of teachers across distant locales, ranging across grade levels, expertise, years of teaching, and diverse intersections of social identities, provide grounds to claim that observations made in this study indicate more general processes are at work producing those similarities.

Although the engagement with follow-up interview data on teacher mental health produced these ‘high-level inferences,’ the interviews on which we draw to illustrate the concept of moral trap are initial interviews. The ten selected interviews were conducted via Zoom by nine different interviewers. All interviews followed a qualitative semi-structured protocol. All interviews included in this study were conducted as initial interviews. The interview protocol is attached as Appendix A; prompts included questions such as, ‘What equity considerations do you see being raised by alternative approaches to teaching being used?’ All interviews used Times New Roman font size 12 single-spaced, with transcripts ranging from 19 to 80 pages. Interviews lasted between 30 minutes to two hours. For more information, review Table 1.

Research questions

Through our iterative process of engagement with the data, our research questions became:

1. Where do we see evidence that teachers’ experiences of moral injury are caused by larger structural and systemic conditions (traps)?

2. What thematic categories of moral entrapment emerge from the data?

Findings

Generally, the teachers we interviewed experienced their moral lives more often in personal and emotional terms, not simply as a process of implementing rational and logical principles. Teachers described feeling morally compelled to meet a wide variety of student needs during the pandemic. These included ensuring that students had food, counseling them through fears when relatives were ill, coaching them to take care of themselves when they were home alone, providing support when they felt unsafe in their own homes, providing basic school supplies, etc. Teachers often experienced personal anguish when they could not meet those needs (Jones & Kessler, 2020; Tran et al., 2020).

Trapped between systems and attempting to enact and/or advocating for social justice

Attempting to enact social justice

Education is often framed in national and international discourse as a meliorative solution to systemic economic, racial, and other inequities and crises (Slater, 2015); yet, without substantive solutions to the systemic dimensions of social inequality, truly equitable education becomes impossible to achieve. All ten teachers in our study shared stories about laboring to meet practically impossible moral obligations to help children who needed mental health assistance, children who needed food to live, and children taking on adult responsibilities within their families. These teachers attempted to enact social justice in what ways they could while being materially unable to meet the full range of students’ needs.

Ainslee³ stated:

[It’s] been really disheartening … I even feel like I’m at a great, supportive school … [but] I’m sitting in this … team meeting, and we’re talking about: how do we best meet the needs of our students? And we’re talking about individual students and what their home life is like and what can we do to support them, and it just feels like, well, first of all, there’s not a lot we can do. There’s just a lot that is not in my locus of control.

Ainslee described the ways she and her colleagues recognize many students’ needs and feel it is important to meet them, but simultaneously feel they have little agency to support students. Teachers in such circumstances often find themselves bending the rules and making accommodations. In this case, the teacher reported that even her best efforts fell far short of supporting her students. Ainslee continued:

We’re going to try everything we can, but we can’t change the fact that this kid is watching her three younger siblings all day while mom works; I can’t change that. I can be flexible with my due dates, but at that point, why do I give a shit about due dates? Why do I care that this kid knows about the Boston Massacre?

This feeling of futility is compounded by the schooling institution imposing standardized teaching and learning imperatives that, given this student’s situation, seem arbitrary and irrelevant (e.g., ‘the Boston Massacre’). Ainslee continued:

But I have to show ‘learning outcomes’ because I am still being told by an administrator who’s being told by her boss that we have to make ‘Smart Goals’ … . It doesn’t matter, I would say, ever, but it definitely doesn’t matter now … . I just sat and cried because it just feels so disheartening.

This teacher experienced a moral conflict between what she knew contextually to be important in her student’s life (the obligation to take care of younger siblings) and what she knew mattered to her administration and her administration’s superiors (goals, due dates, and content standards). The teacher was held accountable for learning goals, not her own making, which seemed trivial compared with her student’s challenges. The result was a moral trap that forced the teacher to enforce those learning goals through assignments given to the child or defy or deceive her administrator.

To be clear, the moral trap here consisted of a combination of factors: the societal discourse concerning education as melioration to inequity, administrative and policy standardized learning goals, the student’s impoverished living conditions, the structural poverty and racism that contributed to these, schooling norms around due dates and grades, professional moral obligations to be consistent, honest, and transparent with student learning goals and evaluations, and the impossibility of meeting all of these moral obligations at once. This set of circumstances resulted in moral injury to the teacher. While not unique to pandemic times, the moral trap and resulting moral injury were thrown into stark relief by them.

