Making sense of a student’s arrest for sexual assault: The need for talking and teaching in response to violent acts

Reports of sexual assault are frequently in the news and many news stories are about adolescents. Coverage of adolescent sexual assaults focuses on the perpetrator and the victim(s), without much attention to the community where the violence occurred. These events are magnified in the discourse of the #MeToo Movement. In reporting the crime, “the media and other social institutions (e.g. schooling) often turn trauma into a form of spectacle, in which the pain of others is commodified” and neglected (Zembylas, 2008, p. 8). Teachers who are invested in nurturing their students’ development likely respond emotionally when learning of students’ arrests for sexual assault. This study seeks to look beyond the “spectacle” to the experiences of two teachers who navigated these difficult moments with students while making sense their emotions through an intensive interview study (Lofland & Lofland, 1995). I address the following questions: 1) What were the emotional experiences of teachers who learned that students had been arrested for sexual assault? 2) How did teachers respond to these critical incidents? I will share how these teachers mediated the communal traumatic experiences through conversation and curriculum to make sense of the emotional, material, and political realities of these critical incidents