Attending to School-Based Racial Trauma in Trauma-Sensitive Schools Initiatives: Insights from a Narrative Inquiry

• In Event: What’s Missing in Trauma-Informed Practice? An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Equity-Driven Student and Teacher Perspectives

Abstract

Trauma-Sensitive Schools (TSS) initiatives are commonly conceptualized as undertakings warranted by students’ experiences outside of school, often failing to acknowledge the prevalence of school-based trauma, particularly racial trauma (Saleem et al., 2022). Trauma includes both acute events and prolonged exposure to toxic conditions, and racial trauma refers to the stress and psychological injury resultant of racism and racial discrimination. Studies examining the schooling experiences of racially minoritized youth reveal that they are confronted with recurring racial discrimination. Research also evidences the adverse consequences of racial trauma and race-based traumatic stress, including its negative impacts on student-teacher relationships, academic performance, and overall psychosocial wellbeing (see Anderson et al., 2019). As such, those advocating for TSS initiatives must contend with racially minoritized students’ experiences of racial trauma in schools to design TSS initiatives that attend to the particularity of racially minoritized youth’s needs.

The purpose of this presentation is to offer student-centered insights about how schools can more effectively develop and implement TSS initiatives that consider Black youth’s experiences of racial trauma and race-based traumatic stress in schools. This presentation leverages data from the Making Justice Project (MJP), a qualitative study examining Black student organizers’ lives, activist identity formation, political perspectives, and sociopolitical visions. Black adolescent organizers are uniquely positioned to offer perspectives both on the experience of school-based traumatic stress and the potential remedies to such with critical consideration of sociopolitical factors.

MJP is a rigorously designed developmental science study, situated at the nexus of narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), oral history (Yow, 2015), and Black storytelling (Toliver, 2022). The study involved multimethod, multiphase in-depth narrative interviews with Black adolescents (n=10, ages 12-18) who resided in the United States and had a history of political activism. The interview sequentially integrated Lifestory Interviewing, Artifact Elicitation, and Imagework methods to capture the youth’s lives across multiple ecological contexts. The semi-structured interview protocol invited discussion related to youth’s schooling experiences and social relationships, including those with other students, teachers, coaches, and connected community members. A categorical-content approach to narrative thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. A stress, coping, and resilience theoretical framework was used for data analysis, informed by the Developmental and Ecological Model of Youth Racial Trauma (Saleem et al., 2020). This theory and analytic method allowed us to highlight the nature and source of traumatic stress, the youth’s (desired) approaches to coping, and pathways to resilience based on the youth’s experiential expertise.

The findings expose how race-based traumatic stress occurs in schools, being instigated by multiple ecological and institutional factors. Identified themes provide significant insights about: (1) how school-based racial trauma emerges in the narratives of Black adolescent organizers; (2) the resources and strategies Black adolescent organizers use to address or cope with school-based racial trauma; and (3) potential approaches to preventing and redressing the harms of school-based racial trauma for Black adolescents. These findings have implications for the study, theorization, design, and implementation of TSS initiatives and how to promote the well-being of Black adolescent organizers.

Author

• Edward D. Scott, University of Houston