Remote teaching also exacerbated pre-existing systemic inequities and made the limits of teachers’ abilities to help students more visible. Paula similarly expressed:

So, I have kids who are like, totally disengaged, they’re failing every class, they don’t answer their email. Their parents don’t answer the phone, [or the students are] providing childcare for their siblings or [the parents are] working 60 hours a week … . And that kid’s just not getting an education this year. Right? And that’s not because we’re online. And it’s not because I’m not doing enough engaging strategies. It’s because our society’s really unequal and all of that is like, totally hitting the fan right now.

The lack of structural support for students leaves the burden of meeting students’ basic needs to the individual teacher, morally entrapping them, as no one teacher alone can provide all the support a child needs. The moral injury is expressed by the teacher defending her own moral efforts and calling out societal failings. However, this awareness of the structural nature of the problem was cold comfort, as it did not ameliorate the challenges students faced nor lessen the distress the teacher felt.

Indeed, teachers often know a great deal about students’ lives outside of school. They understand that the skills students need to navigate their circumstances are not part of the curriculum. This moral trap requires teachers to choose between their students’ tangible needs and required curricula. But, if they choose the latter, they are likely to experience moral injury. Mateo shared his experience:

I have a couple of students who work at a fast-food restaurant, and they close the restaurant … . because they need a full-time job, and they get home around 12:30 (a.m.). They may do a little bit of homework, and they fall asleep while doing homework. And then the next day they are up at 5:30 to get to school … . It’s just too much for them. And they need to do it because otherwise, how are they going to eat? How are they going to pay rent? How do we successfully guide these students through schooling, knowing that the curriculum has no relevance to the skills they need?

The entrapment of this situation is in the bind between the moral/ethical obligation a teacher feels to support an individual student and institutional imperatives driven by more general political imperatives and the policies they produce. Here again, the teacher was asked to choose between the immediate physical needs of his students and what he was obligated by the system to deliver. Teachers who are positioned between moral and political spaces in this way are constantly asked to make choices between what is best for students and their role as the system’s representatives, exposing them to repeated moral injuries.

The circumstances described here do not merely entail a part of teachers’ work that is routinely difficult. They illustrate how teachers are routinely asked–or more accurately, are morally obligated by circumstance–to care for students and families in ways that reach far beyond the scope of current teacher training, teacher accountability metrics, and even beyond the scope of what a single person or team of people can reasonably or practically accomplish. The structural inability to accomplish these moral obligations is the essence of the moral trap. We highlight that although the pandemic has thrown the moral traps present in teaching work into sharp relief, this has been a feature of public-school teaching for a long time and is not likely to change as the pandemic abates.

Due to concerns about liability and teachers’ safety, Graciana and her colleagues were explicitly directed not to act outside the realm of instruction. Knowing that her students lacked access to basic material needs, this teacher was similarly trapped between keeping her job and providing for those needs—e.g., providing access to school supplies, food, clothing etc., resulting in moral injury. Graciana stated:

So, it just feels like, a lot of time, my hands are tied, right? And it’s really hard knowing I have children whose parents don’t have money for food, or they don’t have money even to buy their kids winter clothes. And trying to figure out okay, usually in the school year, [I’d] just say, “Okay, what do you need?” And I would go get it for them. But now it’s like, I can’t even go … . Just because you don’t want to be getting in trouble right now. Especially right now, when everything feels so fragile. But I think the biggest thing is knowing when my students need support.

The district explicitly told Graciana and her colleagues not to spend extra time or money or drive to students’ homes because of the liability the school incurred if teachers were injured during such trips. The district seemed to know that teachers felt obligated to provide for students’ basic needs yet banned them from doing so. These teachers were compelled to adhere to the district’s instructions by the threat of losing their jobs. In this case, Graciana was exposed to moral injury through her compliance with a policy that contradicted her felt moral obligation.

Ashley’s circumstances illustrated the same moral trap–that of teaching while being unable to meet all her students’ material and safety needs:

We are not only teaching, but now we have that role of social services: checking for anybody–how are the kids doing, are you getting fed? … what’s that bruise?

