You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel’: Centering Emotions as Embodiment as Trauma-Informed Praxis

• In Event: Racialized Emotions, Trauma, and the Ethics of Feeling in Teacher Education

Abstract

Research indicates that two thirds of children have experienced a traumatic stressor by the age of 16 (National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative, 2023). In response to this health crisis, over the last decade there has been burgeoning research on social emotional learning and trauma-informed pedagogies and practices in schools (e.g., Author, year; Alvarez, 2020; Camangian & Cariaga, 2022; Shevrin Venet, 2021; Simmons, 2019). These bodies of scholarship have made important contributions to the field of education and to educational practice at large and have recently led to a necessary increase in trauma-informed courses within teacher education.

Despite the many positive contributions of trauma-informed scholarship, it is important to name that much of the current trauma research in education continues to lack systemic analysis, conflates acute trauma with embedded and persistent traumas, and confuses trauma as something that children bring to schools as opposed to something that schools inflict upon children. Further, very little draws on interdisciplinary scholarship which calls on us to center emotionality and embodiment as necessary practices for healing (e.g., Cariaga, 2019; Haines, 2019; Menakem, 2017). The imminent need to address trauma and healing in classrooms through trauma-informed pedagogies and social emotional learning practices is further thwarted by what Garcia (2019) referred to as a healing gap, “a fissure that separates what we want to teach youth about how to heal and cope and the skills that teachers develop to do the same” (p. 66). Essentially, one of the major hindrances to the effective implementation of these pedagogical praxes is that many teachers are asking young people to do something they have not yet practiced in their own lives. Teachers are expected (and often want to) support the healing and well-being of children, but are themselves unsupported, unwell, and untrained. I argue that this gap is further complicated and pronounced by the fact that many of our teacher-education programs do not facilitate this type of emotional and embodied learning.

In this paper, I explore how I centered emotionality and embodiment within my trauma-informed and healing-centered pedagogies course. Utilizing chicana feminist methods, namely testimonios and pláticas (e.g., Author, year; Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016), I engage former students to explore how the curricular and pedagogical commitments and practices of the course impacted their own learning, healing, and teaching. Through participant testimonios, this study demonstrates the degree to which rituals and relationships supported students’ in deepening their relationship to their own bodies and emotions. Ultimately, this paper argues that through creating a course that centered emotionality and embodiment, students were able to experience trauma-informed pedagogies in a way that led to deeper learning—one that can be applied in their varied teaching contexts.

Author

• Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, University of Michigan