Introduction
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you have a [teacher] who is a friend to your mind.”
–Toni Morrison, Beloved
The Origins of the Project
The Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Project at UC Santa Barbara emerged from our experiences in the classroom teaching courses for the Literature and Mind specialization in the English Department. Drawing on studies of the mind/brain from the disciplines of psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive science and neurobiology, our specialization foregrounds the importance of language and of literature in structuring the mind’s representations and re-workings of reality. That reworking is vital to human existence, enabling our inventiveness, capacities to dream and exist otherwise, and to bear reality by expressing it. At the same time, studying literary texts or the dynamics of mental processing acquaints us with the harshness of reality, the uneven playing fields accorded to differing bodyminds and depictions of them. Because our classes focus on these topics, students are unusually engaged by class materials but also frequently activated by them: disturbed by what they discover or encounter and often unsettled by their own reading and writing. Even when assigned materials are not focused on trauma, the topic comes up—in class discussion, in office-hour conversations, in student projects. While a heartening indication that students are connecting personally to class materials, the frequency and levels of voiced distress distressed us. We were unnerved by the prospect that our courses were causing or intensifying harm in our desire to highlight literature’s potential to lessen it. This on top of our concern over the prevalence of students entering the university with significant histories of trauma.
In spring 2021, the postdoctoral fellow for Literature and Mind, Dr. Jesse Miller, ran an undergraduate collaborative research project that provided data and context for our growing concerns. Entitled “Trigger Warning! Reading, Politics, and Mental Wellness” and supported by an Arnhold Excellence in English grant, Miller and his students read articles on student trauma and trigger warnings, conducted interviews with undergraduates and professors on their experiences with them, and produced a podcast miniseries still available on Spotify. Their basic conclusion was that trigger warnings were an inadequate, largely managerial, response to a growing problem that demanded serious attention—well-captured in the title of one of their episodes, “Institutional Responses to Trauma are Just Band-aids on Bullet Holes.” Around the same time, the University of California, acknowledging “the escalating behavioral health crisis among students” and “equity gaps for our most underserved students,” launched an “Equity in Mental Health, 2021-2025” initiative and funding plan. Drs. Julie Carlson and Sowon Park [should we mention Ken Kosik??] applied and were awarded funding to devise a Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Project in the English Department (and in the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts). The statistics we cited in our application have not improved. According to the 2019 American College Health Associations National College Health Assessment II (ACHA NCHA), 15 percent of UC students considered suicide, 64 percent felt hopeless, 68 percent felt overwhelming anxiety, 74 percent felt lonely, 88 percent felt exhausted and 90 percent felt overwhelmed. Not much has changed either in the asymmetries highlighted in a pandemic-related Pew Research Center report. Black and Latinx respondents report higher rates of depression, anxiety and trauma-related symptoms than their white counterparts and 30% of Asian American adults have experienced acts of racism since the pandemic began [links].
Our work was cut out for us. Joining Sowon and Julie in the TIP project were, from the start, Aili Pettersson Peeker, then an English PhD student and now faculty in the Writing Program, and, in fall 2023, Dr. Emily Troscianko, a Visiting Researcher at Literature and Mind from Oxford University and a scholar and coach on writing and recovery. Together, we sponsored talks, devised new courses, organized reading groups, and held campus workshops on pedagogy, activism, and student writing, all designed to expand our knowledge of trauma and modes of responding effectively to it. We invited speakers with expertise on student trauma (Dr. Meridith Merchant), legal and institutional redress of sexual assault (Kel O’Hara), traumatic effects of war and forced migration (Dr. Oksana Yakushko) and collaborated with several campus agencies addressing racial and sexual trauma (The Multicultural Center, The Healing Space, Campus Advocacy Resources Education, and The Resource Center for Gender and Sexual Diversity). We hired Undergraduate Research Assistants who conducted research and assembled annotated bibliographies (Bethany Clements, Hailey Row, Emily Cardona, Kaitlyn Do) and led student focus groups (Nye Rauf, Cassidy Creer, Hailey Row). Slowly but steadily, through these means we formed a community of people concerned with trauma and equity on campus. Our collection of essays is a fruit of these experiences, and we are grateful to all the people who have facilitated our thinking along the way.
Objections
Some of the help we received was critical, raising objections with which we have grappled, usually willingly. One acknowledged stumbling block is the fact that trauma-informed practice is not a natural outgrowth of university settings but instead was instituted in public health and K-8 educational arenas and developed in relation to their needs. At best, then, its applicability to research universities requires significant justification and modification; at worst, it may be seen as fine for primary education, but as having no business in higher ed. Other objections were less hierarchical but equally skeptical about “trauma”. By diffusing the term to the point that we regard every student as being traumatized in differing degrees, don’t we end up trivializing or normalizing trauma? Doesn’t focusing on student trauma make the situation worse by locking students into a deficit identity, indulging their (hyper-)sensitivities, or sanctioning a form of not trying? Besides, isn’t “trauma,” and particularly PTSD as a diagnosis, a Western construct that universalizes diverse experiences and enforces a linear and imperial way of thinking? Then there are practice-related objections. Trauma accommodations can be used as excuses to get out of assignments, leave the classroom, request multiple extensions. Directing attention to embodied aspects of learning, by including breathing or other grounding and/or movement exercises, wastes valuable class time and distracts from more important tasks. Plus, inviting students to engage in these exercises might give way to reactions that we as educators, not mental health professionals, are ill-equipped to guide. “Student-centered” learning intensifies the burden on faculty, making unreasonable demands on already-dwindling faculty energy, time, and compassion.
These essays are our best responses to these questions and objections, and our best attempts at providing evidence-based guidance on ways to make classrooms conducive to the intellectual and cultural development of all students in them. For now. It is hardly our last word on the topic and in fact is offered as an evolving document that will require modification as continued experiences in the classroom and responses by online readers alter our convictions and expand our suggestions.
What distinguishes our approach to trauma-informed pedagogy are the many intersections that it takes into account and holds in mind: between demographic diversity and diversities of trauma; between texts and persons; between bodies and writing. For us, “somatic reading,” the ability to sense and mitigate one’s own aversive bodily reactions to the difficulties encountered in texts, is a more comprehensive and agentive way to acknowledge the power of language and lessen its power to harm. Such a practice both approaches and enjoys students as bodyminds and wants them to flourish.
Overview of the Essays
This collection offers four essays on what we consider to be key areas of trauma-informed pedagogy. While they often connect to each other and can be read in any order, we suggest that you read them in the order they’re published here.
Julie Carlson’s “Relations” functions as a starting point by demonstrating how crucial the intersectional politics is to trauma-informed higher education. The essay asks questions about why being a trauma-informed teacher is essential for both educational equity and effectiveness, and why we need to be culturally trauma-informed in order to craft just pedagogies for the diverse range of students in our current-day classrooms.
Sowon Park’s “Bodies” continues exploring the connections between culture, politics, and education with a particular focus on how the myth of the disembodied, “rational” mind still haunts higher education and how this impedes trauma-informed efforts. This essay invites reflections on how the rationality myth shapes varied student experiences of trauma, and how we can work towards a world in which teaching practices reflect a view of students as whole embodied beings rather than as disembodied minds consuming information that we, as teachers, pour into them.
Emily Troscianko’s piece on “Writing” leads us into a more practical territory by introducing her concept of “experience-informed” writing. Considering how this framework connects with trauma-informed principles, Troscianko describes what we can learn about writing (and feeling) well from her experience leading writing workshops that incorporate bodily and habit-focused elements.
Aili Pettersson Peeker’s essay on teaching introduces concrete strategies and tools that you may or may not want to experiment with in your own teaching. Here you’ll find practices for both reading-intensive humanities courses and other types of curriculum, as well as concrete ideas for how you can restructure your grading practices.
While core ideas in these individual essays have developed over many meetings and discussions, each essay represents an individual take on what it means to be a trauma-informed university teacher. What this means is that the essays sometimes contradict each other as we disagree about what trauma-informed pedagogy could or should look like. We would like this dissensus to be an invitation for you to share your disagreements, ideas, questions, and reflections in this space too. If you’d like to, please feel free to leave a comment on the “Conversations” page below. We read all comments, and we look forward to replying as one way of keeping the conversation going.
