Childhood Trauma and a Call for Collective Healing in Public Education

• In Event: Rethinking Trauma: Creating Hope and Preserving Dreams Through Critical Media Literacy

Abstract

This may be the only time I speak publicly about a gap in anything without using the term pejoratively: the U.S. public school and child mental health systems currently face a devastating gap in services that leaves many children who have experienced trauma underserved, incorrectly served, or simply not served at all by the institutions intended to support them. The purposes of this paper are twofold: first, to illustrate the need for trauma-informed perspectives in public schooling through autoethnographic narrative, and second, to situate this need in the sociocultural context of a school system that is living out the paradox of collective wounds that are brought on by individualistic epistemologies and ontologies.

Author

• Ann Mogush Mason, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities