The way that trauma and inequity connect and affect one another is complicated. Teachers must reexamine their assumptions about childhood and children in order to focus on equity and trauma-responsiveness. In order to educate the whole child, teachers must commit to enabling student voice. The process of truly listening to children, to the student voice and what they have to say about safety and healing in schools is likely to cause teachers to re-think their current practices. This level of re-examination and self-reflection require humility and courage.
Teachers have to be open and willing to change their daily practice, to embrace improvisation and collaboration. In order to see significant and equitable change, particularly across whole school cultures, there must be supportive agents across the school, district and community. Rural schools, which are the focus of this particular book’s examples, do have important implications and lessons for urban and suburban schools. We were fortunate to have the opportunity to interview two of the authors to help make this linkage more clear in this special issue.
JAID: Trauma informed Pedagogy may be considered a lens or a practice with strategies. AU: I think one of the big things that we learned through this project was just a reinforcement of the importance of relationships between instructors and their students. The project really foregrounded that relationships aren't just about learning the things that motivate students to coerce them into better engagement in the classroom. But that it's really about understanding at a fundamental level their emotional lives.
Students need to feel that they're being listened to and that their needs matter. We saw lots of evidence that this listening is the key to building the relationships that are essential to healing. We have lots of examples of that happening, and we wrote about a lot of them in the book.
AU: "Healing begins with voice being heard, and with a claim to humanity" "It's not rocket science, you know the teachers can do it. I mean, one quick example is our “Some days” initiative" "We believe that that means incorporating their voices into the instructional design process" "I think we were able in our project to have coaches in each school who were former teachers who were really steeped in the trauma responsive work"
This is where each kid is asked what do they want to do in school “some day” and then try to make that come true. One of the stories in the book is about a little boy who wants to play Beyblades with his teacher someday. They didn’t have a great relationship, but she reluctantly agrees, and she sits down, and he teaches her how to do the battling tops. It radically transforms their relationship. So that's one example. The other thing is making the decisions in this moment about this, and making sure our learners voice is represented. Thestructures Just drive that, and a lot of that comes from the idea that the teacher is the God of the world.
The structure is so counter-normative to the way that we do education now that even just building it is the starting point. It's still pretty rare. If you let students have that agency, a voice in the design, that’s healing for the kids who’ve experienced trauma. So yes, this is radical, counter normative. And maybe you all in your world have lots of examples of students as instructional designers, but it just doesn’t happen.
There are a lot of opportunities, particularly with older kids, to get them to articulate their emotions, their experience of the world in different ways, right? And they have the kind of cognitive wherewithal to do that. When we were working with much younger kids we struggled with this question of how do we create space for that? And stories are such a generative way to understand the world. But they also bring in this incredible opportunity to connect to kids’ home lives in different way, you know, by allowing in culturally responsive stories, for example, and holding that space for students.
Carol Duffy developed this process out of her own individual therapeutic work, her clinical practice with kids. It started out as play therapy in the clinical setting, and then she expanded it to a group setting. It provides a kind of physical model so that the stories are chosen carefully–really powerful children's literature. Then they're literally acted out and then they are asked to respond and to tell their own story.
Sometimes they draw as a way into telling their own stories. And there's somebody who's listening, either another kid or a grown up in the room. And so there's an audience. It has to be the right setting and not every kid's comfortable with that. But it seems to me it's a structure that really helped–this holding space.
You get this incredible insight into the dynamics of a classroom, just watching the kids interact with the sand tray as a group, you know. And so, as a teacher being able to sit back and look at this and understand it from a social perspective. What is happening here emotionally is just through this very simple structure. You get some really powerful information from that. I think there’s a kind of messiness in this. When you hold that space, you don't know what's going to emerge out into it, and that's the whole point. But that is so counterintuitive to the way that we do teaching and learning right now where we have standards and expected outcomes to get us from Point A to Point B.
Teacher preparation programs should be moving away from behaviorist ideas about student behavior management. One thing that I don't see enough of is authenticity–authentic approaches to listening to students. I really think it just starts there, which from an instructional design perspective, prompts several questions. What are the structures that you build in your classroom to listen to students? What is the ways in which they can determine their own learning?
There's a huge emphasis right now, especially post pandemic on whole child education. We've been so much behind our zoom screens, and locked down for so long that we have lost connection with our moving, sensing body. So I'm thinking about this notion of embodied education as part of a whole child approach. Perhaps the best example we discuss in the book is the use of micro-adventures as a way to structure outdoor education within the school day.
i.e, Mico-adventures are intended to align with the curriculum and to be genuine learning opportunities within the context of a set of curriculum targets in science and math. We also partnered with an outdoor education organization called the Main Outdoor School. They trained outdoor educators who worked with kids to do all kinds of experiential learnings around nature and habitats, and constructing shelters. The simple part of it is you getting kids out of the classroom, moving around in the natural world, engaged with each other, not having to sit in rows and raise their hand. It can be chaotic at times, but we have lots of examples, formal and informally, where the kids learned a lot and also benefited socially and emotionally from those
So the kids said they wanted more recess, but then they asked the kids, “Why do you want more recess?” And it was like, ‘Well, we want to spend more time outside. We want to spending more time moving our bodies.’ And so then it waslike, "Well, how can we do that and leverage the natural assets of these rural schools?" And so that's what we're looking at going forward.
If school is a place that supports the healthy development of kids, then their relationship to that supportive environment is disrupted. I think we're grappling with a crisis of isolation, and the mental health effects even more than the disruption of learning itself. It's so easy to get completely obsessed with learning loss and worrying about lower academic achievement. But to address that we must also acknowledge the causes, one being that so many young people are trauma-exposed and isolated.
AU: We're critical of the automatic assumption that all SEL approaches or SEL curriculum are trauma-informed. I'd say one of the reasons that SEL and Trauma-informed pedagogy get confused is that they're both universal approaches. We were inspired deeply by the work of Judith Herman and others in the trauma world, who talk about the importance of voice and reclaiming story and agency and control for adult trauma survivors. Helping kids build and develop their social and emotional capacities and skills, they can't be passive participants in that process. They have to be empowered, they have to been given the opportunity to make choices.
It's about centering the healing of the person who's experienced trauma and preventing retraumatization. SEL is a cognitive approach to emotional learning. So SEL may offer children some words and vocabulary and tools to enhance emotional awareness, but it doesn't have a healing objective.
The authors of Trauma-responsive schooling: Centering student voice and healing were interviewed. The conversation was both spirited and engaging for all. The authors are Lyn Brown, Catharine Biddle & Mark Tappan, 2022. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
As we move closer to a model of instructional design with positions itself to be responsive to learner trauma and needs, we see the alignment of many needs based models of design including traditional ID, Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Universal Design (UDL) and Trauma-informed pedagogy. Rural settings have a lot to tell us about trauma-informed learning models and these learnings can be translated to urban and suburban settings.
As Carr-Chellman (2022) points out, we must find ways to integrate this into our daily practice as the pandemic will likely point all of us toward more need for trauma-informed instructional design models. From this interview we can hear the importance of suspending our traditional top down model where the teacher and the designer make all the decisions. Rather the need for student voice, agency, storytelling, and decision-making control are essential to the critical relationship building that is needed for post-traumatic healing and growth. This represents a significant and well-documented departure from traditional ID models with supportive evidence from the book’s case study in Maine. We are grateful to the book authors for their time and patience in guiding us
Lyn Mikel Brown is a professor of Education at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She uses qualitative, voice-centered methods to explore the intersections of culture, context, and development. She is a founder of three youth-driven organizations and the author of six books, including her first, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (with Carol Gilligan)
Catharine Biddle is an associate professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Maine. Her research focuses on ways in which rural schools and communities respond to social and economic change in the twenty-first century. Mark Tappan is a professor of Education at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
He is a developmental and educational psychologist whose early work focused on narrative and sociocultural approaches to identity development, moral development, and moral education. Currently, his research interests include equity and social justice in elementary, secondary, and higher education; the development of healthy forms of masculinity among children, adolescents, and young adults; and trauma-responsive education in rural schools and communities.