The moral conflict Ashley experiences is indicative of the hypocrisy of the circumstances that create moral entrapment. The education of students necessitates that students’ basic needs are met and requires a high level of attention to aspects of children’s well-being that are significantly more difficult to accomplish remotely (‘What’s that bruise?’). Without systemic support to meet those needs, teachers are placed in the role of social workers who lack access to social support for their own families at the same time. They are overburdened with caring work, which places multiple, competing moral demands on them, not all of which can practically be met at one time or by one person.

Advocating for social justice

Sometimes, the moral stakes associated with including subject matter content in their teaching created moral traps, with teachers defending the inclusion of certain content in curricula and administrators recommending leaving content out. In the following interview, which was conducted after the murder of George Floyd by police in Minnesota (Hill et al., 2020), and subsequent worldwide protests, a team of social studies teachers felt a need to address systemic racism explicitly. Their administrator, however, felt such lessons would be ‘too stressful’ for students and prohibited lessons on such topics. Wendy described the process by which she converted lessons on systemic racism to a virtual format and shared the lessons with fellow teachers:

… so I sent it to our social studies developers. I was like, hey, look how I have converted this to virtual [instruction]. I’m just starting this unit, and [the administrator] wrote back and said, don’t do it. I was like, excuse me? The school board said not to do anything, the wording they used was ‘stressful.’ … They were like, the school board doesn’t want us to do slavery, internment, like anything that might cause students stress during this time.

The teacher, in this case, found this direction objectionable. It violated her moral sense of what was right. It ignored the possibility that silences, such as the one the principal insisted upon, damaged students and primarily served the comfort needs of white students, parents, and administrators at the expense of students of color. In this instance, Wendy took concerns to her departmental colleagues.

I talked to my team—I didn’t talk to my principal; [my principal] attacks my team. And we decided to do it anyway. Even though we have been directly told not to do it. Oh really? We can’t not do it. That is white supremacy,⁴ when we try to avoid subjects because we think they’re going to be difficult for kids. And we did [the unit] anyway.

Wendy’s experience illustrates the tension created when a school system insists on suppressing a curriculum considered morally necessary by the teacher. Caught between the risk of moral injury entailed in failing to teach important historical and contemporary truths (of immediate relevance to their students) and the risk of professional reprimand that deceiving and defying their principal and school board might precipitate, the teachers chose the path that entailed the lesser risk of moral injury. What is significant for our purposes is the fact that this circumstance did not permit the teachers an option that did not involve the risk of moral injury or negative consequences from the administration. They were, in other words, trapped. This particular type of trap bears increasing relevance as laws are increasingly passed in the United States, such as the state of Florida’s ‘Parental Rights in Education’ bill and the several anti-Critical Race Theory bills that have been passed in 42 states as of this writing.

In Wendy’s case, teachers felt compelled to advocate against the influence of macro social conditions like poverty and racism and the trauma they cause. They had to do so while working in a system negligent in addressing the impact of these forces. Teachers here functioned as first responders. They were left on their own to address the impact of structural issues on students’ lives without systemic support. Teachers were either implicitly or explicitly asked to act in ways that violated their moral values for the sake of priorities imposed at a systemic level, priorities they found less compelling and, in some cases, harmful.

Trapped between the system and caring for one’s family

Lucas had shared custody of his three children, including a daughter with significant disabilities who required full-time care. During the pandemic, Lucas was home with all three children on alternating weeks, which also required time and emotional availability, often in ways that conflicted with his need to be present as a teacher.

I have three children … . One of whom has some very significant needs. In many ways, I am her body and her voice and her advocate … . What that has meant is since we’ve been home, if she’s doing something, it’s because we’re helping her to do it in her wheelchair or feeding her. So, I work a lot on the week that I don’t have the kids. When I have the kids, they’re my primary focus. And then I just try and squeeze in five minutes here, five minutes there. And you can imagine that those five minutes are not the most effective periods of time that I’m working.

At one point, Lucas considered quitting teaching because he did not feel he could fulfill his basic obligations as a teacher and parent. When he thought of all the additional needs for care, attention, and outreach both his students and his children needed during the pandemic, he was certain he couldn’t meet all of these needs. This was a source of concern and emotional pain.

