Teacher Self-Care Mandates as Institutional Gaslighting in a Neoliberal System

Abstract

In this manuscript, I argue that narratives of self-care for educators in the midst of pandemic teaching are a form of gaslighting, supported and exacerbated by a neoliberal school system that reinforces individualist, White-normed conceptions of teaching and learning. To make this argument, I use several excerpts from practicing teachers’ writing to illustrate the deep sense of frustration and betrayal that teachers felt when inundated with self-care messages without regard for more systemic support and change.

Keywords

content analysis educational reform policy social context stress/coping teacher context

I was with a friend yesterday who said, “What most people are doing is not self-care, it’s after-care, and that is not sustainable.” And wow, I felt that.

—Tweet from @Jasminnemendez, April 23, 2022

The emails came almost daily, she remembered, and they always included an “inspirational quotation that wasn’t really inspirational” because it did not take into account the so-called unprecedented times she and her fellow educators were living through. In 2020–2022, in the midst of a global pandemic, a social revolution, and massive political upheaval, educators around the United States were also attempting to negotiate what it meant to teach online or to return to in-person teaching in unsafe classroom conditions. Their colleagues were retiring, and it was increasingly difficult to recruit and retain new teachers. They were losing their preparation periods (if they ever had any to begin with) to serve as substitutes for other classes, some of which never even started the year with a permanent teacher. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, educators had been hailed by families, administrators, and the media as “heroes” (also a problematic characterization, to be sure, though a more welcome one than in the second year of the pandemic, when they were framed as villains who were indoctrinating youth with visions of Critical Race Theory [CRT]).

Against this backdrop of multiple years of interrupted schooling, teachers were constantly receiving “feel-good” messages from administrators and the public without regard for these many contextual factors. Instead, messages emphasized “self-care.” Self-care was often framed as a solution to the stressors that educators were facing, placing the onus for solving the stress on educators themselves rather than on fixing a system that was increasingly pressuring teachers and expecting too much. Education Week and other publications by and for educators have covered the barrage of self-care mandates, including interviews with teachers who see this surge as “superficial” and “no substitute for the kind of broader, systemic change that would keep them from feeling that their jobs have become untenable” (Klein, 2022). As a result, teachers were often made to feel like they were the problem and they should be able to “self-care” themselves out of it. In short, they felt gaslighted.

In this manuscript, I argue that narratives of self-care for educators in the midst of pandemic teaching are a form of institutional gaslighting, supported and exacerbated by a neoliberal school system that reinforces individualist, White-normed conceptions of teaching and learning. To make this argument, I use several excerpts from practicing teachers’ writing to illustrate the deep sense of frustration and betrayal that teachers felt when inundated with institutional self-care messages without regard for more systemic support and change. First, I explain more about self-care as a social phenomenon and gaslighting as a sociological problem (Sweet, 2019).

What Is Self-Care?

Self-care essays, blogs, social media posts, and news stories proliferated during the pandemic, but the history of self-care, especially for teachers and others in “helping professions,” extends much further back. Although limited, some empirical and practitioner-based articles in education specifically define self-care and offer it as one way to respond to teacher stress and burnout, or an effort to move toward “well-being” and “resilience” (Ainsworth & Oldfield, 2019; Baker, 2020; Kuebel, 2019; A. Roberts & Kim, 2019).

Self-care, or engaging in tasks designed to improve one’s overall wellness (Lemon, 2021), is rooted in health literature that argues that such practices improve physical, mental, emotional, and social health. In particular, “much of the literature on self-care behavior is related to recharging and restoring the self, and has focused on practitioners, given their role as caregivers to vulnerable populations” (Wyatt & Ampadu, 2022). In research with first-year teachers, Baker (2020) finds that before the COVID-19 pandemic, self-care and wellness strategies were very important for novice educators.

The complexity of self-care is that many of these tasks are individual-based—as one works to develop self-awareness and self-reflection (Wyatt & Ampadu, 2022)—yet an individual exists within contexts that may limit or advance their commitments to self-care (Denyes et al., 2001). Vital for understanding self-care practices is an equal understanding of these systems and how much agency people do or do not have in any given time and space (Ainsworth & Oldfield, 2001; Lemon, 2021). Black feminist perspectives argue that self-care, especially for Black women, is a radical praxis (hooks, 1993; Lorde, 1988; Nicol & Yee, 2017) designed for self-resortation and activism. As Lorde writes, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation; and that is an act of political warfare.”

This is in contrast to much of the attention given to self-care during the COVID-19 pandemic, which instead emphasized engaging in small, individual, one-time behaviors in the midst of the chaotic world. For teachers, suggestions were shared in popular social media memes about ways to “engage in self-care to improve mental health”: Read a book, take a bath, go for a walk, use a face mask, meditate, or bake some sourdough bread. Wyatt and Ampadu (2022) effectively summarize:

Within the general public, self-care is often discussed and illustrated as individual activities performed to “treat” oneself (Kinser et al., 2016). Unfortunately, this, in combination with a growing wellness industry, perpetuates a culture of self-care based on individualism, capitalism, and consumerism (Hobart & Kneese, 2020).

There is a large market for teacher self-care materials, including dozens of books with “strategies,” “tips,” and “tricks” for educator self-care. In addition to practitioner books, there are teacher self-care journals, planners, workbooks, and coloring books. There are also, as discussed below, prepackaged virtual self-care modules that districts and schools can purchase for online staff distribution. This marketization of self-care is deeply connected to neoliberal ideology. Instead of self-care in the form of professional support, it has become yet another commodity to be bought and sold; more about this neoliberal connection to self-care is discussed below.

To be clear, not all self-care initiatives take the same form, and some may be based in existing literature about the critical importance of well-being and wellness. For educators, however, there was such a proliferation of self-care mandates during the pandemic that the impact negated the potential positive intentions, as discussed in more depth below.

What Is Gaslighting?

There has been an uptick in popular media coverage of gaslighting in recent years, such that it has become an “increasingly ubiquitous term used to describe the mind-manipulating strategies of abusive people, in both politics and interpersonal relationships” (Sweet, 2019, p. 851). The concept has existed in the field of psychology for decades. Originally conceived of by Barton and Whitehead (1969), Kline (2006) defines gaslighting as “the effort of one person to undermine another person’s confidence and stability by causing the victim to doubt [their] own senses and beliefs” (p. 1148). As a result, people’s own words, experiences, and emotions are used against them.

Sweet (2019) argues for a more robust, sociological definition that is particularly useful for this manuscript, explaining that

gaslighting is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Engaging in abusive mental manipulation certainly involves psychological dynamics, but scholars have thus far disregarded the social characteristics that actually give gaslighting its power. Specifically, gaslighting is effective when it is rooted in social inequalities, especially gender and sexuality, and executed in power-laden intimate relationships. (p. 852)

Much the way scholarship on self-care can ignore the institutional contexts in which educators work, “accepting purely psychological approaches to gaslighting risks the proliferation of context-free analyses” (Sweet, 2019, p. 854). Sweet’s work on domestic violence victims’ experiences of gaslighting in interpersonal relationships emphasizes that “understanding gaslighting sociologically requires placing this phenomenon in its cultural, structural, and institutional contexts. Gender inequality is a condition of possibility for gaslighting” (p. 854). I argue that neoliberal school contexts, combined with the pandemic, also created a condition of possibility for gaslighting.

What does context have to do with individuals engaging in gaslighting behaviors? According to Sweet (2019), “Gaslighting tactics become consequential when abusers mobilize macro-level inequalities related to gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and class against an intimate other” (p. 852). That is, “structural vulnerabilities—gender, nationality, sexuality—create the terrain upon which gaslighting tactics become successful” (p. 865). We see this in how scholars have explained gaslighting in educational settings. Educational researchers argue that gaslighting has been used historically and contemporarily to further oppress marginalized groups—such as Black teachers (T. Roberts & Carter Andrews, 2013), Black women in the academy (Grant, 2021), and LGBTQ+ youth (Wolozek, 2018)—and render their identities and histories invisible. Gaslighting, to Roberts and Carter Andrews (2013), serves the “sociohistorical project” of creating “educational and social environments that foster the continued ideological and professional marginalization of African American teachers” (p. 81). As Wolozek (2018) argues, “gaslighting is often discussed as an intentional set of interactions that are designed to leave the victim to question her own sense of self and sanity” (p. 319). These intentional actions often reinforce “normalized master narratives” (T. Roberts & Carter Andrews, 2013, p. 70), or beliefs that people already hold about certain groups or ideas based on preconceived notions and structural inequities like racism, sexism, and heterosexism.

