RELATIONS
By Julie Carlson
jcarlson@english.ucsb.edu
Why Trauma-Informed
Many people question the appropriateness of addressing student trauma at research-1 universities like UC Santa Barbara. Some of that questioning we share and discuss in what follows. But while we acknowledge that trauma-informed practice was not conceived with university contexts in mind, we are committed to pursuing it now because effective university pedagogy depends on constructing equitable learning environments and this begins with meeting students where they are. To put this a different way, the university that we have inherited and that we have a role in shaping requires that we take a trauma-informed approach if we are to fulfill our chief purpose of educating—in the root sense (educere) of preparing students to handle current and future challenges by fostering their intellectual and cultural development. Seeing as our “natural” and “human” climates are increasingly toxic and that they disseminate that toxicity unequally, educating students to meet these challenges requires new ways of conceptualizing and addressing diverse student bodyminds. Refraining from doing so on the assumption that our pedagogical practices are time-tested and work fine as they are ignores the biases embedded in Western conceptions of time, tests, and being tested, and it casts doubt on our own capacity to evolve in conjunction with the times. In our view, dismissing trauma-informed approaches not only perpetuates the racial, gender, class, citizenship, and religious exclusions embedded in the founding structures of the university that continue to advantage those students who have been “college-bound” since birth. It also continues to betray The Master Plan for Higher Education in California (1960) which mandates providing a place in higher education for every Californian who desires one.
Initially conceived as a one-time catastrophic event with lasting psychological consequences, “trauma” has broadened to encompass a series of developmental and/or societal acts of violence and/or neglect that affect an individual’s nervous system as well as their psyche. This broadening, ongoing since the 1980s, has contributed to reported increases in student trauma, but it is not the only explanation, and it has major implications for university training. Chief is the well-documented fact that trauma significantly restricts a person’s ability to concentrate, take risks, embrace newness and difference, and trust others or themselves—effects exacerbated by COVID and qualities currently under fire with the Trump administration’s overt attacks on academic freedom and histories and practices of resistance. Yet these qualities are essential to performing well in one’s studies and to feeling involved and supported in the classroom. Ignoring the effects of trauma on the capacity to learn does not make those difficulties disappear. It worsens both the prospects and the climate for learning not only in the short-term and not only for those directly affected by trauma.
At the same time, this broadening of what counts as trauma and alarm over its pervasiveness have occasioned plausible objections that keep many of us from grappling seriously with the situation. One objection is to “trauma creep,” or the heightening and widening of harm-related concepts like bullying and abuse, that critics allege has resulted in a hypersensitive populace that is easily offended and quick to perceive even relatively “mild” offenses as cause for outrage and recrimination. These concerns get translated at the university into allegations that instructors are “coddling” students, whom they characterize as “snowflakes,” only interested in “me-studies,” and therefore woefully unprepared for the rigors of academic study or for life in the real world. A different objection is to using the word “trauma” to describe what “trauma-informed” is trying to designate and rectify. Here the concern is locking students into victim-identities or making one part the sum total of a person’s identity, a deficit view that casts pedagogical changes as remedial for some rather than beneficial for everyone. To avoid these downsides, some propose terms like “healing-centered” or “resilience-promoting” pedagogy. But others contend that “healing” and “resilience” favor can-do ableist attitudes that ignore systemic injustice and put the onus to fix things back onto the very persons whom those systems have harmed.
As a group of literature professors, we recognize that terms are important and often set the parameters of debate in ways that are biased and short-sighted. None of us is particularly wedded to the term “trauma” as what is informing our pedagogy. Some of us prefer a less negative phrase like “experience-based” pedagogy, and, in any case, we look forward to an evolving vocabulary. But we also know that endless debates over terminology can keep us from tackling the situation that such terms inadequately name because the condition is multifaceted and hard to sum up in a word. This is particularly true of the prevalence of trauma at universities and of our attempts to reduce it. Part of our aim with this document is to confront these concerns so as to lessen the ability to ignore student suffering.
Why Culturally-Trauma-Informed
Two consequences of the broadening of trauma heighten the difficulties of dealing with it at universities like UCSB. One is its convergence with increases in the demographic diversity of college students, also on the rise since the 1980s. These increases are interlocking, given that those who historically have been excluded from the university owing to their race, gender, sexuality, and/or class are likely also to have experienced both catastrophic and developmental trauma as the result of living in toxic environments. Plus, these students’ acknowledged “under-representation” at the university indicates that standard curricula and pedagogical protocols are not designed with their backgrounds and circumstances in mind. But the two increases are hardly conflatable for the obvious reason that increases in demographic diversity expand knowledge whereas increases in trauma impede it. To conflate the prevalence of first generation, BIPOC, and neurodiverse students with the rise in student trauma is offensive, potentially traumatizing, and ill-informed about current classrooms.
