Special Issues, Volume 2: Trauma-Informed Teaching

By Elizabeth Dutro and Bre Pacheco

Teachers and students alike begin their day as humans, and they must all end their day as humans. Experiences of pain, sorrow, loss, fear, disruption, and systemic and institutional oppression are an inevitable presence in schools and classrooms. Editors Elizabeth Dutro and Bre Pacheco have edited this collection of original essays with the belief that trauma-informed teaching, with all of the complex layers that term contains, can and must be harnessed to propel movements toward equity and justice in English language arts classrooms. Woven throughout, authors in this volume share stories from life and literature that aptly show the power and possibility of ELA classrooms for enacting the deepest hopes that fuel the year-to-year, day-to-day, moment-to-moment enactment of humanizing, healing teaching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780814145111

Elizabeth Dutro

ELIZABETH DUTRO is professor of literacy studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a former elementary teacher. Her recent research and writing focus on critical, humanizing pedagogies in response to trauma, the poetics of children’s writing, and teachers’ collaborative learning. She is the author of The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy (Teachers College Press, 2019). She can be contacted at [e-mail].

Book preview

TRAUMA-INFORMED

TEACHING:

Toward Responsive,

Humanizing Classrooms

ELIZABETH DUTRO AND BRE PACHECO

WHEN WE THINK ABOUT TRAUMA in the context of the lives that animate schools, we start here: Teachers and students begin their day as humans and end their day as humans. What happens during school hours impacts children's, youth's, and teachers' opportunities to have their humanity recognized and affirmed or to be made to feel inadequate, invisible, or unworthy of respect and care. We know these statements are not in dispute. Yet, we also know that in systems steeped in histories of injustice and invested in narrow quantifiable ways of measuring and categorizing achievement and success, acting toward the affirming and humanizing in schooling is never a given. Experiences of pain, sorrow, loss, fear, disruption, and systemic and institutional oppression are an inevitable presence in schools and classrooms. We join colleagues within and far beyond the pages in this volume in our belief that trauma-informed teaching, with all of the complex layers that term contains, can and must be harnessed to propel movements toward equity and justice in English language arts classrooms.

As we launch Volume 2 of the Special Issues series on trauma-informed teaching, we hope readers have also delved into the powerful collection of previously published writing related to this area of the field in Volume 1, edited by Dr. Sakeena Everett. That volume curated recent articles from across NCTE journals as a resource for ELA educators. This second volume joins that effort through this collection of chapters by authors who submitted their work in response to our call. The chapters that follow reflect multiple conversations and voices in our profession. This volume's pages are filled with expe-riences, lenses, pedagogies, and practices arising from K–12 classrooms, spaces of teacher learning and collaboration, and partnerships with families and communities. Woven throughout, authors share stories from life and literature that aptly show the power and possibility of ELA classrooms for enacting the deepest hopes that fuel the year to year, day to day, moment to moment enactment of humanizing, healing teaching.

In compiling this collection of insights from ELA educators across grade levels and contexts of work with students, we have felt the presence of interwoven themes, including: knowledge, story, justice, healing, and complexity. Guided by these themes, we begin this introduction by situating ourselves in relation to this work and this volume within the historical moment in which it arrives. We then highlight some of the ideas related to trauma and ELA classrooms that animate our own and this Special Issue's commitments. We then turn to the chapters readers will encounter, briefly pointing to each chapter to capture the range of contexts, ideas, and resources ELA educators will find.