Whether defined as “intentional actions” or “strategies and tactics,” gaslighters characteristically operate in several ways. Borrowing from the literature in psychology (Barton & Whitehead, 1969; Kline, 2006), education (Grant, 2021; T. Roberts & Carter Andrews, 2013; Wolozek, 2018), and sociology (Sweet, 2019), these strategies include:

Lying: Gaslighters blatantly lie to and about the victim. This behavior destabilizes the victim and makes them unsure of whether anything is true. They may begin to question their own sense of reality and sanity, or have a “sense of surreality” (Sweet, 2019, p. 860).

Denial: Gaslighters, often even in the face of evidence to the contrary, deny what they are doing and saying. This behavior makes the victim question whether their evidence is real and true.

Victim-blaming: Gaslighters blame the victim for the gaslighters’ own problems and mistakes. This behavior leads the victim to feel responsible and guilty for no reason.

Victim-shaming: Gaslighters often attack victims’ sense of self and identity, often relying on stereotypes (Sweet, 2019). The victim may then feel ashamed about any aspect of themself, leading to lower self-confidence and self-efficacy.

Intentional mixed messages: Gaslighters intentionally pepper the victim with a combination of harmful actions and positive messages, “confusing [them] on purpose” (Sweet, 2019, p. 860).

Isolation: Gaslighters turn the victim against other people by telling them that everyone around them is a liar. They also turn other people against the victim and seek to isolate the victim away from a community of support that could otherwise serve as trustworthy confidantes.

Consistency: Gaslighters strive for consistency in messaging and often increase their actions gradually over time. This behavior leads victims to be worn down and lack a sense of self and community by the time the gaslighting becomes unbearable.

In sum, gaslighting may be hard for someone to recognize as it is happening to them because gaslighters use covert strategies and tactics to antagonize and disarm (Sweet, 2019). Gaslighting messages are “linked to insidious patterns of control” (p. 862), which isolate people from their systems of support. This situation could exacerbate self-doubt and fear even further when occurring during a pandemic that had already left so many detached from colleagues and family.

How Is a Neoliberal School System Designed to Gaslight Teachers?

For several decades, the reigning discourse and policy in public education have been neoliberalism, or the application of market ideologies of competition and privatization to teaching and learning (Giroux, 2004). This market-based system seeks to improve school outcomes through commodification of teachers and students. That is, rather than seeking to improve system-wide issues or support collaboration, neoliberal plans for competition reinforce individualist and capitalist practices (Souto-Manning, 2019). Neoliberalism “shift[s] control over curriculum, pedagogy and assessment away from teachers to corporations” (Hursh, 2018, p. 145). There is likely no practicing teacher who has not heard of or worked with materials from Pearson, for example, which maintains a monopoly in the for-profit curriculum sector. Additionally, standardized testing, teacher evaluation measures, charter schools, and voucher programs are all part of the neoliberal project (Au, 2007, 2016), which has gone on for so long that it is hard to imagine a public system without this influence. Harvey (2005) argues that “neoliberalism has become a hegemonic discourse with pervasive effects on ways of thought and political-economic practices to the point where it is now part of the commonsense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world” (p. 21). Despite decades of neoliberal reforms and policies,

there is no evidence that privatisation, markets and standardised testing have held students, educators and schools accountable and improved learning outcomes (Ravitch, 2013). Testing and their manipulated test scores have undermined efforts to improve pedagogy and been used instead as a rationale for the further conversion of public education into private education. (Hursh, 2018, p. 147)

This emphasis on profit over people (Chomsky, 1999) means that it is easy for teachers to be gaslit in a neoliberal system. Profit leads to power, and, as Sweet (2019) explains, “manipulating others’ sense of reality amplifies power” (p. 870). Because neoliberal programs often co-opt the language of equity and “democracy,” teachers who push back against the system are often accused of threatening justice and equity aims. They are made to believe that they are the problem, rather than the system itself. Indeed, a neoliberal system, like individual gaslighters, isolates teachers. It emphasizes competition over collaboration and promotes individualism versus collectivism. For example, Guenther (2019) writes about how neoliberal teacher evaluation models lead to more competition between teachers when they are ranked against one another and when their school funding is dependent on their rankings. Neoliberal policies in schools have been so consistent and happening for so long that it is hard to imagine an alternative to things like standardized testing. Many novice teachers today do not remember a time before standardized testing and have moved from “tested students to testing teachers” (Dunn & Certo, 2016).