A second consequence of less-catastrophizing understandings of trauma is the space that it grants to cultural and embodied, not simply to medical and psychotherapeutic, approaches to allaying trauma. No informed proponent of trauma-informed pedagogy confuses classroom instruction with clinical intervention nor considers professors equipped to handle acute traumatic episodes other than by referring affected students to resources with the expertise to help them. But proponents do contend that instructors profoundly affect students’ ability to learn for better and worse and that a precondition for effective learning is constructing environments that send a credible message of interest in all of the bodyminds assembled in them. The difficulty here is that the guiding tenets of trauma-informed care do not provide much specific guidance on how to implement them in university settings. Core principles such as safety, transparency, trust, mutuality, choice, voice, and agency sound bland and common-sensical. Their broadness is intentional but their blandness sounds to many like psycho-babble and hardly germane to academic training or achievement.
We affirm these challenges as what our role as educators now asks us to take on. Trauma-informed approaches threaten standard academic practice both because core values like individualism, objectivity, publish or perish are questionable, if not traumatizing, and because effectively implementing alternative values is difficult. Still, the effort gauges the degree of our commitment to fostering intellectual wellbeing for all students (as well as instructors). Because students with histories of trauma and of marginalization differently highlight the dense interactions between bodies and minds in knowledge acquisition, we have found that assessing our pedagogical practices in relation to these students’ circumstances is the surest test of whether our approaches are as non-dualist and intersectional as we like to claim—that is, how well they take into account not only interactions among physiology, psychology, and neurology in cognitive processing but also the structural challenges that multiply-marginalized identities pose to social institutions. In this, we draw on legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s chief purpose in offering the term intersectionality in 1989: to insist on structural transformation, rather than a piecemeal inclusiveness that is endlessly additive (race+gender+class+ability+neurodiversity+,+,+) but does little to dismantle a system that is fundamentally unfair.
Taking on these challenges is also why we contend that trauma-informed and culturally-informed practices need to be differentiated but also considered together when designing syllabi and classroom protocols. Otherwise, the two endeavors can pull in opposing directions. Most universities separate “DEI” from “mental health” in their organizational and conceptual arrangements. In addition, many non-white-western and/or gender non-conforming persons view mental illness or health as Anglo-Eurocentric, colonizing and/or individuating enterprises. To the extent that both concerns play a role in classroom redesigns, they generally take the form of diversifying course syllabi and issuing trigger warnings. But without attending to the fuller aim of fostering the intellectual and affective development of all students, those revisions can seem managerial rather than genuine, a difference that many students feel and more instructors need to. We believe that in order to effectively address disengaged and/or dysregulated students as well as instructors’ skepticism over whether this is their pedagogical responsibility, it is helpful to differentiate inability from unwillingness. When does an apparent refusal to engage manifest neurophysiological responses to threat and when does it indicate conscious resistance to endorsing certain class activities? Moreover, a threat response—whether of fight, flight, fawn, or freeze—can be active and activatible in both newly-traditional students and students with histories of other forms of violence. Both groups of individuals have reason to question what taking in this or that idea or experience might do to them. In these instances, nervous systems need to be calmed and re-regulated before the types of cognitive work that we desire in our classrooms can occur. These two reactions are different from those of students who feel and/or express resistance to engaging with materials that they find racist, sexist, or potentially triggering. Here too dysregulated systems profit from calming, but their sources are anger and impatience, neither of which are frozen or fawning responses, and thus slightly “higher” on the polyvagal scale.
While these are slippery and complex distinctions, attempts to differentiate between them aid in constructing a more risk-enabling classroom ecology. Not all reactive students find the same aspects of class threatening or safe. For some, texts are triggering while for others they are reassuring; some are disturbed and others are placated by embodied features of their classmates or instructor; some feel energized, others terrified, by speaking in class. By recommending attentiveness to these varying dynamics, our main aim is to lessen their shared capacity to impede thoughtful engagement with class materials, including other classmates and the instructor. As trauma responses, knee-jerk dismissals are often forms of self-protection occasioned by adverse historical and/or developmental experiences. In such cases, the implicit work of the course is to validate that reality and suggest the damage that perpetuating these defenses occasions affected students now. These autonomic responses are different from “virtue signaling,” the self-righteousness of which also hinders self-reflection and open communication.