Situating Ourselves and This Volume

WHO WE ARE

We met through a mutual colleague in 2015 and, since then, have collaborated on two school-university partnerships. We each bring investments to trauma-informed policy and practice from our distinct positions and in our shared work to support and collaborate with teacher colleagues in bringing their creativity and commitments to practice amidst all of the pressures they have to navigate. Bre writes as a cisgendered, queer, Indigenous and European woman. She has spent the past fifteen years as anelementary teacher, instructional coach, and social emotional learning specialist in Title I schools. She has two young boys in elementary school who have inherited the call for justice. Together, they spend nights reading books that inspire hope, resistance, and resilience. They talk deeply about the small and big actions they want to take and reflect on actions that have already been taken. This begins part of the critical thinking and planning of lessons that transfer into the classroom. Elizabeth writes as a white, cis, straight woman, a former elementary teacher and longtime literacy professor. In her collaborations with teacher colleagues and children, and as parent to two queer biracial Asian American young adults, she strives to be a coconspirator toward justice. Fifteen years ago, she started studying humanities-centered trauma studies and what it might offer critical literacy research and practice. Our work together on this volume and separately has allowed us to hold onto possibilities, conundrums, hopes, and curiosities within this area of the field.

EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE, TRAUMA, AND THE HISTORICAL MOMENT

What might we consider and pursue when we hold the themes of knowledge, story, healing, justice, and complexity in concert with the goal of attuning to trauma in responsive, humanizing ways in classrooms? As Chicanx queer theorist and writer Gloria Anzaldúa writes, The material body is center, and central. The body is the ground of thought (5). The body as knowledge holder is always reading, writing, and rewriting stories that are steeped in personal, familial, community, and cultural histories. Given that all forms of knowledge held by bodies matter, some of that knowledge is, of course, gleaned through trauma. As those stories are lived within and beyond schools, they are encountered and interpreted by others in ways that hold potential to foster vibrant, healing connections and perpetuate pain and harm. Central to the aims of this volume is the idea that difficult knowledge, born of trauma, not only must count as knowledge but is central to seeing the world for what it is and what it could be.

A vision for what the world could be and must become is at the heart of the potential of trauma-informed teaching. This volume will arrive at a time saturated with multiple dimensions of trauma impacting teachers, students, and families. We wrote this introduction in the wake of the most recent brutal and heartbreaking school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, preceded days before by a white supremacist's targeted murder of Black community members in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store. We know, with horrific certainty that, whenever readers may be reading these words, other gun-fueled brutalities and hate-fueled threats and violence will have replaced those particular horrors, along with the rage, despair, grief, and sorrow they fuel. Such violence is joined with other traumas aimed at students and teachers at this historical moment through laws in several states aimed at legislating injustice in classrooms. These laws seek erasure of history and identities, censor and censure of curricular representation of BIPOC and LGBTQ people, and to quash access to truth in schools and sustain the oppressive status quo in US society. All of this is occurring in the wake of the world-altering COVID-19 pandemic, with the grief and havoc it brought to the lives and learning of children, youth, and educators, and its seemingly never-ending shapeshifting forms over years, vaccines, and variants. When lockdowns became a regular drill for schools, every teacher has thought through the school's protocol versus what they really think they would do and what measures they would take to keep their students safe. When the pandemic began, teachers scrambled to retain threads of connection with students and to rethink what learning could mean when routines are shattered. Many teachers found creative and time-intensive ways to check in with students and to see how they were doing, how they were feeling and cop-ing, and to see what support was needed. In times of crisis, people seek connection and take action out of care and love, and many teachers demonstrated that humanity, all while grappling with impacts on their own lives and wellbeing.

We write with these realities both fueling our fingers across the keyboard and freezing them in the paralysis of knowing words are so limited in the face of trauma. Will we fight for change? Most definitely. And we know literacy educators are pursuing change across multiple dimensions. Alongside those actions, we recognize and honor the exhaustion of this time and how each layer of these traumas, though they wield impacts across identities and locations, are targeted traumas, aimed at oppression and suppression of, most prominently, students of color and LGBTQ+ communities. Navigating trauma requires joining the imperative for action with thenecessity of turning to the people, places, texts, and practices that ground and center us, bring us joy and hold our sorrow, and nurture the body and spirit. We hope this volume may be one site for seeking some solace in connection and solidarity with fellow ELA educators, along with its role as a source of tangible stances and actions to take up in classrooms.