Further, their teacher education programs were also subsumed in neoliberalism. Sleeter (2008) writes of the many forms of neoliberalism in teacher education, including the movement away from social justice teacher preparation and “toward preparing teachers as technicians to implement measures school districts are taking to raise student test scores”; the movement away from an expansive definition of what teachers need to know and be able to do “toward defining it terms testable content knowledge”; and the movement away from 4-year teacher preparation programs “toward shortening university-based teacher education or by-passing it altogether” (p. 1952). Most recently, we have seen state efforts, like those in Arizona and Florida, that eliminate certification requirements for teachers and require no more than a high school diploma or status as a veteran. Each of these movements was accompanied by messaging from politicians and the public that “reform” was needed in teacher preparation because it was not working, that it was “a failure.” As Souto-Manning (2019) argues, “The discursive construction of university-based teacher education as a failure . . . was void of critical considerations about teaching and teacher education as systems committed to upholding democratic principles and prioritizing the public good. It operated on the assumption that social well-being would result from privatization and competition, thereby comprising gaslighting” (p. 5, emphasis original). As neoliberal policies gained a stronghold in teacher preparation,

gaslighting was crucial to . . . positioning university-based teacher education as fundamentally inept. Foundational in the neoliberal gaslighting of university-based teacher education, these reports and regulations forwarded an ideology of pathology, “repeatedly and convincingly offering explanations that depict the victim [university-based teacher education] as unstable” (T. Roberts & Carter Andrews, 2013, p. 70). They enacted a certain level of control over teacher education, forwarding a certain “perception of reality while maintaining a position of truth-holder and authority” (p. 70). (Souto-Manning, 2019, p. 6)

Neoliberal systems also rely on the gaslighting technique of denial, of making it seem like long-term problems can be solved with short-term solutions and denying systemic issues with easy fixes. They engage in victim-blaming when they punish schools for test scores and remove funding (Kumashiro, 2011), yet they maintain their intentions that such moves are about care for marginalized populations rather than addressing the harmful impact of their intentions.

In sum, neoliberalism and gaslighting go hand-in-hand, reinforcing and exacerbating each other. That is, a neoliberal system enables and perpetuates gaslighting because of the inherent features of neoliberal ideology discussed above; and gaslighting reinforces that neoliberal system by seeking to disempower educators who might fight back against the system. Building on Sweet (2019), I argue that “gaslighting mobilizes and worsens the power inequalities already present in . . . the [neoliberal] institutional setting” (p. 869).

Teachers Talk Back: How Is Self-Care a Recent Incantation of Gaslighting?

The opening vignette from the educator who received a daily barrage of self-care emails was written by one practicing teacher, but it could easily have been written by teachers from any number of school demographics. From urban to rural and everything in between, in the pandemic context, no educator was immune (pun intended) from calls for “self-care” and “positivity.” The word cloud below illustrates how 102 educators—from across geographic areas and identities—responded on social media to the prompt “What is one word that describes how you feel when you hear/read about or are directed to practice ‘self-care’ as an educator, especially during a pandemic?” The larger words are those expressed by multiple respondents.¹ With the exception of one positive response (“gratitude”) and one neutral response (“intentional”), the other 100 responses are negative. In general, the negative responses can be organized into several overarching categories, with some clear overlap between them: Anger (“rage,” “fury”), Frustration/Stress (“aggravation,” “annoyance,” “unsupported”), Exhaustion (“exhausted,” “how”), Skepticism (“impossible,” “how”), and Unsupported (“ignored,” “abandoned,” “exploited,” “invisible”).

Beyond these brief responses, how else did teachers feel? Below are three examples of self-care mandates that teachers received and their responses to them. All teachers were enrolled in an online graduate program while teaching full-time and, for a class assignment, were asked to reflect on any kind of communication they had seen or received to which they wanted to “speak back.” There was no specification about whether to choose something they agreed or disagreed with, and they were allowed to choose any kind of communication, such as an email or message from their school, a meme they saw on social media, a policy document, and so forth. Of the 20 educators who responded, eight wrote about issues related to messages of self-care; four are highlighted below. These examples—again, across a range of grade levels and demographic contexts—illustrate how self-care is a recent incantation of institutional gaslighting in a neoliberal education system.