As schools navigated new teaching modalities during the pandemic, another aspect of caring work came to the fore as schools transitioned to a hybrid model: the potential risk to elderly or immunocompromised people cared for by teachers. Teachers were tasked with returning to teaching in person without considering their familial situations. Teachers wanted to show up for their students and were excited to see them in person; however, they were forced to choose between fulfilling their roles as teachers and fulfilling their roles as caretakers in a new way. A hard choice–as illustrated by Millie:

In our house, my 86-year-old mother lives with us. And when I was asked to go back into the classroom to teach in person, I felt really strongly that that was not safe for her, and so just the overall anxiety of being in the classroom, knowing that an 86-year-old could have a really bad experience if they caught COVID has probably been the biggest issue for our family. And so she’s not living with us now because it wasn’t safe for her to be here and for me to be in the classroom.

In this case, the teacher chose to stop caring for her mother at home at what seemed to be a critical moment to keep caring for her. Millie’s circumstance highlights how the institution builds traps; there was nothing inevitable or necessary about having her teach in person at that point, yet the institution put her in an impossible situation, and an avoidable one. Had teachers had the option to continue remotely, especially if caring for at-risk individuals at home, until it was safer (i.e., vaccines available), this teacher would not have faced this particular moral trap. To reiterate the point, Jaci put it this way:

I don’t want to quit. I love doing this (teaching). It’s a fun job. But I don’t want to kill my husband either.

Trapped between the system and caring for one’s professional identity

All teachers quoted in this study reported feeling exhausted or overwhelmed by the competing demands on their time and the feeling that they could not meet all relevant student needs. Elaine described widespread feelings of enervation and distress among her colleagues, feelings that resulted from stay-home orders that came with no official guidance:

It’s a group of highly motivated, highly dedicated, creative, positive, upbeat, highly educated teachers. Every single one of them wants to quit right now. Every single one. One of them was doing a hybrid teaching scenario. One of his kids tested positive for COVID, so they sent them all home for two weeks. They didn’t give any instructions… . I messaged him: 'What’s going on?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m fixing up my house for two weeks because they didn’t give me any instructions.’ And I was like, ‘That doesn’t sound like you at all.’ This is the guy who does Revolutionary War camp with his seventh graders twice a year for an entire weekend. … You don’t do that unless you really love your job, and he’s ready to quit. When I saw that I was like, wow.

When passionate, exemplary teachers’ desires to care for and uplift students becomes blocked, this causes a sense of professional and moral failure, which impacts teacher well-being (Currin, 2021). Drawing back to Oser’s (1991) definition of moral conflict as being unable simultaneously to meet the demands of justice, care, and truthfulness, the morally entrapping circumstances created just such moral conflicts, and the result was moral injury, and (quite literally) demoralization. In the above example, we see how moral entrapment entails not merely an individual moral conflict, but instead becomes a feature of the general structure of schooling, impacting multiple teachers similarly. In this case, it is not simply one teacher who ‘wanted to quit.’ A lack of guidance and support created conditions under which a ‘group of highly motivated … teachers’ could not sustain their professional moral identities under the existing conditions. The inability to care for professional moral identity is an outcome of moral entrapment. In this way, moral entrapment becomes a pervasive condition of teaching.

In the words of two teachers, ‘I feel like I fail my students every day.’ Two teachers made this comment in larger discussions about the context of their work. It pertains to the perceived needs of their students that were beyond the scope of what they could provide in terms of counsel, food, shelter, stability, and even inspiration about the state of the larger society. These teachers do not lack motivation or care yet encounter systemic obstructions that prevent achieving a sense of moral fulfillment in their work.

Scholarly significance

In this article, we have explored a different aspect of the moral dimension of teaching—the way it entails a risk of moral injury (Sugrue, 2020). Such risks, we have argued, are not natural features of the work of teaching but are the consequence of the institutional and social contexts in which teaching takes place. Specifically, we have observed how teachers are often placed in positions where it is difficult to avoid incurring moral injury—circumstances we refer to as moral traps.

Evidence that teachers’ experiences of moral injury are caused by larger structural and systemic conditions (traps) include the following thematic categories: inability to enact social justice by meeting students’ material and psychological needs, overwork at school and at home that results in poor work-life balance, and burnout caused by moral threats to teachers’ professional identities. These systemic conditions resulted in teachers becoming entrapped when attempting to enact and or advocate for social justice, care for their families, and care for their professional identities. In this section, we now focus on the larger implications of this work for the field.