The Complexities and Potentials of Trauma-Informed Teaching

As literacy educators, we are grateful to be part of conversations on and off the page that recognize what we so deeply believe is true and necessary: ELA educators are and must continue to be leaders in designing, enacting, and advocating for responsive, humanizing approaches to trauma in schools. Authors in this volume and others in our field are at the forefront of recognizing the essential role of criticality and anti-oppression to trauma-responsive teaching. Steeped in story, poetics, and the power of language as the lifeblood of their work, who could be better poised to recognize the imperatives of keeping approaches to trauma critical, complex, humane, and knowledge centered? We believe that ELA teachers can link arms with one another to shape and reshape what actions can and must be taken to strive toward just and loving schools, where children and youth can share their brilliance in physical and emotional safety. Literacy practices are the means through which life stories are encountered, shared, and witnessed in classrooms, which makes ELA classrooms crucial contexts for engaging the complexities of trauma and the healing potential trauma-responsive teaching holds.

As the idea of trauma-informed education has moved to the center of many conversations and ini-tiatives in K–12 education, the definitions and actions brought to trauma are complex and consequential for both students and teachers (e.g., Alvarez; Venet). There are risks in oversimplifying or emphasizing some impacts over others. Here, we point to two key areas of complexity that support us in thinking about trauma in classrooms and what it demands. First, trauma in relation to schools involves multiple dimensions, including trauma as personal and shared; trauma as part of the human condition and systemically targeted; and trauma as carried into schools and inflicted by schools and systems of schooling (Dutro and Caasi). Second, and related to the first, without vigilance and attention to justice and anti-oppression, centering trauma can feed false narratives of damage and brokenness about students, layering into the histories of toxic deficit myths that are pervasive in US schooling (e.g., Love; Tuck).

Of course, literacy educators and researchers have long engaged in deep inquiry and practice toward combating deficit-centered and oppressive practices in schools. Research and practice that challenges the status quo of whose voices and histories are represented in curriculum, instruction, and in the profession's conversations have long been relevant to considerations of trauma and the facets it holds, even when the term was not as present in our field and the larger educational landscape. As trauma has gained prominence in the profession's conversations, we also see from analyses of journals in the field and our own experience that recent years have also brought a welcome wave of accelerated attention to (and venues for sharing) critical perspectives that center analysis of power and privilege, how inequities are woven into the policies and practices of schooling, and how ELA educators can and must disrupt those patterns of injustice. We're heartened by the burgeoning visibility of critical lenses on trauma in schools that this convergence is affording our field (to name just a few examples from others whom readers will find cited in the chapters in this volume, see Alvarez and Farinde-Wu; Garcia; Venet).

Amidst the acceleration of trauma-informed programs and approaches, it is important to explicitly name the complexities and potential pitfalls within the movement for trauma-informed education. When approaches to trauma in programs or publications aimed at schools employ assumptions of damage and deficit about students, particularly students of color and those facing inadequate economic resources, we don't have to debate whether or not such messages are well-intentioned. What matters is that educators, when presented with approaches to addressing trauma in schools, notice and vociferously challenge narratives about trauma in the lives of students that perpetuate us-versus-them framings of teachers and students and feed into the already-prevalent myths about disinvestment in education by communities of color and the inherent dysfunctions of cultures of poverty (see Bomer, et al.; Jones; Tuck as examples of discussions of these impacts).

Layered into the complexities of trauma in edu-cation policy and practice is how attention to traumain schools necessitates navigating and weaving per-spectives from various disciplines and frameworks. From social science (e.g., psychology, sociology) to medical science (e.g., neurology) to the humanities (e.g., women of color feminisms, literary theory and criticism, and ethnic studies), literacy educators are asked to absorb, analyze, and enact a flood of some-times contradictory information coming into schools in the trauma-informed teaching movement. This convergence of perspectives is part of what makes a turn toward trauma ripe with potential to nurture love and humanity in schools and to further label and target some students. We can consider any number of terms that have taken root in many approaches to trauma-informed teaching and the larger landscape of social emotional learning, including grit and resilience. Scholars and educators have shown how such terms that, on their face, could be interpreted as desirable traits for all humans to cultivate can instead become yet another targeted intervention for students who are assumed to lack such life skills (e.g., Love; Simmons). In systems like schooling in the US, steeped in racism and invested in policies that sustain the dominance of whiteness and heter-onormativity, those ideas can never be neutral and inevitably valorize some ways of assessing the grit and resilience of a child (e.g., sustained attention on a task or academic achievement) over others (e.g., navigating racism in school and society or using bilingual skills to support communications between home and school).

