Trauma-informed pedagogy

and trauma-informed everything else

At some point several years ago, a bit before the pandemic, I participated in a workshop about trauma-informed pedagogy. It was supremely useful and distilled a lot of lessons about teaching that I came upon the hard way. The upshot is that a variety of common practices in the classroom might be associated with prior trauma experienced by students. While we don’t need to navigate every moment in fear of triggering a PTSD response in our students, it helps people learn if we take the time to consider the reality that everybody has experienced prior trauma. We should go to reasonable lengths to avoid practices that might have caused trauma in the past, and work to find ways to academically challenge our students without relying on approaches that are less effective because of a potential legacy of trauma.

For example, it’s has not been uncommon for some K-12 teachers to expect students to stand at the board in the front of class to solve math problems, or to put up their homework solutions. For a student who hadn’t completed their homework, or in some other way is not prepared to answer the question at hand, this can cause shaming and anxiety. If you’re doing this with your own students, even if you’re working to be gentle and supportive, this still might bring back that trauma, which would be harmful to learning. Likewise, this can happen when students are called on to answer a question and are treated negatively when they provide a wrong answer. Or imagine students who have not completed exams in the past because time ran out, and you have just given students a big thick exam that will take a full period for the average student to complete.

Also keep in mind that almost every class will have multiple students who have experienced domestic violence or sexual assault, and when class material might intersect with these issues (in some areas of biology, this is likely), navigating these discussions with that potential history in mind is important for the safety of your students.

The point this trauma-informed pedagogy, like all of this classroom stuff, is to help people learn better. It’s our job to help students learn, and when we do things that interfere with learning, then that means we aren’t doing our jobs as well. The more that students feel safe in your course, the more they can express their curiosity and engage with course content to learn. I think we need to challenge our students and not coddle them, and we can’t intellectually challenge them if they have emotional responses to classroom content that prevent them from focusing on the science.

I think trauma-informed pedagogy is neato, so I’m glad that more people got the general message during the pandemic that it’s better to go about doing science using a trauma-informed everything approach. I think most folks who’ve gone through therapy have realized how much of what we do, how we see the world, how we make decisions and establish our priorities, are trauma responses. This is true for everybody.

When working with colleagues and collaborators, and training junior scientists, there are all kinds of routine traumas that we need to be aware of if we’re going to have a successful working relationship. The most common one is rejection, and being told that you’re not good enough. Considering that having proposals and manuscripts being rejected is an extremely common in our field, then it’s important to work with trainees to prepare them, help them process it when it happens, and affirm that this is the norm in our community, and isn’t a reflection of the worth of a person. If we are working with students who have experienced professors unfairly wield their authority (which is also far too common), then we need to be communicate clearly, develop expectations, and deliver on what is expected of us. If a student reacts badly to something in a way you didn’t expect, I’m willing to bet that this is rooted in prior trauma. We shouldn’t be grilling our students to reveal their souls to us so that we can be good mentors, but we also should be sensitive to the reality that everybody has different challenges.

What are some of the traumas that I carry with me? Well, if you’re a long-time reader, you would know about some of these. Being denied tenure and all of the hell associated with that was pretty bad. In high school, it wasn’t so nice being the poorest kid in a prep school full of rich kids. I suppose I have some baggage from my relationships with my parents, or the lack thereof. I still feel burned from the time when a friend used me and my students to help land their grant and then rudely dropped us in the first year of the project. Also I’ve done so many embarrassing, stupid, clueless, and uninformed things in the past, it’s hard to navigate a day without cringing at my prior self. And here’s the kicker: I think I’m doing pretty well and I think I’m not really weighed down by my traumas, and realize that a lot of people have experienced much more harm, loss, and hurt than myself. And nonetheless, I can see how they have affected how I do things in my work.

A lot of academics have been burned by collaborators or advisors who mess around with authorship, switch levels of promised support, underdeliver on mentorship, and so on. We all could tell so many stories we’ve heard from others, as well as experienced ourselves. Who we choose to trust, and how we choose to trust, is an ever-evolving target as we grow in experience and wisdom, and heal from prior harm. While I have the luxury of implementing a “no assholes” rule to my research teams, a lot of people who are junior to me don’t have that luxury if they are going to make avail of opportunities, and that involves risk. Getting good collaborative work done involves vulnerability, and that vulnerability might result in trauma. So we’ve got to train one another to know how to manage vulnerability. And we need to be cognizant of the reality that some folks we might want to work with or train might not be ready to be vulnerable with us because of prior experiences, and adjust our expectations and plans accordingly. We don’t talk much about vulnerability management but I think this is a key piece of success in academic science.

So in light of trauma in our line of business, instead of the golden rule to treat other people how you would want to be treated, I think we’re better off with the platinum rule, to treat other people how they would like to be treated.