The Poetics Of Children’s Embodied Knowledge: Critical Necessities and Liberatory Possibilities of Humanizing Trauma Pedagogies

• In Event: Insisting on Critical Hope: Interrogating School-Based Trauma and Reimagining Liberatory Possibilities

Abstract

Background
This paper shares findings from analysis of interviews about school writing with 30 2nd and 3rd graders who had experienced critical literacy pedagogies designed to facilitate children's opportunities to draw on their embodied knowledge, including knowledge gleaned from challenging life experiences. The purpose is to better understand how close reading of children’s language and ideas can inform bringing justice- and child-centered perspectives on trauma to classrooms.

Perspective(s)
As attention to trauma grows in US schools, critical scholarship has questioned pathologizing foci of some approaches (Duane & Venet, 2022), critiqued lack of attention to racism and other systemic oppressions (Alvarez, 2020), highlighted terms that can exacerbate racialized deficit assumptions (Love, 2019; Tuck, 2009), centered healing and love (Ginwright, 2018; Ohito, et al, 2019) and shown the importance of discipline-specific pedagogies that center anti-oppressive practices (author; Jones, 2022). Situated in this critical landscape, this paper draws on two lenses, poetics (Hirschfield, 1997)—that emphasizes subtleties, evocations, and ingenuity in how knowledge is shared—and Anzaldua’s ideas about the body as “the ground of thought” (p. 5). These theories support attuning to children as knowledge holders who are always writing and rewriting stories steeped in personal, familial, and community histories and viewing children’s perspectives as central to understanding what trauma needs to mean in anti-oppressive, humanizing classrooms.

Data Sources and Methods
This analysis is drawn from a larger multi-year study of children’s experiences with critical literacy pedagogies designed to be responsive to trauma in two classrooms located in a Title 1 elementary school serving students classified as approximately 60% Latinx, 20% White, 10% multiracial, 5% Black, and 5% Asian. Researchers and teachers collaborated to design and study pedagogies and children’s responses. Data included transcripts of audio recorded interviews, contextualized by fieldnotes, classroom video, and writing from across school years. Content analysis discerned themes in interviews and a critical poetics framework guided close readings focused on children’s use of language to express connections between lived knowledge and literacies.

Results
Many children used imagery, metaphor, and other literary moves to share their perspectives on their school writing. These literary elements were particularly present in children’s spontaneous retellings of writing they had chosen to pursue when invited to center their topics on experiences that held deep meaning for them, including trauma. Findings illustrate 1) the evocative and sophisticated ways children describe their use of writing for connection to self and others 2) how children challenge binaries (e.g., pain/joy, loss/connection) 3) interrelated topics centered on loss, systemic racism, and economic precarity.

Significance
This analysis shows how children’s perspectives inform the complexity that must be brought to understandings of "trauma", if attention to trauma is to fuel, rather than undermine, justice and humanization in schools. Critical and student-centered perspectives on trauma-informed movements are crucial, as many programs sold to schools take an instrumental view of trauma that emphasizes achievement outcomes, ignores systemic oppression and racism as sources of trauma, and position children and youth as damaged.

Author

• Elizabeth Dutro, University of Colorado - Boulder