Unsnarling Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports and Trauma-Informed Education

• In Event: Disentangling the Reproductive From the Liberatory: Trauma-Informed Practice for Racially Just Systemic Teaching

Abstract

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS, is a framework for managing student behavior, currently implemented in over 25,000 schools in the US (Center on PBIS, n.d.). The framework, and its companion Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), are so ubiquitous as to escape serious scrutiny. As schools seek to implement trauma-informed education practices (TIE), they often plug TIE into existing PBIS/MTSS structures and systems with PBIS being identified as a key strategy for supporting trauma-informed school environments (Thomas et al., 2019). PBIS and TIE are seen as intertwined, and this is ultimately harmful for students, especially students of color and disabled students. PBIS is rooted in behaviorism and applied behavioral analysis (Knestrict, 2019), which are harmful philosophies that focus on compliance and adherence to white heteropatriarchal and ableist norms of behavior. Behaviorism and trauma-informed practices are fundamentally incompatible (author, 2021) and educators and researchers should question this entanglement.

When schools implement PBIS, teachers and administrators overemphasize compliance and consequences rather than seeking to understand the etiologies and presentations of trauma responses. This encourages and sustains teacher labeling and pathologization of student behavior (Bornstein, 2017). PBIS reproduces constructs such as appropriate/inappropriate, orderly/disorderly which prioritizes dominant norms rooted in whiteness and ableism and harms students who have been historically and are currently marginalized. To truly create trauma-informed and healing-centered schools, we must divest from PBIS and disentangle it from TIE.

The PBIS classroom teacher delivers rules that have been determined by a committee rather than working with the unique constellation of students and families in the learning community. This prevents classrooms from being heterarchical and democratic. Rather than being rooted in an understanding of social identity and interlocking systems of oppression, PBIS views cultural responsiveness as an add-on. Despite its promise to reduce disparities in discipline and learning, PBIS does not address or disrupt racist beliefs such as deficit views and color-evasiveness (Fergus, 2021). Because of this, we contend that PBIS actually reproduces and produces trauma, specifically race-based and ableist social identity trauma within schools. Trauma-informed education is a potentially powerful paradigm shift for schools, but it loses its promise when we yoke it to PBIS.

In this paper, we draw on the work of Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education (DisCrit) (Conner et al., 2016) combined with Annamma's concept of the “pedagogy of pathologization” (2018). Annamma describes a cycle of “hyper-punishment, hyper-labeling, and hyper-surveillance” that disproportionately negatively impacts disabled youth of color. We posit that PBIS serves as a way to label, punish, and surveil students, which is antithetical to trauma-informed education. We put existing critiques of PBIS in conversation with literature on trauma-informed education and DisCrit and draw on our own experiences as educators. Grounded in a human-centered pedagogical orientation, we propose that educators actively advocate against the use of PBIS in their schools and instead focus their efforts on culturally sustaining pedagogies, systemic trauma-informed practices, and affirming practices based on asset views of students and communities.

Authors

• Alex Shevrin Venet, Community College of Vermont

• Rhiannon Kim, The University of Vermont