A Teacher’s Terminal Illness in the Secondary Classroom: The Effects of Disclosure

Abstract

My teaching partner Kathy first voiced to me her fear of metastasis at a technol ogy conference for high school teachers in Southern California. It was fall of 2002, nearly twenty years after her original diagnosis of breast cancer, and she was confident the disease had returned. In our shared hotel room that night, as Kathy worried about how her family would handle a recurrence or how her body might tolerate cancer treatment the second time around, I agonized over our team-taught classroom, and how her illness—and death—would affect our common students and learning space. In this essay, I attempt to provide a self-aware critique of my experience with one teacher’s disclosure of her dying body in the secondary English classroom. I’ll argue that context, pedagogical relevance, and ethical responsibility are vital considerations in a teacher’s decision to disclose. I write with three goals. First, I’ll contrast embodied disclosure in the high school classroom with similar disclosure in the college classroom, to foreground the effects of a more complex form of disclosure (e.g., related to death and dying) among younger students. Second, I’ll problematize the empowerment pedagogy often used to advocate for disclosure by arguing that not all disclosure results in empowerment. Third, I’ll reflect critically on this event from my first years as a secondary English teacher, to speculate on how a modified pedagogy of discomfort, applied in tandem with relevant curricula and post-disclosure support may have served as guiding principles for Kathy and I to better facilitate and manage the effects of Kathy’s disclosure (see Boler, 1999). Before further discussion, I want to address my subjectivity in this account. I was in my early twenties and only a few years into my career when I faced this traumatic experience. I was still forming my teacher identity and developing a sense of self in the classroom, which may account for the personal struggles that are a clear subtext to the analysis. Furthermore, Kathy was my district-assigned mentor, so throughout her illness I was witness to the deterioration of a friend, a colleague, a teaching partner, and a guide into the profession. I mention the specific context to address my bias and to show how my relationship with Kathy and her role in my life influenced how I managed the nature of her disclosure both personally and professionally. To suggest that Kathy should have disclosed in one way or another is to reveal my own reflections upon how she shaped her experience of teaching and dying. My intent is not to criticize Kathy, and I do not mean to judge how she dealt with her teacher’s body by asking questions and making my reaction transparent. I share this story and examination of the pedagogical situation to extend the ongoing discussion about non-normative teacher bodies and to add to the conversation an alternative perspective on the effects of disclosing a terminal illness in the context of the secondary English classroom. *** Kathy and I team-taught a class of seventy sophomores in an urban area half-way between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. Our high school was the largest of the three high