Our empirical work adds to the ethics of teaching literature and to the interdisciplinary literature on moral injury and caring ethics. Currier et al. (2021) called for more research that is ‘competent and ecologically valid … to shore up fissures in the underlying foundations of this growing literature [on moral injury]’ (p. 262). Our research demonstrates structural and systemic circumstances in education that make moral injury nearly inevitable for teachers and thereby locates accountability for those injuries in the design of educational institutions and social hegemonies, thus avoiding neoliberal capitalist devolvement of responsibility to individual teachers. We have sought qualitative ecological validity (Bronfenbrenner, 1996) in that our interviews explored the nested contexts of teachers’ lives and the systemic circumstances that entrapped them morally. The moral injury lens examines the immediate and long-term effects of moral entrapment on teacher well-being. In contrast, the concept of moral traps helps to emphasize the more prominent institutional and systemic causes of teachers’ moral injuries. Indeed, Currier et al. (2021) averred that ‘nearly all studies on moral injury have focused on psychological outcomes,’ but ‘a biopsychosocial-spiritual model … may catalyze interdisciplinary research on potential biological, social, and spiritual mechanisms and outcomes that likely characterize this multidimensional construct’ (p. 262). Our findings lay groundwork for future work investigating ‘biopsychosocial-spiritual’ teacher well-being under morally entrapping societal and institutional arrangements.

Colnerud (2015) described moral dilemmas as emanating from conflicts between the demands of laws and professional commitments. It is our contention that while focusing on moral dilemmas (Koc & Buzzelli, 2016; Oser, 1991) and moral conflicts (Colnerud, 2015) is indeed crucial, these conceptualizations do not sufficiently draw attention to the ways in which laws, administrative directives, White supremacist attitudes and assumptions, systemic poverty and lack of access to sufficient childcare, nutrition, medical care, and or safety create circumstances where teachers are not merely ‘ill-equipped’ to meet the moral demands of caring in their professions; they are in fact signing up for a morally impossible job.

Limitations

This study did not collect explicit data on teachers’ ages, races, genders, or the socioeconomic and racial demographic makeups of the school communities at which these teachers taught. The project focused on teachers’ immediate experiences as the pandemic began to unfold. The point of entry of the project was simply talking to as many teachers as we could during that time. Also, of the ten teachers included in the study data, nine taught in schools in U.S. West Coast states. Only one taught in a U.S. East Coast state, and the data is therefore limited in its generalizability. Additionally, the teachers whose voices appear specifically in this paper are all from the U.S., which is what Bastik (2000) would call a ‘metropolitan’ nation, and therefore, findings are limited to this population as well.

Furthermore, all authors identify as former PK-12 teachers; therefore, our analysis is motivated by our empathy for teachers in the classroom as the pandemic unfolded. We also identify as critical scholars who explicitly honor standpoint (Harding, 1997) as a valid way of understanding the larger power hegemonies of society.

Implications

Teacher education

The phenomena of moral entrapment highlights how the lens of moral and ethical theory can provide a means to think at the boundary of the technical aspects of teaching individual children and navigating the influence of macro-social structures, both of which are important parts of teaching practice. This boundary is an undertheorized space, or, at least, an underused curricular possibility; indeed, only 24% of teacher education programs include ethics courses (Maxwell et al., 2016).

Careful critical attention to teachers’ moral experiences can go some distance in filling this gap between the macro and micro aspects of the work of teaching, a gap into which our research shows teachers often fall and a space in which moral injury is incurred. Teacher education curricula alone cannot remove moral traps from the work of teaching. It can, however, provide students opportunities to practice and discuss the situational judgment, affects, and decision-making processes involved in navigating unpredictable circumstances and incommensurable moral imperatives. As early as 1991, Oser argued that ‘teacher education doesn’t do enough when it leaves out preparation for responsible solution of professional conflicts’ (p. 224). Indeed, both Shapira-Lishchinsky (2011) and Ehrich et al. (2011) discuss curricular models for helping teachers work through ethical dilemmas, while Colnerud (2015) suggests having ‘ethics teams’ located in schools to support the moral dimension of teachers’ work explicitly. Our findings concur with these suggestions, and we further advocate that this curricular space in teacher education could include role-playing and rehearsing example classroom situations. Pre-service and practicing teachers need ongoing affective rehearsals with such circumstances, and while clinical experiences and observations are crucial, they often do not provide enough repeated opportunities for teachers to internalize the affective dimensions of situational moral judgment.

