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Dateline: 4/17/2009

GONZAGA UNIVERSITY NEWS RELEASE
Dale Goodwin, Director
Peter Tormey, Associate Director

April 20 Marks 10th Anniversary of Deadly Rampage
SPOKANE, Wash. -- Gonzaga University Professor Albert Fein and former Gonzaga educator Nancy Isaacson are among a variety of scholars nationwide contributing to two special issues of the American Behavioral Scientist marking the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.

Twelve students and a teacher were killed and 23 others were wounded on April 20, 1999, at the school near Denver and Littleton in unincorporated Jefferson County, Colo., when students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold embarked on one of the deadliest shootings in U.S. history before they committed suicide.

Fein, an associate professor of education at Gonzaga, and Nancy Isaacson, a former associate professor in Gonzaga’s Doctoral Program in Leadership Studies and currently director for the Center for Organizational Reform, located in the Clare Center in Spokane, both contributed their expertise to the April and May issues of the scholarly publication. Their article is titled, “Echoes of Columbine: The Emotion Work of Leaders in School Shooting Sites” and appears in the April special issue of American Behavioral Scientist [http://abs.sagepub.com/], titled “The Lessons of Columbine, I” Vol. 52 No. 9. The second issue, focusing on media studies and policy groups resulting from the shootings, is Vol. 52 No. 10.

The authors describe how school leaders at seven sites where school shootings occurred engaged in surface and deep acting, two forms of emotion work (Hochschild, 1983, 1990) in response to their understanding about what feelings were appropriate in crisis situations. Data were drawn from three qualitative studies over a 9-year period. Analyses of data regarding emotion work yielded four lessons for school crisis leadership: (a) personal definitions of leadership-guided responses to the shooting; (b) the extent that the crisis changed leaders’ work; (c) the high personal toll paid by leaders; and (d) the change in the sense of what is possible. Ideas about leadership and emotion, including display rules, are culturally bound, which has implications for leadership training, development, and policy changes in schools.

Fein’s area of expertise focuses on crises leadership. His doctoral dissertation also addresses the Columbine shootings and was titled, “There and Back Again: A Phenomenological Inquiry of School Shootings as Experienced by School Leaders.” The dissertation received the Jepson Dissertation Award from the Jepson School of Leadership Studies in 2002. The purpose of Fein’s research was to explore how school leaders perceive and describe their experiences of school shooting incidents. 

For more information about the publications, contact Albert Fein at (509) 313-3651 or via e-mail or Nancy Isaacson at (509) 747-5103 .