Abstract:

Burnout is a well-known term that is used frequently in the world of education. Koenig Rodger& Specht (2018) described burnout as "a long-term chronic state of stress which is the direct result of working with people". Burnout occurs when teachers feel emotionally exhausted, lack personal accomplishment, and depersonalize. Similar to burnout, compassion fatigue is a difficult challenge educators face in the workforce that can lead to many emotional problems for a teacher. While a lack of personal accomplishment often causes burnout, compassion fatigue is more directly the result of the emotional exhaustion that occurs after repeatedly being exposed to trauma. In the education world, compassion fatigue is a term lesser known than burnout, but it has just as great an impact on teachers. Individuals suffering from compassion fatigue often exhibit symptoms similarly outlined by the Diagnostic and Statical Manual of Mental Disorders-5th edition (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder:

The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence, in the following way(s): direct exposure; witnessing the trauma; learning that a relative or close friend was exposed to a trauma or indirect exposure to aversive details of the trauma, usually in the course of professional duties.

This is an important aspect of compassion fatigue because it explains the way that teachers may have to deal with secondhand trauma, which affects an individual immensely, causing emotional strife and internal grief (Lynch, 1999; Spence, Kagan, Kljakovic, & Bifulco, 2021).

This research uses a case study approach to explore this complex issue to gain important and in-depth insights during the student teaching semester. In detail, student teaching happens before the teacher candidate enter full-time in the teaching profession and complete an internship for 15 weeks or more in the classroom guided by the mentor teacher. This study uses qualitative measures to drill down to see how this secondary trauma affects student teachers in order to deeply understand their behaviors compared to quantitatively measuring them.

Keywords:

Case Study, Compassion fatigue, teacher preparation.