Teachers’ narratives in this study also suggest, in addition to increased practice and moral judgment rehearsal opportunities, the need for skill-building that includes identification of student mental health challenges, crisis counseling, coaching, case management, interdisciplinary teaming, and coordinating wrap-around services for students and their families. Competence and confidence with such things matter.

Ideally, what is needed is increased coordination between teacher education programs, local schools, and local social service agencies that provide access to things like food, clothing, and mental and physical health support, etc. Such coordination requires personnel, and budgetary allocations for such coordinator positions at school district and school levels would help prevent this work from contributing to teacher burnout. Importantly, teachers’ stories indicate that many of these solutions come at system levels, which leads us to our next set of recommendations.

Educational policy and institutional practice

Teachers’ work is not merely ‘independent’ work—either in terms of labor or in terms of the work’s structure. While conceptions of good, moral lives inform teachers’ decision-making processes (Beyer, 1997), conceptions of morality and goodness are also implicit in the larger political patterns of decisions concerning the structuring of schools. These collective decisions merit consideration as both ethical and political because the moral traps these teachers describe are constellations of institutional, societal, structural, community, and individual forces that combine to instantiate ethical and moral consequences. As Sugrue (2020) and Levinson (2015) have argued, the systems and structures that create moral injury may be individually enacted, but they supersede individual agency. Moral injury is therefore a societal problem.

Consequently, the solutions to teachers’ moral entrapment within teacher education cannot be solely individualistic in nature (or even limited to single school communities). Eliminating–or at least reducing–the frequency with which teachers face moral entrapment not only suggests, but in fact thoroughly mandates systemic solutions. For example, making free, on-site counseling systematically available to teachers (in addition to students) as a regular support for their practice could also help ameliorate the worst impacts of moral entrapment on teachers.

Our findings also suggest that teachers can and should play a role in advocating for such systemic changes. Teachers see the impact of institutional forces on students’ lives and often find themselves subverting existing policies that are harmful. Teachers’ agency in addressing their moral entrapment lies, in part, in their ability to engage as policy advocates. Normalization of policy advocacy as part of teachers’ work and therefore part of teacher education curricula and ongoing professional development is therefore suggested by the stories teachers in this study shared. To accomplish this, teacher education programs and professional development might include formally teaching teachers which educational social justice groups already exist and to which they may connect for support, resources, and advocacy assistance.

Future research

Moral trap as defined in this paper draws attention to the structural conditions that often contribute to teachers’ unmet and individually unmeetable moral obligations. The different entrapments encountered by teachers interviewed in this study included entrapments between their moral obligations to promote and enact social justice, to engage self-care and care for family, and to care for students and their families while meeting more traditional academic student needs.

These aspects of the work, which are structurally conditioned, are also highly personal. Therefore, analysis of these limiting conditions of the moral lives of teachers may best be approached through research methodologies that begin with respect for first-person lived experience. For example, additional work on moral entrapment from a narrative inquiry stance (Clandinin, 2019; Clandinin et al., 2018; Pratt & Rosiek, 2021) may have the capacity to effectively attune researchers, education professionals, and policymakers to the nuances of moral entrapment and provide additional examples for future teachers to study. Phenomenological exploration (Charlesworth, 2005; Geertz, 1973; van Manen, 1995) of teachers’ lived experiences of moral entrapment may also provide greater clarity about the ways societal structures shape teachers’ relations to children, their emotions, and their identity (Koenig & Al Zaben, 2021; Sugrue, 2020) and professional attrition (Harmsen et al., 2018). Future research could also include data collection of teachers’ race, age, gender, socioeconomic status, etc. and could examine similarities and differences among teachers’ experiences by these categories of analysis.