Lana

In one rural middle school, teachers were enrolled in a virtual district-wide professional development session. In explaining her reaction to the requirement to attend these professional development sessions, Lana (pseudonym) writes:

I find the talk of “self-care” in education to be unrealistic. My district has talked this whole year about how teachers should do more self care and mindfulness, but the district leaves us no time to do so. We lost quite a bit of planning time when our schedules were rearranged due to COVID, which forces teachers to work during lunch and/or before and after school. We were also given days that we could take as personal days, but due to the sub shortage, I feel guilty for taking time to take care of my own personal business. On top of all of the hats that teachers already have to wear, many teachers have families to take care of as well, which adds a whole new element to this conversation. What I would like is to stop talking about and planning self-care activities just for PD hours, and actually having the guilt-free time to do so.”

Here, we see Lana echoing the negative emotions of stress and exhaustion.

Destiny

In another district, educators like Destiny (pseudonym) were “gifted” a free virtual professional development course from the suburban high school’s Parent-Teacher Association. The “Well-Being at Work” Mindfulness Series was 7 weeks long; on week 6, Destiny received the above message

Figure 1.

Teachers’ feelings about self-care mandates.

letting me know that I was 0% completed with the course. Clearly, I have not had the time to complete the series every week like I was supposed to. As someone who practices yoga, getting this email reminder was quite frankly annoying and made me want to do it less. Yes, I know I am behind on yet another requirement, and having to meet a deadline just doesn’t align with my idea of mindfulness and self-care. My district and school have been talking about and encouraging “self-care” since the beginning of this unique school year. I think giving us this mindfulness opportunity was a nice gesture, but if we aren’t going to be given the time or be able to take the time throughout our busy day to complete the series at work, it’s kind of a joke. Instead of adding an item to our to-do lists, maybe we should be incorporating self-care practices in our professional development sessions and actually participate in some kind of mindfulness. Instead of continuing to talk about how self-care and mindfulness are crucial in preventing teacher burnout, let’s actually take the time to practice it, at work, guilt-free, like the title of this series says to: “Well-Being at Work.” Key words: At Work.

Destiny illustrates how self-care mandates made her feel unsupported and skeptical (“it’s kind of a joke”). Several fellow educators, upon seeing Destiny’s reflections, respond similarly. Monique (pseudonym) says,

I can relate to your post, as I think many teachers can. I consider this an example of toxic positivity, something I’ve experienced a lot over the past year. People telling us to “make sure you do something for you this weekend!” and “Don’t take any work home tonight!” when in reality, if we followed that guidance, our lessons wouldn’t be ready, grades wouldn’t be submitted, etc. I’d much rather acknowledge the difficult situations educators were put in this year and have somebody offer to take something off of my plate!

Penelope (pseudonym) concurs: “My district has been pushing ‘self-care’ as well, but I’m not actually sure they know what that means. . . . I don’t want a seminar or PD on self-care, I want to be given a reprieve.” Feelings of anger and frustration are clear in these responses.

Ellie

A third example includes yet another virtual self-care module. Ellie is a teacher in an urban elementary school and reflects that “all year long, our upper administration has been preaching self-care to help avoid burnout. They’ve done this through various emails and professional development opportunities, [but] they haven’t actually treated the source of our burnout.” In Ellie’s school, a six-part series was held from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. for 6 consecutive weeks. After the announcement was made, Ellie’s school-level administration

followed up with the statement above [Figure 4]. All other PDs offered during this time staff would be paid for, EXCEPT those that had to do with teacher wellness and self-care. Now personally, every time one of my admins says “self-care,” I roll my eyes. They push the idea that they want us to take care of ourselves and take time for us, but they won’t give us the time and tools to actually be able to do it. Nevermind the fact that “self-care” is a way to put the blame of burnout back on the teachers (“they didn’t take care of themselves”) instead of on the systems that are abusing them. But, my personal feelings on the topic aside, it angered me that they had the guts to preach self-care to their teachers (without lightening the load that causes us to NEED self-care), but didn’t think it important enough to find the money to pay us for our time. What’s the best form of self-care? Pay teachers for the work they do and the time they invest—don’t ask us to do more, without pay, and then be disappointed when we refuse to attend.

Anjali (pseudonym), responding to Ellie, expresses similar frustration based on similar experiences in her urban teaching context:

I hate that I am laughing, (keeps us from crying, right?) but I 100% know where you are coming from, as my district pulled one of the same stunts. I can’t believe that yours had the audacity to remind you yet again that the self-care would not be paid. It is extremely frustrating, and yet I have a lot of hope. Despite the fact that we aren’t in the same teaching setting, it sounds like more and more teachers from all over are standing up and no longer willing to be martyrs. I appreciate that you brought the fact that by preaching self-care, it puts the responsibility back on the teachers—that is something that I wish I knew if districts were doing intentionally or if it’s just oversight/them *thinking* they are helping.

