CONVERSATIONS

We would love to learn from your experiences with trauma-informed pedagogies, or hear your reactions to the essays published here. Please feel free to leave a comment, question, concern, idea, or reflection on this page. We read all comments and look forward to engaging with your experiences.

In the spirit of encouraging conversations, we have crafted some questions to consider. We offer these questions as both personal prompts to thinking and invitations to collective discussion. If you'd like to reply to any of them—or share other responses to any of the essays—please post a comment below. If you just want to use them as private thinking tools, or discuss them with colleagues, that's great too!

Questions

I. ASSESSING YOUR PEDAGOGY AND CLASSROOM

1. How many of our suggestions are you already doing?

2. What stands out in these essays as most relevant to your teaching practice and your students?

3. What would you most like to try out in your teaching?

4. What practices have you used in your teaching? How did they work or not work?

5. What tensions have you experienced in conducting a trauma-informed *and* culturally-sensitive curriculum and classroom?

6. How do you gauge and diversify what “active participation” entails?

II. YOUR WRITING

1. What makes it possible to write well? What makes it (more or less) impossible?

2. How can we strike a productive balance between the importance and the burden of personal agency and choice in writing-focused teaching?

3. What role do bodily elements play in honing the cognitive skill of writing?

4. How do enjoyment, usefulness, and viability relate to each other in the design of personal writing strategies?

5. What does experience-informed writing mean for AI, and vice versa?

III. QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS ABOUT TRAUMA-INFORMED APPROACHES

1. Can students be trusted to set their own standards?

2. What has breathing got to do with learning?

3. What evidence do we have of how all this plays out for UCSB students?

4. Do these approaches minimize the depth of trauma and take insufficient account of the role of the unconscious?

IV. THINGS THAT YOU HAVE FOUND EFFECTIVE IN REDUCING TRAUMA IN YOUR TEACHING

Please tell us!

Thank you for reading and for sharing your ideas (if you do!)