Whatever theoretical or methodological frameworks we use, teachers’ moral lives, even the hard parts–especially the hard parts–deserve discussion. We argue that teachers need to be a part of that conversation, and methods for deeper teacher engagement in these conversations is also terrain for future research and discussion. As Lucas, one teacher whose story we included, said:

I think teachers and everyone else, we need to be engaged in these conversations. We need to be thinking about this and talking to people with different perspectives … I know right now everybody’s managing their mental and emotional bandwidth in terms of getting through this pandemic. But … this energy is—it’s good for us.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers for their feedback which improved the paper and added to its conceptual and methodological clarity. We also are grateful for the support of the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon for a small travel grant that helped the authors present this work at the American Educational Research Association.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported with a travel grant by the Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon.

Notes on contributors

Dana Cohen Lissman

Dana Cohen Lissman is an international Ph.D. candidate from Israel in the Department of Special Education at the University of Oregon. She served as special education preschool teacher and subsequently after obtaining her masters as a behavioral consultant for the ministry of Education for self-contained classroom teams for students identified as having Emotional Behavioral Disorders. She earned her MS.c from the University of Oregon in 2010.

Mary R. Adkins-Cartee

Mary R. Adkins-Cartee is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education at the University of Oregon. She taught 7^th grade and high school English, Creative Writing, and Theory of Knowledge (in the International Baccalaureate program), for a total of 10 years at two high schools and a middle school in the Upstate region of South Carolina. She also earned her M.A. in Society, Culture, and Politics in Education at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she and her partner lived from 2009-2011.

Jerry Rosiek

Jerry Rosiek is Professor of Education Studies at the University of Oregon where he teaches courses on curriculum theory, the racial politics of education practice and policy, and qualitative research methodology. His empirical scholarship focuses on the ways teachers learn from their classroom experience. His scholarship has experimented with the use of fiction and narrative modes of representations and is informed by revisionist pragmatism, new materialist philosophy, critical race theory, and Indigenous studies literature. His writing has appeared in journals such as Harvard Educational Review, Education Theory, Educational Researcher, and Phi Delta Kapan. His book, Resegregation as Curriculum (coauthored with Kathy Kinslow), won the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum 2017 Book of the Year Award.

Shareen Springer

Shareen Springer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education program and a Graduate Employee in the Education Studies Department at the University of Oregon. She is a restorative justice practitioner and scholar-activist, rooted in a commitment to and movement within an Abolitionist praxis that examines the ways in which carceral logics and ideologies operate in schools. Her research documents how young people perceive, and experience social and racial injustices (re)produced by current structures and practices in schools and examines how and in what ways we as educators collude in and/or disrupt the ideologies and practices that maintain the school to prison nexus.

Notes

1. Codes included ‘teacher mental health,’ ‘racial disparities,’ ‘social activism,’ ‘special education,’ ‘English learners.’

2. As of this writing, we reject the term ‘post-COVID-19,’ as the pandemic, while changed, is ongoing; many of these traps are very likely to continue.

3. See Table 1 for teacher demographics.

4. Here, we follow the capitalization conventions of Gotanda (1991, p. 4), who discusses ‘white’ as a term of racial domination, and therefore not deserving of capitalization, and ‘Black’ as a term of politically and socially liberatory identity. These conventions are also discussed in Rosiek (2016).

Appendix A:

Initial Interview Protocol, Spring 2020:

Pedagogy of the Pandemic

Interview Protocol

Prior to the interview:

● The participant should have received the informed consent form.

● They should have replied with an email providing their consent.

● Any questions asked by email should have been answered by email (unless last minute.)

Prior to the recording:

● Make greetings, and express thanks for participation. Perhaps chat about how person is coping with the social distancing. Be human.

● Summarize research using a version of the following:

As you know I am part of a research team at the University of Oregon conducting research on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on k-12 teaching. We want to know what you are seeing and feeling as a [teacher, aid, principal, district administrator, state policy maker, etc.] Our goal is to learn how school systems are adapting to these extraordinary circumstances. We will be looking at the effects of the pandemic on the teaching of specific subjects, on educational equity issues, on teacher professional development, on conversations about education reform, assessment, teacher autonomy, and other things that we cannot anticipate but people like you will tell us about.

We do not anticipate this research being controversial in any way, however, as a standard procedure we will keep your responses to us anonymous. As explained in the consent form, I sent you, once this interview is transcribed, your name will be taken off of it, and the video will be deleted. You also have the right to opt out of questions and to stop participation in the research at any time.

