So suggests former teacher Lee-Anne Courtney from Bond University, who has led a revealing study looking at what the evidence says about this unique form of psychological trauma and how it is experienced within the teaching profession.
Mainstream commentary that points to stress and burnout as the reasons for why educators eye the exit door does not accurately capture the nature of many teacher’s experience, Courtney says.
“I am a secondary teacher who hasn’t been able to work in a classroom for 10 years, and the only explanations I had available were the usual.
“Burnout is the [one] usually you’d go to – it’s like having one of those game show boards and you can spin the wheel but there aren’t any extra options.”
It was by pure chance that moral injury came onto the researcher’s radar.
“I was doing some exam supervision and I was sitting out in the hallway available to take students to the bathroom when I read an article about it.
“As soon as I heard the definition everything just fell into place, and I must have looked a bit odd because I just sat there grinning like an idiot.
“I had a research proposal written submitted and accepted within two months. It was eye-opening,” Courtney tells EducationHQ.
Having canvassed 29 peer-reviewed papers, the study found that moral injury is an underexplored concept that illuminates teachers’ experience of ‘debilitating’ psychosocial trauma in their job.
Much of the theory around moral injury to date began by looking at the suffering of military veterans who felt they had been betrayed by their higher commanders, Courtney explains.
“From that point [the research focus] moved to veterans who had done things against their own values … and looking for pathways for repair [when] PTSD treatment wasn’t really working.
“The next iteration of theorisation involved looking at it from a witness and bystander perspective [and] increasingly recognising the different ways that transgressions like it can occur.”
The symptoms of PTSD and moral injury do overlap, but there is a clear distinction, Courtney adds.
“What I found is that burnout has not been overlaid … I’m hoping that will be a direction of (future) research, because when you put the three together, moral injury sits covering half of each.
“What people have been saying teachers are suffering from is stress and burnout, so that’s been the story teachers have been telling themselves. That’s been the reasons given for staff leaving – and it isn’t an accurate representation.
“And forcing people to go to some more resilience training isn’t working.”
When former secondary teacher Lee-Anne Courtney first came across the term moral injury, her symptoms finally made sense.
Courtney’s study found a “misalignment of teaching practice arrangements” with the profession’s own values caused “morally injurious working conditions and events”.
Studies noted that values of service, care and justice inherently drove the teaching profession.
Teachers experienced moral injury because their working conditions undermined their professional identity and prevented them from fulfilling their core obligations within school communities.
Teachers’ identity is essentially ‘heartbroken’, Coutney laments.
“The teaching profession is highly regulated as an ethical profession, and everywhere you look in the job descriptions, in the codes of ethics, in the goals of education, there are normative expectations that are clearly laid out: excellence, equity, all young Australians … to be a successful lifelong learner.”
There are expectations of trust and partnership here, Courtney adds, but these espoused dynamics are often not felt by teachers.
“Teachers come into the profession knowing full well this is not a financial endeavour. They know it’s going to have long hours and they know they have to deal with all sorts of emotionally demanding and draining things and teachers, on the whole, that’s why they go into it – they want to make a difference.
“So, what I’m hearing is, ‘I’m not trusted, I’m being micromanaged, my workload has effectively stopped me from doing the job that is outlined in my job description. I am not in partnership; the students don’t want to partner with me, their families and carers don’t want to partner with me, and the broader community keeps painting a picture of either heroes or villains’.
Teachers are expressing a despair that speaks to a ‘deep, profound anguish’, the researcher warns.
“And they keep thinking, ‘it’s me, I’m not coping ... I’m not balancing my workload well enough’ or ‘I can’t leave it at school’.
”And so, there’s a lot of conclusions being drawn about the work of teaching by the public, by policymakers, that’s ill-informed and politicised, and then teachers themselves are feeling distraught that they can’t do what they need to do to teach the little people in front of them.”
A lot of teachers who stay in the profession despite experiencing moral injury become numb and ‘callous’ over time, Courtney says.
“Some people recognise that and then go, ‘well, I can’t actually sustain this, I don’t like who I am’. And actually, that line someone said in an interview with me…”
While sometimes moving schools or into a different role can help, Courtney says there’s no will on the part of policymakers and senior leaders to bring about meaningful change at the system level.
“In another interview, there was a particularly specific and vicious situation that arose, and it was never resolved and the participants said all of the pathways were useless, all the supports were useless because nobody wants to know.
“And that, I guess, is the heartbreaking part: that there are performative support strategies, but there is no [broader capacity for change].”
Courtney concedes to being fairly cynical about the prospect of reform efforts that might go some way towards addressing the moral injury experienced by teachers.
“I want dialogue that’s nuanced. I despair of these simplified representations. I want conversations to occur that recognise the complexity of the situation.
“I don’t want it to be all about ‘bad leaders’ or ‘bad parents’ or ‘bad teachers’ or ‘bad students’. It’s simplified. People are doing their best…”
Unless concrete paths to restoration and reparation are sought for the profession little will shift for the better, she concludes.
“…it’s easy enough for [people to say], ‘well that was a a dud teacher and they left’, and for parents to say, ‘well, my child was being discriminated against’, instead of really looking for a way to move into partnership with schools and teachers because it all comes back to money.”