Of course, those false narratives can be resisted and transformed, as many educators demonstrate each and every day in classrooms, but it takes vig-ilance because those longstanding mythologies are insidious and often instantiated and normalized in the policies and language surrounding schools and schooling. For teachers who wish to be change-agents toward social justice in schools, the kinds of trauma-informed frameworks and practices discussed in this volume and in volume one of this series speak to how this is always both heartwork steeped in love and fiercely critical, and analytical work, brewed in action and advocacy. When situated in equity-centered and humanizing commitments, educators might turn to any number of tools aimed at attuning to feelings and cultivating agency in one's embodied responses to navigating pain and hardship (Ginwright). In one example from our recent experience, the use of regulation in trauma-informed teaching to support students to foster skills to regulate their emotions and behaviors in school raises important red fags related to our discussion above. At the same time, Bre experienced the term in the context of trauma-informed programs that attend to equity and could envision its positive potential if used in loving classrooms in which teachers are advocates for students of color. We might unpack, for instance, how the term holds at least two valences, one that suggests control and rigidity and one that can be viewed as an ongoing process of checking in with oneself with compassion and accessing supportive tools for agentic responses to what we experience across a day. Concepts we may encounter in the varying approaches to trauma-informed teaching may often reside in a gray area that calls on us to critique, embrace, nuance, and reframe in light of what they invite and demand.

This collection of chapters captures complexities, as well as the rich potential and urgent need for attention to trauma and healing to humanize ELA classrooms as well as the schools and larger systems that surround the classroom communities teachers and students craft together.

Chapters in This Special Issue

In the chapters that follow, readers will find compelling frameworks for approaching trauma-informed teaching and vibrant, actionable practices to bring them to life in classrooms. We have organized this special issue into three sections: Lenses for attending to trauma for equity and justice, attuning to trauma with and for educators, and cultivating stances and practices in ELA classrooms. We sometimes felt ourselves resisting the idea of categorizing the chapters in this volume. In the end, we hope these sections are helpful as flexible guides for readers, but we certainly want to underscore the importantly blurred boundaries across them. To a chapter, each holds resonance for the ideas and frameworks ELA educators may turn to, the inquiry and reflection educators may take up together to enrich their practice and wellbeing, and rich practices to enact with students in classrooms.

In the first section, Lenses for Attending to Trauma for Equity and Justice, readers will encounter Duane and Venet's exploration of thirteen ways of viewing the prism of trauma-informed teaching that, collectively, offer ELA educators lenses for holding complexity of trauma in view as they bringtheir commitments to classrooms. Next, Alvarez, Sealey-Ruiz, and Acosta share stories and frameworks that support ELA educators to enact racial trauma literacy, which addresses the urgent need for trauma-informed teaching to center race, racism, and the histories of trauma, resistance, brilliance, and thriving that communities of color experience in schooling and beyond. In the final chapter in this section, Leonardi and Staley show how taking a queering lens to practice in ELA classrooms can disrupt damage-centered approaches to LGBTQ+ representation in curriculum and instruction.

