Quick reading up on trauma-informed pedagogy
In a world where more and more people carry trauma, we need to assume that there are students in all our classes that do, too. How can we make sure to teach in ways that reduce harm, avoid re‑traumatization, and support all learners’ capacity to engage and learn?
McChesney (2026) summarizes trauma-informed practice as “realizing the prevalence and impacts of trauma, recognizing when trauma may be affecting students, responding by creating (in an anticipatory, universal way – rather than just making accommodations for individuals) systemic changes informed by an understanding of trauma, and resisting actions or policies that may re-traumatize students“. I find this quite helpful — when I have read about trauma-informed teaching before, the focus has mostly been on the third point, how to shape teaching in response to trauma. But of course before that can happen, we need to understand what is going on! So let’s go through those four steps.
Realizing the prevalence and impacts of trauma
In the current polycrisis with climate change, biodiversity loss, geopolitical conflict, social injustices, wars, etc, it is not hard to imagine that many people — including some in our own context — are affected by trauma. Trauma changes how the brain processes information, interprets cause-and-effect relationships, relates to other people. Often, trauma leads to flight-fight-freeze type responses rather than rational ones.
I really enjoyed listening to an episode of Faculty Feed on trauma-informed teaching, where they discuss how the same experience can be traumatic for one person but not another, and how there are also education-specific traumas like for example math trauma, where the experience of embarrassment or failure can lead to long-term disengagement with a subject. And trauma doesn’t need to stay contained to one context, either, a similar emotion in a different context can still trigger a trauma response. Past trauma thus shapes the presence, and people might react to even non-traumatic situations in ways that might not serve them best.
Trauma also does not only affect the individual, but since that individual is part of communities, for example in class, reactions can affect the whole community. So it is something we need to be sensitive to, not just for the sake of the individual(s), but for everybody.
Recognizing when trauma may be affecting students
First: We should never require students to disclose trauma to us — it might be re-traumatising for them, and also it is none of our business.
In an All In The Mind episode, they discuss “concept creep” — while trauma was initially about soldiers returning from combat or people living through terrorist attacks, the way people use the concept has broadened over time. People now have a lower threshold for what counts as harm (which, interestingly can help people on the “lower end” of trauma since the harm is now taken more seriously, but at the same time it can make people more fragile if difficult but maybe not super harmful experiences are labeled as traumatic. And it can trivialize the experiences that severely affected people have!).
In the end, I don’t think we need to diagnose when someone is affected by trauma, as they say in the Faculty Feed episode on trauma-informed teaching: It’s just good practice to teach in trauma-informed ways all the time. Even if it is not trauma that makes people unable to focus, but “just a normal bad day”, giving them a minute to breathe and drink some water will help them, and ultimately everybody, too!
Responding by creating systemic changes informed by an understanding of trauma
In my favorite book, Venet (2024) suggests focusing on
- Predictability (having routines so that everybody knows what to expect when, and make sure to build space into those routines so that, for example, the trust and habit to talk about happy and difficult experiences is there if/when that is needed)
- Flexibility (so that existing meeting formats can expand to contain whatever comes up, or additional meetings of a known format can be added when needed because everybody already knows how they work)
- Connection (lots of ways to build that in class, for example through regular check-ins)
- Empowerment (through conversations and shared learning)
Another point that comes up in the brilliant tea-for-teaching podcast episode with Karen Costa is the need for clear communication.
In their article “Creating trauma-informed higher education classrooms“, Wells (2023) investigates college students’ perceptions on how to create trauma-informed learning environments. The top 5 strategies according to those students are
- “not tokenizing a student based on identity“, i.e. not asking someone to speak as representative for everybody who shares an identity facet with them
- “showing students compassion and empathy in the classroom“, which would be showing care and concern in our study, where we find that that is the most important trust-building move according to students
- “focusing on building a healthy classroom environment” (ok, that is very vague… but they might mean for example not tolerating microaggressions, I guess?)
- “knowing where to go if there is an issue with an instructor“
- “giving students individualized, supportive feedback“, which both in this and in our study is considered an important trust building move
Wells (2023) write that it is not clear that all strategies need to be implemented at the same time, and they recommend that teachers ask students directly how to best support them — via an anonymous survey, an open discussion, or even one-on-one.
Resisting actions or policies that may re-traumatize students
I find this point really important but at the same I am not sure what this looks like in teaching practice. One example I can think of in a different context is the discussion around fireworks for new year’s in Germany, which can be re-traumatizing for refugees from war zones, which is one of the many reasons for why fireworks should be made illegal. Policies that I think are harmful, and probably especially if there are already negative experience with it, are around policing students to prevent cheating — putting them under surveillance in exam situations even in their own homes, doing plagiarism- and AI-(which do not work!!)-checking, just making them feel that they are under suspicion all the time, or even falsely accusing them.
In the end, I don’t think that trauma-informed teaching is really any different from generally good, caring teaching. It is a helpful lens to raise the importance of care in the classroom, using the specific case to hopefully change things for all students. And it is helpful to look at what good practice means in many contexts, even if the advice is largely overlapping, as there might still always be something new, and at least it might remind us of something that we would want to consider more.
P.S.: The McChesney (2026) article I refer to above is actually about trauma-informed research, not teaching, and definitely worth a read!
McChesney, K. (2026). Trauma-informed approaches for research in higher education: a guiding framework. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 49(2), 149-166.
Wells, T. (2023). Creating trauma-informed higher education classrooms. Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education, 6(1).
Windy morning dip!
Love the play of light in the water!
And a sunny dip is always a good dip!
Who am I kidding, every dip is a good dip!
But it was windy! Langmuir circulation in action!
And things are happening in the trees!
Share this post via