Trying to bring differing individuals in any classroom to a risk-enabling state is where our approach differs from trauma-informed proposals that interpret “student-centered” as prioritizing students over course content or professorial expertise. Instead, our version of student-centered envisions the classroom as a decentered assemblage of students, instructors, and authors, all of whom we characterize as readers and writers at different stages in their life course (some long-dead, others alive to varying degrees), and where each type of reader-writer has an important but different role to play in making the course, and their life courses, meaningful. Texts from the past are vital to this process, because they are crucial conduits between past and present, between a reader’s past self and future self, and between one student or tradition and another student or tradition. Instructors join students in the live mix, equipped by training and more years of reading to render materials less foreign or off-putting to students—a mediating function that could lessen seasoned and/or white instructors’ anxieties about being old-school and out of touch. Such differentiated co-created classrooms give students something deeply im/personal to do: strengthen and in the process feel strengthened by their developing relation to a range of texts and knowledge bearers.
Literary Study as Culturally-Trauma Informed
The following three pedagogical examples seek to concretize these reflections. Each suggests how and why our pedagogy strives to be culturally-trauma-informed by addressing both cognitive and somatic aspects of learning. In other words, our response to having a diverse student body is to appeal to students as bodyminds whose intellects and capacity to live together are deepened by cultivating reflective and nuanced exchanges with texts—texts construed broadly as encompassing visual and sonic media and reading understood as a technique applicable to interpersonal as well as intertextual analysis. None of this is easy to coordinate; nor, even when coordinated, any guarantee of a successful outcome. Creativity involves trial and error. But we hope that these discussions provide some guidance on how to begin or advance.
Trigger warnings
We view trigger warnings in line with studies contending that they intensify more than allay student anxiety, lock students into a trauma identity, and send pacifying messages about the efficacy of warnings. But we also object for less-familiar reasons relating to the biases that are implicit in them. One set leads to a hierarchizing or questioning of suffering. Trigger warnings are commonly issued for content involving rape or pedophilia or graphic violence against a white or well-educated person but not as often for content involving persons subjected to chattel slavery, forced migration, or incarceration. Moreover, incidents of rape and sexual abuse are four times higher for individuals who are queer and transgender than for those who are straight and cis-gendered, though these stories and realities are less frequently depicted or taught. We also are sensitive to which students tend to demand or expect warnings about which topics or worldviews and which students are hesitant to complain or expect their feelings to be taken seriously. In other words, without a culturally-informed approach to trigger warnings, they can perpetuate harms that they were devised to allay. This is also why we favor the feminist “wheel of practice” over a mere listing of trauma-informed tenets, because the wheel situates “cultural, historical, and gender issues” at the hub into which each individual tenet intersects. Such a model is a visual reminder that the safety, trust, and transparency that trigger warnings are meant to secure are deeply body- and context-specific.
The feminist wheel of practice
We object as well to the bias against literary study implicit in any expectation that it should facilitate or emerge from safety and transparency. In our view, precisely because literature, in its topics and form, dwells in unsafe territory and questions certitude, studying literary and humanistic texts better prepare students for the world that they are asked to confront. The capacity to tolerate, even grow to desire, difference and nuance are vital life skills, but ones that are seriously diminished by experiences of trauma and climates of censorship. Consequently, the balancing act that culturally-trauma-informed literature professors seek to perform is creating a safe-enough environment in the classroom for students to become able and/or willing to risk encountering the uncertainties that literature foregrounds. Lack of transparency is inherent to poetic meaningfulness, which is why many students mistake “hidden” for “co-created”. Its meaning is multivocal, sensuous, context-dependent, and often non-sensical. This un/safe-enough balancing act does not rule out giving brief content descriptions or devising alternative assignments in specific instances. But our chief aim is to help students become less defended against having their habits of thought and associational logics disturbed by the otherness of literary texts. This is how encounters with literature come to be life-changing.
Instead of trigger warnings, then, we have begun to experiment with somatic reader response, whereby students learn to discern their bodily responses to disturbing content through tracking heightened pulse rates, altered breathing patterns, limb agitations, etc.. In other words, we apply somatic experiencing (SE) techniques to the activities of reading and writing so that students learn to identify and becalm reactions that hinder their ability to focus and analyze. These techniques include grounding (focusing on the present moment by engaging the five senses), orienting (identifying locations and sensations of safety), titration (working with small bits of difficult material at a time, gradually increasing the window of tolerance), and pendulation (oscillating between alertness and rest, between more and less resourced states). We teach these techniques to lessen the disturbances evoked by reading and writing. Some perturbations relate to capability: can I understand this text, its vocabulary and historical context; am I smart or creative enough to write college papers? Some to self-concept and identity: who might or will I become if I speak this language or find it meaningful; who and what do I renounce in adopting habits of white language (HOWL)? Helping students learn to ground themselves or titrate their exposure to difficult material described in texts and evoked by reading or producing them has the advantage of restoring a sense of agency to what otherwise can feel like disempowering activities. It also relieves instructors of having to guess or presuming to know what any individual student will find triggering or what they might need.
2. Re/gaining wholeness
Wishing to feel whole and/or be perceived or treated as a whole or resilient person are certainly valid aims, given that trauma reduces one’s capacity to live fully and causes gaps in consciousness and memory that make it difficult to exist in the present. But these aims have vexed conceptual histories that, if left unacknowledged or if perceived as disregarded, threaten to derail well-intentioned efforts at restoring health. In fact, concepts like wholeness manifest the structural-conceptual tensions between university commitments to “DEI” and “mental health”. As the Black radical tradition teaches, the supremacy of whiteness requires Blackness (and all bodies of color) to be posited as—and perenially positioned in—the “hole” that constitutes enlightened personhood and its rights to property. To imply, then, that wholeness is within the grasp of every individual is an affront to those who have been categorized as a hole and should be impossible to assert without enacting massive economic and conceptual repairs. Plus, wholeness is viewed as a fantasy from poststructural and posthumanist perspectives, a wishful refusal of the signifier, the split subject, foreclosure, and artificial intelligences. These reservations are why “mental health” is often perceived to be a white or bourgeois or colonializing enterprise and why variously disenfranchised persons view rectifying material and societal ills as a top, and more basic, priority.
We take a holistic approach to the student body so as to diffuse divisions between body and mind, psyche and soma, collective and individual, human and environment. This is why we structure our classrooms as a decentered assembly of readers and writers at different stages in the life course. We have found that classes come alive when they are freed from disembodied notions of rigor or expertise, the chief obstacle being the disembodiment, and therefore from-out-of-nowhere-ness, ascribed to rigor and expertise. Not possible! Instead, we view classes as what they actually are: both a microcosm of society in all its differences and diversity and a think-tank for the current hour whose effects extend indefinitely. This view augments the temporality and sociality of classtime. People think and feel better when their creativity is activated and when they do not feel as if they are left on their own or a strict timeline to work a problem. Besides, most interesting problems are not any one’s own and only have a chance of being solved through collective discussion, improvisation, and repeated attention. Accommodating disagreement is crucial to establishing common ground, a potential that sometimes becomes actualized in the moment as for the future. Students not only learn better in ecologically-differentiated spaces but also experience learning as a process that invites collaboration across difference. This combination of resources is both ready-made upon entry into a classroom and ready each time to be made, remade, or damaged. It is a holistic approach to study that acknowledges the “some” in any part or whole.
3. Anxious to read and write
The essence of our project is to fuel students’ eagerness to read and write by minimizing their anxiety about doing so. We aim to lessen student anxiety by strengthening their bodily, emotional, and cognitive relations to different texts and persons. In other words, we characterize reading and writing as relational practices that, like most valuable relationships, are challenging, unpredictable, and that change over time as each entity and its context changes. A precondition to developing this felt-sense of having a personal relation to a text is assigning texts from an array of traditions and genres so that no one textual or biological bodymind is portrayed as norm-setting or the best. Then we practice close reading as the means of establishing and assessing the connections made in one’s study and in the classroom. What does this word, sound, and/or image cluster evoke in me? In you? What logics of association—semantic, rhythmic, affective, group-specific—do they or you set in motion? Developing a personal connection to texts also involves learning to perceive writing, especially one’s own, as a life practice, a repeated and evolving coming-to-consciousness of what one thinks and feels, rather than as a product or means to an end, usually geared toward finishing something off or pleasing others. We acknowledge the difficulties of writing by helping students differentiate actual from felt impossibilities. No one is original; language structures us far more than we control or shape it. So then the point of my writing must be something less consensual, more specific to my way of rethinking-being. And reaching that point, as Emily’s essay on Writing describes, is discovering that felt impossibilities (I don’t know enough, don’t have sufficient blocks of time, don’t have a thing to say) dissolve quite easily if one experiments with one’s writing conditions.
