The complexity of “trauma” in trauma-responsive teaching

Hard, challenging, difficult. Painful, disorienting, life-altering. There are so many words we reach for in response to the difficult experiences of life. We feel how words fail, how they are all inadequate. None can capture a story of loss and hurt in the way it is felt and held in the body. 

If this is true for all forms of expression in the face of hardship and suffering, it is certainly true of the word trauma itself, the term most often used to capture those experiences. Attention to trauma in educational policy and practice has grown exponentially in recent years and, as we have explored with teacher colleagues in K–12 classrooms, “trauma” is a term ripe with potential to accelerate justice and fuel oppression in schools and classrooms.  

As educators, we know that vibrant learning is fueled when children feel that their lived stories—of joy, pain, oppression, identities, connections to family and community histories—are seen, heard and valued as a source of knowledge and resource for learning. Experiences, from the hard to the celebratory, matter in classrooms. Yet, holding that commitment doesn’t alone ensure students’ lives get to matter in ways that honor and humanize their experiences. Here, we share some reflections about what stories of challenging life experiences urge us to consider about the complexities of trauma in classrooms. 

Why is it so important to recognize the complexity of the word trauma and how it is used in relation to students in schools? That word is always heavy with the certainty of hard things, hurt, loss, pain, despair, violence, oppression, to name but a few of the experiences it might suggest. Because it is a word often laden with assumptions and a vast range of experiences, the risks of oversimplifying or emphasizing some impacts over others can be consequential for students. 

We can consider the multiple dimensions of trauma in relation to schools, including: 

1. trauma as personal and shared; 
2. trauma as part of the human condition and systemically targeted; and 
3. trauma as carried into schools and inflicted by schools and systems of schooling. 

For example, the COVID-19 pandemic was a shared trauma across all students and families, while individual families experienced loss and fear in specific, personal ways. We can also agree that no one gets through life unscathed. Human bodies are finite and fragile, so loss and grief and physical and emotional pain happens in all lives, in some form. However, many traumas, including the pandemic, illustrate how trauma is targeted, arising from oppressive systems of societies and institutions that create or exacerbate pain, loss and struggle. 
Many approaches to trauma in relation to schools focus on trauma as issues that are carried into schools. However, there is too often less emphasis on how schooling inflicts trauma on students. 

Black, Brown, indigenous and queer students are far more likely to experience targeted trauma or institutional harm. Layered into these complexities is the risk that centering trauma can feed false narratives of damage about students, exacerbating the histories of toxic deficit myths that are pervasive in U.S. schooling.  

Without a doubt, justice-centered, compassionate approaches to trauma can and do exist in schools. However, the policy push to center trauma in schools demands that we contend with the risks embedded in well-meaning attention to trauma and sharpen our vigilance and explicit attention to anti-oppressive practices. We can never fully know the depth and breadth of others’ lives, but we can commit to honoring the sources of knowledge children bring to their learning. We can respond with love, advocacy and tangible actions toward the schools students deserve.

This essay is excerpted from Dutro, E., Caasi, E. (May 2022). “The Complexities of Trauma in Responsive Teaching.” Language Arts. Vol. 99, Iss. 5

Elizabeth Dutro is Professor of Literacy Studies, Associate Dean of Faculty in the School of Education, and author of the book, The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy. Erica Caasi (PhdEdu’23) is an alumna of the PhD program in Literacy Studies.