Figure 2.

Lana’s screenshot from a virtual “Educator Self-Care” module.

Figure 3.

Destiny’s screenshot from an email regarding enrollment in a virtual professional development course.

Figure 4.

Ellie’s screenshot from “Virtual Self-Care Series” agenda.

Ellie’s comments and Anjali’s responses exemplify their feelings of anger, frustration, stress, and a lack of support.

Aubrey

On the first day upon returning from their winter break, Aubrey and the staff at her suburban middle school received an email regarding their next staff meeting. Alongside an article about teacher self-care (from Forbes.com) was a Google Form, pictured above. Aubrey explains, “The article was titled: ‘,’Mission Possible: How to Move From Surviving to Thriving in the Middle of a Crisis and the form was titled: ‘[school name omitted] Surviving to Thriving.’ I immediately felt defeated because I was, in fact, surviving the year, but I also felt as though I wasn’t allowed to feel this way.” Aubrey had been teaching social studies virtually and in-person for months, “shuffling back and forth,” and yet “not once have I myself or the staff at my school been asked, ‘How are you feeling?,’ ‘What can I do to help?,’ or even told, ‘You’re doing an amazing job.’ I would do just about anything for my students, but I also want to feel heard and safe.”

Figure 5.

Ellie’s screenshot from an email regarding upcoming professional development modules.

Aubrey, like previous teachers, references the toxicity of self-care mandates that led her to feel unsupported, stressed, and angry. For Aubrey, this wasn’t the first time she had received messages about the importance of “self-care and positivity.” She continues, “All year long, we have been fed every toxic positivity quote and cliché out there. This inauthentic optimism and positivity are defeating, not helpful. Especially when it seems as if we are alone in what we are doing this year, only to have things added to our plates left and right. I have only felt worse this year as I hear these ‘positive’ phrases because I am not feeling positive. I am truly only surviving, and that’s okay.” To add insult to injury, the staff did not even discuss their self-care plans and how they would “move from surviving to thriving.” Instead, upon arriving at the staff meeting, “the very first thing out of my administrator’s mouth was, ‘We need to look at this [test score] data and figure out how we are going to make changes to ensure our data positively increases by the end of the school year.’ Not, ‘How was your much needed break?, ‘How are you doing?,’ or ‘What can I do to support you as we move forward?’”

Discussion and Conclusion

Neoliberalism in schools is a form of institutional gaslighting, and the above narratives illustrate how the “macro-level social inequality” of neoliberalism was “transformed into a micro-level strategy” (Sweet, 2019, p. 852) of self-care mandates. These strategies relied on the social context of neoliberalism to reinforce and gain power over educators at a particularly tenuous time during the COVID-19 pandemic. As one recent incantation of “insidious patterns of control,” these mandates reinforced institutional power and relied on the isolation of the pandemic, when educators already had fewer social connections and opportunities for collective support and organizing. It is a rich example, as the stories above show, because it allows existing neoliberal ideologies to take shape through messages that seem, on the surface, to be ones of commitment and care. Yet there is a deep sense of frustration and betrayal when teachers are besieged with self-care messages without regard for more systemic support and change. In effect, these mandates led to the opposite of self-care: further frustration and anger. The teachers whose experiences are included here felt even less cared for, even more burned out, and even further isolated. Many of the mandates also capitalized (pun intended) on the commodification and marketization of self-care through online modules and required virtual sessions.

