Tackling Tender Topics: How Urban ECE (Early Childhood Education) Teachers Talk About Trauma

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Constructing Equitable Instructional Practices and Procedures in Urban Settings (Table 17)

Abstract

This paper describes how early childhood educators in an urban intensive environment talk about trauma. There is much literature about the ways that ECE teachers and leaders are taught to become trauma-informed educators but less that examines trauma from their perspective. The study found ECE professionals include a wide range of issues under the “trauma” label and use language that suggests a physical impact of trauma when they talk about it. They are more likely to share trauma resources with other ECE professionals and community members in what Bronfenbrenner would call the exosystem of the child’s developmental ecology but express a desire to find resources that give them the ability to use developmentally appropriate language directly with children.

Author

• Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo, Drexel University