“The School Becomes Their Family”: Exploring Renewal and Repair through Teachers’ Framings of Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

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

Abstract

Background/Objective: Given intensifying social, political, and environmental crises and the associated tribulations many young people experience in our deeply inequitable society, educators are increasingly turning to trauma-informed pedagogy as a means of responding to traumas that minoritized young people experience (e.g., Ellis, 2020; Thomas et al., 2019). What trauma-informed pedagogy means, though, varies (Author, 2020). Through analysis of teachers’ discourse around trauma and pedagogy in two sites, this paper explores teachers’ guiding understandings and enactments of trauma-informed pedagogy serving marginalized youth.

Theoretical framework: Trauma has historically been understood through a reductive biomedical approach, with little attention paid to social and cultural factors that produce, intensify, or mitigate the experiences and effects of trauma (Author, 2020). Recent scholarship has begun to attend to issues of identity as well as broader social and cultural processes in ways that deepen our understanding of what trauma is and how pedagogies can work to mitigate its biosocial effects (e.g., Duane et al., 2021; Haynes et al., 2023). Further, recent scholarship has begun to attend to ways that schooling itself can produce trauma (Author, 2021). The discursive positioning—or storying—of trauma shapes the understanding of what trauma is, and what pedagogies might be suited to interrupt or mitigate educational or broader socially-produced traumas that young people experience.

Methods and Data Sources: This comparative study engaged content analysis of narratives shared by 12 educators at the two research sites. Narratives were analyzed for emergent themes, including understandings of trauma, ethno-racialized identity, gender, discourse about class. Narratives were chosen based on their relation to the teachers’ understandings of trauma and how they reified or interrupted dominant, deficit renderings of marginalized youth. Field-note data also provided context for analysis of narratives. The two research sites are Huerta, an alternative high school serving primarily Mexican-American youth in the west coast city of San Sebastián, and Firekeeper Academy, which is an alternative high school located on a Native American Reservation in the Rocky Mountain West.

Findings and Scholarly Significance: In looking across the two cases--Huerta and Firekeeper Academy--there exists a range of ways teachers understand trauma--from individualized, biomedical perspectives to sociocultural and historical considerations. Of significance is that teachers within the same school have differing perspectives despite the fact that each school has a defined trauma-informed program. These teachers’ differing understandings of trauma position youth in various ways that, at times, reinscribe deficit renderings of marginalized youth and their families, and, at other times, critique them. The different renderings of trauma and students correspond with teachers’ positionalities. Teachers of color, particularly those whose racial affiliations align with students’, operate from socio-historical conceptions of trauma that recognize trauma as part of systemic issues (including schools), whereas white teachers primarily drew upon conceptualizations of trauma that recognize it as an individualized experience due to harmful circumstances. This knowledge production around dissimilar storying practices of trauma furthers our research community’s responsibility to explore pathways to repair and remedy the causes and experiences of trauma through informed pedagogies.

Authors

• Noah Asher Golden, California State University - Long Beach

• Robert Petrone, University of Missouri