The second section, Attuning to Trauma with and for Educators, begins with Hsieh's account of bringing her own and her students' vulnerability and humanity to her preservice teacher education classrooms in the face of collective traumas, sharing practices that resonate across K–12 and teacher learning spaces. Readers will then find Moore's exploration of the wisdom that teacher survivors of childhood sex-ual abuse bring to their classrooms as they attune to children and youth in ways that honor what they and others need and deserve as survivors and share approaches that will resonate across teachers' classrooms. Next, O'Donnell-Allen and Robbins turn us to teachers' wellbeing, describing teachers' experiences with the Institute for Sustainable Teaching, a yearlong program designed to nurture connection and reignite professional passions when the pressures of teaching and impacts of oppressive systems and collective traumas have left educators drained. Then, Collins brings disability critical race theory (DisCrit), linguistics, and trauma into conversation to discuss the trauma of linguistic violence in schools and how educators can challenge language and practices that target and harm Black students and other students of color. Next, Furman shows how the method of descriptive inquiry in ELA classrooms can cultivate insights about students, deepen relationships, and build trust toward providing children and youth with the personalized support they need and deserve, including when they are navigating trauma. In the final chapter of this section, Cunningham explores the rich knowledge that can be gleaned from listening to and witnessing the daily responsive practices that educator survivors of childhood trauma bring to their classrooms.

Chapters in the final section share a range of actionable practices to support trauma-responsive teaching in ELA classrooms. Authors describe approaches within particular grade levels and contexts, but readers will find that the principles, stances, and many of the specific practices apply across K–12 classrooms. Casimir, Allum, Silcox, Kim, and Duane describe and illustrate how educators can draw on the healing potential of stories through trauma-responsive read-aloud lessons in elementary classrooms. Collins then presents readers with multiple pathways for immersing in nature-based literacies with students, whether through community or digital spaces, that are responsive to loss and grief. Next, Brewer and Early discuss what they learned with youth in the Philadelphia Young Playwrights about how arts-based literacies can be incorporated in ELA classrooms as a platform to explore topics of identity, oppression, and advocacy. Donovan delves into young adult literature, offering a lens for reading young adult literature that can disrupt narrow con-ceptions of trauma, arguing that how we read representations of trauma with youth is more important than merely being exposed to trauma narratives. Next, Brown shares a teaching protocol for literature classrooms that supports students to not only empathize with characters' experiences but also to analyze texts for the factors that contribute to characters' resilience and, in turn, reflect on their own ways of navigating challenges. Richards then explores the idea of trauma as rupture and how attuning to and allowing space for rupture in classroom routines and curricula is important when approached with vulnerability, care, and love. In the final chapter, González brings readers into her high school English classroom to describe how students engaged with a unit she designed on the Gyasi's Homegoing and discusses how ELA teachers can use literature to support students to explore their strengths, recognize generational or historical harm, and develop tools for healing.

Concluding Thoughts

In closing, we hold close that ELA teachers are not drawn to the profession because of passion for academic standards and high-stakes assessment. They pursue this work because of their passion and drive to work with youth and to offer pathways for students to employ and build on their knowledge toward contributing to a more just, peaceful world. Teachers face much uncertainty in our current social and political realities and within the ever-shifting policies that impact their work. Within thatpress, we know readers share our drive to remember that students need us to reground ourselves in what it means to be human, and they need us to pause to bear witness to one another's stories in classrooms. Far from being disconnected from the day to day of teaching, amidst school and district standards and policies, the authors in this volume show how trauma-informed teaching lives and thrives within the humanity, commitments, and creativity ELA teachers bring to practice. The urge for trauma-informed teaching is the urge to bring humanity back into the things that we do during and throughout the day. The small moments that allow us to feel, react, respond, and interact are the moments we remember, those are the moments that help us begin to heal. We are energized by our recognition that this volume represents the tip of the iceberg of what now exists and what is to come in ELA educators' pursuits toward those goals.

WORKS CITED

Alvarez, Adam J., and Abiola Farinde-Wu. Advancing a Holistic Trauma Framework for Collective Healing from Colonial Abuses. AERA Open 8, 2022, 23328584221083973.

Alvarez, Adam. Seeing Race in the Research on Youth Trauma and Education: A Critical Review. Review of Educational Research, vol. 90, no. 5, 2020, 583–626.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, edited by AnaLouise Keating, Duke UP, 2015.