Do you have any questions about our research you would like to ask before we begin?

Notify participant: I am turning the recording on now.

1. Researcher: state your own name, date, and ‘pedagogy of the pandemic interview.’

2. Would you state your name and where you work for our records.

● If teacher—you may have to prompt for grade level and subject area.

● How long have you worked in this position? As a teacher?

3. Your professional work as a teacher takes place in the context of your full life as a human being. Therefore, before we begin talking about your professional work, I’d like to ask about the impact of these times on you more generally. How are you doing? How is the COVID-19 pandemic affecting you, your family, and those your care for? You may respond to that question in any way that makes sense to you, or you are welcome to pass.

● In case the question seems confusing, you may further explain that:

o Teachers’ lives are often ignored or erased in public discussions of the work of teaching. We don’t want to be a part of that general pattern.

o The pandemic has now forced the practice of teaching into teachers’ homes. So the overlap between professional and personal spaces has expanded. We want to acknowledge that and talk about how this is part of the new work teachers are being asked to do.

4. I will start with an open-ended question: How has the epidemic affected your work as a teacher?

● What educational experiences, if any, are you being asked to provide?

● What are you actually doing, whether it is mandated or not?

● What are your biggest concerns for students?

o Which students are you most concerned about and why?

● What are your biggest concerns for teachers?

o What equity issues are affecting teachers? For example, …

§ Such as access to technology,

§ Teachers’ dis/abilities,

§ Teachers’ financial hardships,

§ Teachers who share identities or have special connections with students having increased emotional labor?

§ Are there any supports in place to respond to these needs?

5. Has your district or school organized any alternative form of educational service for students? If so, what? [Be prepared to explain that while you may know some of the things happening it is better to hear it in their words.]

● How is it going? How are these changes affecting you and your students?

● What supports for these alternatives have the district put in place? Time, expert advice, new materials.

o How does this differ from the supports always offered to teachers?

o What supports are still needed?

● What professional development or training has been provided?

● Has the teachers’ union been involved in decision making about these alternatives or resource development?

6. Are you in conversation with other teachers about how to respond to student educational needs during this pandemic?

● Who are these conversations with?

● What are you talking about?

● Who organized the conversations?

● Have they led to any specific actions or preparations?

● To what degree have teachers had to rely on one another?

o If a great deal ask if this is preferable to receiving more direction?

o How are or could the district assist with this teacher-to-teacher collaboration?

7. Do you see differences of opinions emerging in your school, district, or state about how to handle the educational challenges of the pandemic?

● What are these differences?

● Who are the parties in these discussions and what stances are they taking?

o Why do you see them taking that stance?

● To what extent are practicing teachers being included in the development of a response?

8. What equity considerations do you see being raised by alternative approaches to teaching being used?

● Are there particular students or groups of students you are worried about?

Let’s think about a variety of different student demographic groups and see if you have thoughts about how students in those groups are being affected by the changes in schooling happening.

● How are economic and income differences influencing (likely to influence) student experience of the changes happening?

● How is linguistic difference influencing student experience of the changes happening?

● How is dis/ability influencing student experience of the changes happening?

● How is racial identity influencing student experience of the changes happening?

● How are Indigenous students uniquely experiencing the changes happening?

● How is gender identity influencing student experience of the changes happening?

● How is sexuality identity influencing student experience of the changes happening?

● How is parent education level influencing student experience of the changes happening?

● Any others we might ask or think about?

● Are there particular students or types of students you are worried about, not adequately described by those broad categories?

9. What do you wish you or the district were able to do for students in this pandemic? What would have been an ideal response? What is preventing that response?

10. What do you think the impacts of the pandemic will be for students

● of your grade level specifically?

o What could be done to lessen these effects?

● of your subject matter area specifically?

o What could be done to lessen these effects?

11. What do you think will be the challenges when students and teachers eventually return to in-person classes?

12. What questions have we not asked that we should be asking?

● Ask the question they recommend.

● Tell them this reply will be taken back to the research group and may be incorporated into future interviews.

13. Do you have any questions for us?

14. Is there anyone actively involved in these kinds of conversations that you would recommend we interview? Educators who are particularly active in conversations about developing an educational response to the pandemic?

● Would you be willing to be interviewed again if we wanted to follow up with you as we learn more?