From Coping to Hoping: Teaching Youth to Thrive Through Trauma

• In Event: Reexamining Urban Violence and Trauma: Ecological, Empathetic, and Pedagogical Responses

Abstract

This paper utilizes an interpretive case study (Stake, 2005) to illuminate an exemplar pedagogical paradigm for teaching dispossessed youth to go from maladaptive coping to critical hoping, and to also thrive through their unresolved historical traumas. Unresolved historical, or intergenerational, trauma that comes as a consequence of colonial dispossession and oppression becomes more severe when it is passed on in subsequent generations (Shoshan, 1989). Instead of channeling their social dissatisfaction against social systems that undermine their humanity, dispossessed youth internalize high levels of pent up, displaced anger that they hold onto and too often unleash on members of their own community (Fanon, 1963; Maracle, 1996; Ruth, 1988). This type of maladaptive coping solidifies existing race, class, and gendered social orders.

Teaching students to unlearn maladaptive coping strategies requires resisting what they are conditioned to believe about themselves and their cultures. Martin-Baro (1994) refers to this as capturing “historical memory,” where “one’s own identity and the pride of belonging to a people… and above all, with rescuing aspects of identity which served yesterday, and will serve today, for liberation” (p. 30). Teaching youth to thrive through trauma in this way is a complex practice because it tries to move, in beautifully contested ways, children and communities to where they want to go while grappling with the painful pasts that they have to confront to get there.

This case study draws from historical materialism, the health sciences, and from extensive work as an educator and researcher in urban schools throughout California to contribute to the limited body of work addressing historical trauma in so-called urban schools, providing a framework for understanding how to adequately teach youth the sensibilities needed to deal with the traumatic stress of their everyday lives and create classroom conditions that foster radical healing (Ginwright, 2010) and critical hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009). This case study is part of an ongoing set of qualitative data, the accumulation of field notes, student work and other artifacts, classroom video, and interviews gathered as part of the author’s longer research trajectory. Extensive coded field notes and video analysis of student learning are analyzed to determine the impact of social toxins on student identity, examine learning processes that facilitate critical understandings of coping mechanisms, and pedagogical strategies for increasing hope.

Author

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco