Collective memories and professional ideals: Teachers’ experiences of a disaster

Abstract

Experienced collectively, disasters are also remembered collectively. Constituting a social glue among affected communities, disaster memories are essential for recovery processes. Focusing on teachers, who became frontline disaster workers, this paper explores how disasters are experienced and managed by a professional group lacking emergency management training. The study draws on in-depth interviews with school teachers about their memories of a forest fire in Sweden in 2014. As residents in, or close by, a small, rural community close to the fire, the teachers experienced the fire both as professionals and as citizens in their roles as family members and neighbours. The paper explores the role of kinship and vicinity of community reflecting the concepts of Therapeutic community and Gemeinschaft to provide a more substantial understanding of the social structures of a small, rural community without previous experiences of a disaster. The second theoretical focus and consequential contribution of the study lies within the teacher's recollections of professionalism, and how such interlinked norms and values remained intact through the disaster. In addition to convergence concerning professional ideals in the teacher collective, there was divergence in the teachers' memories of their performance and how others valued them, outlining how the social context and organizational support structures have tangible impacts on individuals' memories. Findings enable further systematic exploration of post-disaster social structures, training and organizational support, as well as the role of professional ideals, in disaster recovery processes.

Introduction

Disasters affect people and communities in multiple ways, from disruptions of social life and the rhythm of everyday life [1] to causing personal and material damage. When the disaster has passed, remembrance begins. Experienced collectively, disasters are also remembered collectively [2]. Serving as a vehicle for retrospectively making sense of insecurity, fear and loss [[3], [4], [5]], and constituting a social glue among members of the affected communities, collective memory is key to disaster recovery [[6], [7], [8]]. Yet, how disasters are experienced and managed by professional groups lacking emergency management training, has been less problematized.

This paper explores teachers’ memories of a forest fire in 2014, as they became frontline disaster workers. It draws on interviews with teachers in a small, rural village in Sweden, affected by the largest forest fire in living memory. As residents in, or near, a community close to the fire the teachers experienced the fire as citizens in their roles as family members and neighbours. Here, recognizing the significance of social cohesion and group solidarity within affected communities for disaster recovery is essential [9,10]. Against this background, particular attention was directed towards exploring memories of social interaction through the theoretical concepts of Gemeinschaft [11] and Therapeutic community [12,13]. In addition to the social dimension, the disaster was experienced and remembered from a professional perspective. Specific attention was thus directed towards exploring professional responsibility, ideals and organizational support. Two key contributions can be drawn from this study. Firstly, findings provide substantial understanding of community in a small village in disasters and post-disaster recovery processes by demonstrating the role of solidarity in disaster memories. Here, the usefulness of the theoretical concepts of Gemeinschaft and Therapeutic community are illustrated. Second, the article contributes to understanding disaster memory related to habitual routines of work experiences through retrospective narratives of professional responsibility and organizational support, illuminating narratives of success as well as tensions due to diverging levels of support.

The article is structured as follows. The next section details literature on theoretical understandings of social organization in the context of disasters and post-disaster community; individual reactions, sensemaking and professionalism of teachers; and post-disaster memory work, which constitutes the epistemological approach of this article. After describing the research context, data and methods, the findings are presented. Related to the specific focus on the social dimension, personal memories of sensory impressions, sensemaking and emotional solidarity are explored. Linked to the focus on work, memories of the work-place and professional ideals are outlined, illustrating how norms and values of professionalism among teachers remained unaffected throughout the disaster. The article concludes with highlighting and discussing the main conclusions.