Care involves listening to learner preferences, recognizing learning needs, anticipating potential barriers to learning, embedding targeted tools and supports, and remaining adaptive to the population served. Designers should explicitly promote the importance of care across their design practices when considering populations that are likely to be significantly impacted by trauma.

This special issue has focused on the importance of integrating mentoring, ungrading and other high-touch, low-stress tools in cases where trauma can be assumed. Lawless & Bogard, in their exploration of the impact of case-based instruction in use with preservice teachers, advocated for resiliency both among learners and as models in teachers’ lives. Herman & Gill consider how designers can support social-emotional-academic-learning (SEAL) within a virtual setting. In this piece, principles of equity, personal growth and development are emphasized within the design process.

LaDuca suggests a planning framework for university faculty development that includes principles such as safety, trust, transparency, support, connection, collaboration, mutuality, empowerment, voice, choice, social justice, resilience, growth and change. Turcotte exposes the positive impact of ungrading in terms of reducing stressors, a critical aspect of trauma-informed design.

Cook-Sather & Nguyen point us toward the appropriate use of tools in trauma-informed settings. They ask us to consider tool use to advance the cause of empathy, healing and growth for our learners through shared co-creation in Google Docs. Plum et al. found that student isolation was common and the need for social-emotional learning is high. They find that intentionally introducing information about trauma, giving opportunities for self-care, as well as slowing the pace to allow for reflection and focusing on communities created much stronger alignment for preservice teachers with their own trauma and that of their future students.

We are seeing the beginning of the end of the pandemic as the American government moves to end the official status of the COVID health emergency. Our daily practices within instructional design necessarily need to change and shift as our culture changes. We can see now that the “normal” is gone, the way we have practiced in the past will have less and less relevance as we increasingly recognize the impacts of COVID on those we design learning for. While COVID is not gone, vulnerable populations must remain vigilant, and health experts warn of future potential pandemics in the near term, nevertheless, it is time to take stock of the trauma that the Pandemic has left in its wake.

The articles in this special issue have given us all much to consider in terms of ways that we can explicitly and intentionally attend to trauma in our design work. Given the impacts that the twin pandemics have had on all of us, isn’t it time? “Coronavirus is constantly attacking society’s vulnerable classes and spaces.” – Park Won-soon.