A Trauma Studies Lens on Writing Methods: Crafting a Critical, Affective, Practice-Based Pedagogy

• In Event: 14.041 - Toward Justice in Literacy Teacher Education: Critical Literacies in Elementary and Secondary Methods Courses

Abstract

Drawing on humanities scholarship that takes trauma as a space for metaphorical, textual, and material analysis, this presentation discusses a project that purposefully attended to vulnerability and affect with the aim of fostering and supporting social justice commitments and tools of critical analysis in an elementary writing methods course. The first part of our presentation will discuss trauma studies, an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the presence and role of trauma in literature, film, and significant cultural-historical events. We illuminate two ways that trauma studies can be productively conceptualized in schools and marshaled as a context for analyzing structural inequities. First, trauma provides a lens for considering individual experiences that get recognized as difficult and how they are shared, interpreted, and circulated in schools and classrooms. Second, trauma studies can be marshaled to point to how some students’ positioning within the institution of schooling constitutes trauma. We then explore constructs of testimony and witness evoked in Trauma Studies scholarship that can be taken up productively in literacy pedagogy (authors). In the second part of our presentation, we turn to illustrations of how we took up a pedagogy of testimony and critical witness in our writing methods course. Using narratives, vignettes, and qualitative data from our writing methods course, we illustrate three tenets of the pedagogy discussed in the previous section. These illustrations reveal how deeply felt life experiences that are present in classrooms can function to both build visceral connections between people and also craft and reify destructive assumptions. In this way, trauma can become a space of connection and critical analysis of social, economic, and educational inequity. Our discussion considers how building perspectives from trauma studies into our methods course challenged the assumption of disconnect between social theories, critical analysis, and specific instructional practices in literacy classrooms and also challenged ourselves to perform the embedded nature of theory and pedagogy in our own practice.

Authors

• Elizabeth M. Dutro, University of Colorado Boulder

• Ashley Cartun, University of Colorado - Boulder