From Emergency to Trauma Work: Associaçāo-da-Pedagogia-de-Emergência Partners With University-teacher-training after the Grande-do-Sul -floods, Brazil 2024

• In Event: Harnessing Waldorf for Arts-based Trauma Pedagogy Across Borders: Opportunities & Challenges

Abstract

1.Purpose
Brazil’s Emergency Pedagogy Team, Associaçāo-da-Pedagogia-de-Emergência , was co-founded and is co-led by educational emergency and trauma expert, Waldorf graduate and certified special education caregiver Reinaldo Nascimento.

This study examines the impact of Brazil’s historic 2024 Grande-do-Sul floods on its teachers and schools, the Assoçiaçāo’s emergency and trauma education training work with the teachers to help meet the crisis, this training’s perceived efficacy and how this resulted in its burgeoning partnership with the province’s two key universities PUC-RS and UFRGS teacher training programs. With particular attention to tensions and opportunities in the process, the study probes how, as the first teacher cohort received training in emergency and trauma pedagogy in person as gift from the Associaçao, word spread and others asked to join and the work expanded from in-person to online in partnership with the province’s two leading teacher-training universities, PUC-RS and UFRGS, growing into a year-long university training, May 2024- June 2025 , serving in total over 1,400 teachers, winning the attention of the press and building confidence for collaboration among the university partners so that now there is a partnership in place and a Reinaldo was offered a contract to write a text book on Waldorf inspired emergency and trauma pedagogy. This process, the shape of the training, how it was adopted and adapted from the already outlined 12 module training as articulated by Bernd Ruf and his team, and outcomes found are the focus of this study.

2.Theoretical Framework
This study employs the frameworks of Tyack & Cuban (1995), Labaree (2020), Scott (1995) Coburn (2023) and Eisner (2002).

3. Methods
The approach is a mixed method (Creswell and Plano Clark, 2017) and employs an organizational case study (see Yin, 2003), and participatory action research ( Zuber-Skerritt, 2018).The study draws also on Eisner’s direction on “design for research study on transfer” (Eisner, 2002, p.220).


4. Data Sources
Data sources include participant observation, participant self report, material review, university documentation and social media and newspaper coverage..

5. Results
Early findings include:
Teacher self report of corrective lens on lines of: “I always thought my student was lazy; now I realize they are frozen in trauma;”; teacher and colleague report on comparative calm environments ‘ready for learning’ in classrooms of trained teachers; report of deeper self- confidence of teachers involved; report, actions and publication of UFRGS to promote and mainstream this Waldorf trauma professional development; spike in public media celebrating the work

6. Scholarly significance of the study
The study advances the interrogation of culturally and developmentally appropriate artistic activity as self- and group-healing and as gateway to academic learning in times of crisis and trauma; it further advances questions of change in structure of the ‘grammar of school’ forged by the impact of crisis. Further it contributes to the research literature on scale.

Authors

• Reinaldo Nascimento, Monte Azul

• Ida Oberman, Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences