Publication Date

July 30, 2024

Perspectives Section

Perspectives Daily, Perspectives Summer Columns

AHA Topic

Teaching & Learning

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in a two-part column. The second column is available here.

Sitting on the floor, the students gazed up at the 230-year-old brick wall and thick wood beams. After a class discussion on slavery and freedom, we had taken a walking tour of campus, visiting sites associated with Georgetown University’s slaveholding past. Our final stop was Anne Marie Becraft Hall, named after a free Black woman who started the first school for Black girls in the Georgetown community in 1827 and home to the university’s meditation center. Gathered in this building that had witnessed so much of the history we had just discussed, my students and I spent a few minutes in quiet contemplation before I asked them to write a short, ungraded reflection to process what we had just discussed.

Students paused outside Anne Marie Becraft Hall to write an ungraded reflection about what they had just learned during a walking tour about slavery on campus. Erica Lally

This exercise emerged from a conference I attended a few weeks earlier on trauma-informed teaching. It was my first exposure to these concepts, and as a graduate student about to teach my first undergraduate course, I wanted to incorporate them into my pedagogy immediately. I scrambled to adjust the syllabus for my summer course on the history of citizenship in the United States to include these concepts, which helped me to be more attuned to the experiences students might be bringing into the classroom, to prioritize communication, predictability, and classroom community, and to build in more space for reflection on course content. The result was an enthusiastic and engaged class in which students were highly invested in their learning experience. A trauma-informed approach does not avoid hard topics. Rather, it creates space and structure precisely so that students can engage with difficult content in a supportive, yet intellectually rigorous way.

Learning more about trauma and students’ exposure to it convinced me of the importance of applying a trauma-informed approach in the classroom. Trauma, to summarize the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s definition, is “an event or circumstance” that causes harm and “has lasting adverse effects” on a person’s health or well-being. One 2011 study found that 66 percent of first-year college students arrived at college having already experienced a traumatic life event. The percentage was even higher for women, people of color, and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Another study found that half of college students experienced a potentially traumatic event within their first year of arriving at college.

This exposure can disrupt an individual’s ability to learn. Trauma, as neuroscientist Dr. Mays Imad has explained, can put students into a perpetual fight-or-flight mode, from which it can be difficult to absorb new information and to distinguish real threats from new ideas that might simply challenge their worldview. Clearly, this state is not optimal for learning.

Trauma-informed pedagogy recognizes that students are entering the classroom with such experiences. The overarching goal of trauma-informed pedagogy is to create a supportive classroom environment, one in which students can be fully themselves and in which they can make mistakes. This approach optimizes learning for everyone, regardless of background or experience, and offers a framework for course design, regardless of content.

Practically speaking, there were three key ways I incorporated trauma-informed practices in my class: by establishing clear classroom rhythms, building a classroom community in which everyone felt comfortable participating, and offering space for reflection. As a five-week summer course, we met daily for 100 minutes, so I was able to mix lecture, discussion, and group work for the seven students.

Because trauma can undermine an individual’s sense of autonomy, giving students a sense of control is a core part of a trauma-informed approach. Communication, transparency, and predictability are key. To establish classroom rhythms, I started each class with music that connected to the day’s topic, outlined the agenda for the day, and instituted a regular break halfway through the 100-minute class. These rhythms created natural stopping points for student questions and discussions about how each day’s sources related to the broader course objectives. This two-way communication enabled students to be active participants in their learning, rather than just passive consumers of content.

I opened each discussion with an informal icebreaker question that got students comfortable with talking. While the icebreakers took away a few minutes from course content, I found that these exercises paid dividends in terms of overall course engagement. As the students got to know each other on a more personal level, they were more willing to speak up throughout the class, respectfully challenge one another’s ideas, make mistakes, and ask questions. Having a daily, low-stakes opportunity for participation helped build a sense of community that facilitated everyone’s learning.

Creating space for reflection, especially when course material dealt with potentially triggering topics, was what led to the class sitting in the meditation center after our campus tour. With the tour, I wanted students to grasp that the history of slavery continued to shape the environment they encountered each day. However, I did not want students to leave the tour no longer feeling comfortable on campus. Ending the tour in quiet reflection, contemplating not only the weight of this history but also counterpoints to it, like the center’s namesake, was one way to balance hard history with hope. Importantly, it also gave the students time to process without the pressure of having to perform for a grade.

While exercises like this went well, there are things I will change when I teach the course again next spring. I plan to build in at least two “freebies,” which allow students to take a one-day extension or rewrite a paper without asking prior permission. A colleague recommended this approach, noting that the policy’s mere existence can alleviate stress, even if students never use a freebie.

I also plan to offer more informal opportunities for written and oral reflection on course content through end-of-class prompts and blog posts. Last summer, I was so focused on conveying as much content as possible, that the reflection time I did provide often felt rushed. Going forward, I plan to be more purposeful about building reflection time into the class rhythms.

A trauma-informed approach to course design does not require perfection from us as educators. It is an iterative process with the goal of meeting students where they are and engaging with them as individuals. Success requires taking care of our own well-being too. In the next column, I will consider how a trauma-informed approach in graduate research seminars can help build a generation of resilient educators and researchers.

The author thanks Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship for its conferences and sessions on trauma-informed pedagogy.

Erica Lally is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University, where her research focuses on citizenship, surveillance, and state development in the early 20th-century United States.

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