This constant messaging and the consistency of the narrative tells teachers that their emotions are their own responsibility. That is, it is not the system’s fault that, for example, there are not enough resources for all students and that virtual teaching of kindergarteners is nearly impossible, but it’s the teacher’s own fault for not being able to cope with it. Teachers are told that it is their problem to deal with. The emphasis is on the individual educator needing to change to accommodate the failures of the system, rather than the other way around, reinforcing neoliberal ideology. This gaslighting minimizes (and, in some cases, denies) the strong emotions of burnout and demoralization and the mental health struggles that teachers had during the pandemic. It projects blame onto the teachers through intentionally evasive language and the spectacle of support, such as when Aubrey was asked to think about personal and professional self-care goals that were never mentioned and were instead replaced with a discussion about student data scores. These messages make it seem like the system cares for the individual when, in reality, the illusion of care is deeply harmful and manipulative. This gaslighting of teachers insinuates that self-care is an easy solution to a systemic problem, that is as simple as getting massages, downloading time-management apps, and “maintaining boundaries” between work and home. As a result, it should be no surprise that teachers would start to question themselves and wonder whether what they think, believe, and feel is really true. And, if they didn’t feel successful or take time to “care” for themselves, they were made to feel guilty for not doing so, as Aubrey, Destiny, Monique, and Lana reference above. The administrative messages above also guilt teachers into participating in self-care series, raising the question: How can it be care for the “self” if it is mandated by others? Perhaps it would be too cynical to argue that frustration, anger, and exhaustion are, in fact, the point of gaslighting self-care mandates, yet there is also evidence that schooling systems that were designed to push out more critical educators and teachers of color are doing just that (Kohli, 2021; T. Roberts & Carter Andrews, 2013).

Figure 6.

Aubrey’s screenshot from an email regarding an upcoming staff meeting.

Although not specifically referenced in the excerpts above, self-care mandates are also an example of racial gaslighting (Davis & Ernst, 2019). Such messaging “perpetuates and normalizes a white supremacist reality through pathologizing those who resist” (Davis & Ernst, 2019, p. 761). Telling teachers of color to care for themselves in a broken system is even more harmful than telling White teachers to do so because they are experiencing all the same neoliberal pressures, plus racism. For example, Black teachers, T. Roberts and Carter Andrews (2013) argue, are already working amid “sociohistorical gaslighting [with] . . . rhetoric and practices that presume their (much like that of African American students) undesirability, incompetence, and general lack of interest in and/or commitment to education. We argue that this designated identity narrative gets constructed and reconstructed historically and contemporarily by broadly positioning Black educators as outsiders and as unqualified” (pp. 70–71). For school administrations to then contribute more mandates of “self-care” for Black teachers ignores how harmful the system itself is. Indeed, the care these teachers need may be protection from the neoliberal, White supremacist system itself. Although not writing about self-care mandates specifically, when Simmons (2021) describes socioemotional learning, another widespread initiative in schools of late, she argues that racism is a critical part of the discussion. Without it, she says, socioemotional learning is just “white supremacy with a hug.” I argue that the same is true for self-care mandates. Devoid of attention to historical and contemporary racial injustice, calls for self-care are just White supremacy with a hug, or a candle, or a massage. Future scholarship should consider more deeply such complexities and questions. This work may focus more deeply on the experiences of educators of color during the pandemic, with self-care mandates, and/or with racial gaslighting in a contemporary neoliberal context. Scholars may also look to examine the long-term effects of institutional gaslighting, such as the impact on teacher turnover, burnout, or morale, in particular for marginalized educators like those featured by Grant (2021), T. Roberts and Carter Andrews (2013), and Wolozek (2018).

In sum, teachers noted that the best act of self-care in which they could engage was to ignore calls for self-care from administration and the public. To engage in preservation of their selves, they had to resist the pressure to conform to the expectation that they would participate in mandated self-care requirements. This response meant actively recognizing the problematic and troubling nature of such messaging. Even if they did not name it as neoliberalism or gaslighting, they associated negative emotions with these pressures and felt further burdened. As Anjali writes above, she wishes she knew whether the gaslighting was intentional; either way, however, the impact was the same. Teachers were destabilized, questioned their realities, and felt blamed, shamed, and isolated. Future research may examine ways to promote self-care in a way that is not gaslighting, extending pre-pandemic scholarship that highlights the importance of educator wellness and well-being. Scholars and teacher educators may work alongside practicing teachers to craft authentic, supportive, and socially contextualized opportunities for self-care.

Superficial calls for self-care contribute to neoliberal’s stronghold in public education, as these mandates reinforce neoliberal ideology of individualism, competition, and short-term solutions to long-term problems. As the tweet in the epigraph of this paper points out, many of the suggestions for educator self-care are merely a desperate and too-late response to teachers’ ongoing burnout. Rather than being proactive attempts to fix systemic issues, they are, at best, “after care,” and, at worst, gaslighting.

Footnotes

Notes

Author

ALYSSA HADLEY DUNN, PhD, is the director of teacher education and associate professor at the University of Connecticut, 249 Glenbrook Road, Storrs, CT 06269; ahdunn@uconn.edu. Her research focuses on the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of teaching and learning, particularly in urban schools, for social and racial justice.

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