Bomer, Randy, et al. Miseducating Teachers about the Poor: A Critical Analysis of Ruby Payne's Claims about Poverty. Teachers College Record, vol. 110, no. 12, 2008, pp. 2497–2531.

Dutro, Elizabeth, and Erica Caasi. The Complexities of Trauma in Responsive Teaching. Language Arts, vol. 99, no. 5, 2022, pp. 358–62.

Garcia, Antero. "A Call for Healing Teachers: Loss, Ideological

Unraveling, and the Healing Gap." Schools, vol. 16, no. 1, 2019, pp. 64–83.

Ginwright, Shawn. The Future of Healing: Shifting from Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement. Occasional Paper, vol. 25, 2018, pp. 25–32.

Jones, Stephanie P. The Language of Curriculum Violence. English Journal, vol. 111, no. 5, 2022, pp. 15–7.

Love, Bettina L. ‘Grit Is in Our DNA': Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black. Education Week, 12 Feb. 2019, https://wwwedweek.org/leadership/opinion-grit-is-in-our-dna-why-teaching-grit-is-inherently-anti-black/2019/02

Simmons, D. Why We Can't Afford Whitewashed Social-Emotional Learning. ASCD, 1 Apr. 2019, https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/why-we-cant-afford-whitewashed-social-emotional-learning

Tuck, Eve. Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities. Harvard Educational Review, vol. 79, no. 3, 2009, pp. 409–28.

Venet, Alex Shevrin. Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education (Equity and Social Justice in Education Series). W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

ELIZABETH DUTRO is professor of literacy studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a former elementary teacher. Her recent research and writing focus on critical, humanizing pedagogies in response to trauma, the poetics of children's writing, and teachers' collaborative learning. She is the author of The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy (Teachers College Press, 2019). She can be contacted at [e-mail].

BRE PACHECO is a social emotional learning specialist at a Title I elementary school in North-glenn, Co. She is an advocate for trauma-informed practices in schools. Her background includes ten years of elementary classroom experience, four years of instructional coaching, and new teacher mentorship.

Acknowledgment

We are very grateful to the chapter authors, Jim Sitar and team at NCTE, and our CU Boul-der colleague, Emily Johns-O'Leary.

THIRTEEN WAYS OF

LOOKING AT TRAUMA:

Possibilities and

Considerations

for ELA Teachers

ADDISON DUANE AND ALEX SHEVRIN VENET

Introduction

When the blackbird few out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

—Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

What are the many circles of meaning that trauma leaves behind? Trauma is a seemingly simple two-syllable term, but the word is something of a Rorschach test, sparking different meaning-making in each beholder. To some, trauma is a diagnosis kept behind the gates of those with medical degrees. To others, trauma describes an emotional landscape deeply buried in shadows. For still others, trauma calls to mind the pain and resilience of ancestors expelled and kidnapped from their homelands, their stories passed on generation by generation.

How can we be trauma-informed educators when the core concept of trauma is so hard to define? Should we try to standardize a particular definition? Is that even possible? We believe the answer to these questions lies within the tangled concept of trauma itself. Samira Rajabi describes the way the experience of trauma is characterized by its unrepresent-ability: [people who experience trauma] exist at the intersection of remembering and forgetting in the way that trauma both demands that they speak and insists they cannot (23). These paradoxes live at the heart of trauma.

In the current data-obsessed culture of education, it sometimes seems the only things that matter are those we can distill into single definitions, measure, and standardize. But there is another way to approach these complexities: lean into them. As ELA teachers, we help our students use language to understand and create the world around them. This process is rarely linear or neat. To infuse trauma awareness into our practice, we can embrace the mess and complexity of understanding trauma the same way we lean into the nuance with our content every day.

Trauma-informed education is a decentralized movement of educators seeking to address the many impacts of trauma in our education system. These practices encompass strategies that respond to the impact of trauma that has already occurred in students' lives, efforts to disrupt the occurrence of traumatic experiences and conditions within school settings, and an orientation toward lessening societal trauma through