Our version of “close reading” keeps literary study culturally-trauma informed. The kind of “close” we favor begins from its meaning as “approximate,” not “intimate.” After all, approximate is the best we can expect from any close reading, even by the most accomplished readers and writers, and it is especially appropriate for those for whom resumption of intimacy or trust in other persons feels hazardous. Both dimensions of approximate are useful for addressing differing needs in the classroom. Indicating that no cultural heritage is the full story is key to acquiring love or respect for literary works. Developing this awareness into a feeling for the not-all that is everything happens through a curated combination of syllabi, discussion protocols, writing assignments, and feedback—the latter so often a stumbling block to student risk-taking and willingness to not-know where one is going. Cultivating this feeling for the not-all is especially beneficial to those whose habitual orientation is mastery. By contrast, accentuating literature’s approximation to life is vital to those stymied by lived experiences of injustice. On one hand, literature’s difference and detachment from life offers a buffer from the pressures of reality and the too-close-pressings of physical sensation, a distancing that provides breathing room and can function as a holding space for overwhelming affect. On the other hand, through their representations of reality, literary texts are the closest approximation to lived experiences that, via fictional re-presentation, are partially metabolized and made potentially bearable for traumatized persons. I see myself not as myself there.
Appropriately approximately, close reading is also what we call student writing or at least require students to perform in their essays. The practice asks students to engage with something other than their own experiences that are necessarily first apprehended through their habits of perception that, in the process of close reading accounts of and by others, challenge habits of mentation and augment them. In other words, “my” reading is a combination of others’ perspectives and mine, also of an accomplished writer being read by another, sometimes fledgling, reader-writer. The more other the text the more challenging and, ideally, transformative are its effects upon “me”. As mentioned before, we should not underestimate how threatening this process can feel, especially to those struggling to regain or claim existence in the here and now. Thus, we highlight and seek to convey the two aspects of literary study most useful for reconnecting persons to life and their lives—literature’s companionability and its viscerality. We portray writing (one’s own or by others) as not only a means of communicating with oneself and/or others but also as manifesting a fundamental desire for connection—for both making connections and feeling connected to something. Our hope is that students come to experience texts and authors during class and long thereafter as “a friend to the mind,” as literally standing with them or standing in for them in whatever process of undoing, dis/associating, or remaking they are undergoing. Developing this relationship helps students feel less isolated and potentially less alienated in the world and their studies. At the same time, one value of “friend” is that the relation cannot be forced or made on its own; the same applies to texts, which students are “free” to take or leave, but hopefully now as the fruit of reflection, not automatism.
A second aim is to highlight the somatic nature of literary language, its embodied dynamics and bodily appeals. Rhythm, rhyme, assonance, figuration are the means through which literary language both heightens meaning and moves beyond and before it. More than any other form of writing, poetry appeals to the body, transporting bodyminds back to their preverbal stage when sensation was primary. In this regard, poetic language is a primal stimulation that may help those who have lost touch reconnect to their bodies and their capacity to feel. Moreover, because its visceral features address non-conscious patterning, literary language is more effective than other prose at communicating to deadened bodies or to bodies over-agitated by proximity to differently raced or gendered bodies [here-9]. Here too, we draw on trauma practitioners who prioritize addressing bodily over “higher order” networks when working with persons in hypo- or hyper-aroused states. But this priority is temporal, not conceptual, essential to readying mind/brains for what is to follow. Giving priority to the visceral also occurs at the other end of the temporal spectrum when it comes to one’s own writing. There is no surer measure of authentic writing—of writing that is neither fawning nor dissociated—than that bodily response to seeing an unthought-known now click into place: yes!, aha!, aahhh. Body as archive and barometer of truth.
Our bottom line as educators is to minimize hindrances to engaging the possibilities embedded in the range of materials assembled in any classroom. Many hindrances are the consequence of histories of trauma and marginalization that, while structurally determined and perpetuated, are now lodged in a dysregulated nervous system that affected students are left on their own to (not) bear. Talk about inequity. We find this situation intolerable and seek to address it through transforming standard pedagogical procedures. In our view, creating a culturally-trauma-informed classroom indicates that all of us are in it differently together. Coddling couldn’t be farther from this truth.
