Trauma-Informed Practice: Interrogating the "Shiny New Toy" for Curing the African American Child

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: Supporting Young Children's Learning and Development

Abstract

Increasingly Trauma-Informed Practice models are found in early education programs that serve African American students. These models derive from American psychiatry; a discipline with an extensive history of promoting inaccurate racial science that is then used to profit from Black pathology (CCHR, 1995). Additionally, the epistemological grounding for TIP concepts are antithetical to African comprehension of human functioning. An interrogation via the lens of African scholarship was conducted to predict TIP efficacy as an intervention strategy. Preliminary findings reveal ineffectiveness informed by conflicting cosmological and ontological views and a potential trauma trigger via limited attention to race-based trauma. TIP funding allocation and purported healing benefits for a historically marginalized Black preschoolers demand a more critical examination of this education model.

Author

• Patricia Lynn Nunley, City College of San Francisco