Recap: Developing a Trauma-Aware Pedagogy
The week before the break, CETL hosted our final workshop of the semester, “Developing a Trauma-Aware Pedagogy.” Unfortunately, the topic is more relevant than ever: according to recent reports, nearly half of students who attend college counseling sessions say they have experienced trauma, and rates of post-traumatic stress disorder more than doubled among college students from 2017 to 2022. While instructors are not counselors and cannot treat students’ mental health concerns, it’s important to be aware of how trauma manifests in our classrooms so that we can mitigate its impacts on learning.
There are many different definitions of “trauma,” but for our purposes, this definition from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) works well:
Trauma results from “an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”
Somewhere between 66 to 85% of youth report lifetime traumatic event exposure, and as many as 50% are exposed to a potentially traumatic event in their first year of college. Unsurprisingly, the experience of a traumatic event or circumstance can affect how students show up in our classrooms. In redirecting cognitive resources toward survival, trauma tends to crowd out the cognitive resources necessary for curiosity, exploration, and learning. It may keep students in a constant state of alarm or low-level fear, hampering executive function and self-regulation.
This can manifest in a number of ways. Trauma-affected students might have trouble focusing or prioritizing tasks. They might miss a lot of classes or have a tendency to isolate themselves. They might be hypervigilant, dissociated, or feel anxious, angry, and helpless when stressed.
So, what’s to be done? Well, we don’t recommend instructors attempt to diagnose student trauma and certainly don’t advise trying to treat it—as educators, we’re neither qualified nor responsible for that. What we do recommend is being aware of trauma’s effects on learning and developing a pedagogical approach that can help mitigate those effects.
One framework that might help is Phyllis Thompson and Heidi Marsh’s trauma-informed wheel of practice, adapted from SAMHSA’s trauma-informed care approach:
The wheel lays out six principles of “equity-centered, trauma-informed care.” At the center of the wheel, in Thompson and Marsh’s formulation, is “Cultural, Historic, Gender Issues.” Addressing such issues means being aware of the histories and systems that have erected barriers to thriving for marginalized populations and working to remove these barriers—in our classrooms and our educational systems more broadly. This is the central element, according to Thompson and Marsh, that keeps the other spokes of the wheel in place. Without addressing exclusion and inequity, it’s impossible to take a truly trauma-informed approach.
The other five principles that make up the wheel are safety; trustworthiness and transparency; peer support; collaboration and mutuality; and empowerment, voice, and choice. In the workshop, we suggested a few strategies that might exemplify each principle (but these are by no means the only ones).
Promoting safety is all about the classroom environment. It’s important to create spaces in which students know what to expect, can bring their authentic selves, and can experience “compassionate challenge” (in Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s words) rather than fear. Fostering a sense of safety might mean creating predictable course structures, including content warnings on sensitive material, using students’ preferred names and correct pronouns, and incorporating low-stakes practice for major assignments.
Cultivating trustworthiness and transparency builds on the foundation of safety by prioritizing positive relationships and a sense of accountability between students and the instructor. It might mean clearly communicating the course expectations with frameworks like transparent assignment design. It also means soliciting student feedback and (scariest of all) recognizing, apologizing for, and rectifying mistakes when we make them in the classroom.
The third principle of peer support is particularly important at this moment, when college students are increasingly experiencing loneliness. To address this crisis, we might consider putting community at the center of our courses. This could mean assigning collaborative projects or exams, providing guidance for group interactions, or helping students create structured study groups and channels for sharing resources with one another.
Collaboration and mutuality is about shared power and shared decision-making. We might practice collaboration and mutuality by inviting students to help us co-create course policies and procedures, or even lessons, assignments, and evaluation criteria. We might also ask students to assess their own work in collaboration with us. In general, this principle invites us to view students as allies, rather than adversaries, in the learning process and to treat them as such.
The final principle, empowerment, voice, and choice, encourages us to prioritize student agency in our courses. It might mean giving students a choice in the assignments they complete or making space for student advocacy in- and outside the classroom. It might also mean respecting students’ expertise by creating opportunities for them to draw on their own interests and experiences (or that of their communities) in class discussion or assignments.
Just as trauma looks different for everyone, a trauma-aware approach will look different depending on your classroom context. It’s also an ongoing process: trauma-aware teaching can’t be perfected and requires continual sensitivity and mindfulness.
We should say, too, that all of this is hard work. Navigating students’ trauma, while also dealing with traumas of our own, can be exhausting, especially at the end of the semester. We hope you can take some time over the holidays to give your brain, and your heart, a break. You deserve all the care you show your students!
If you’re looking for further resources on trauma-aware teaching, check out…
A trauma-aware teaching checklist, by Karen Costa
Trauma-Informed Pedagogies: A Guide for Responding to Crisis and Inequality in Higher Education, edited by Phyllis Thompson and Janice Carello (available at the CETL library; contact cetl@olemiss.edu)
A (brand new) podcast interview with CETL’s Liz Norell on the subject of her new book and, among other things, how trauma disrupts learning for students and for us
On a related note: happy publication week to Liz! Her book The Present Professor is now available from OU Press and other retailers. We’re looking forward to her book launch here at UM on Friday!