I’ve just finished listening to Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry’s ‘What happened to you’ Conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing.’ - which provides through a conversational style content on childhood trauma and real-world experiences of both Oprah and Bryan’s experiences ‘in the field’.
In an academic sense this looks and feels like the methodology I’ve written about previously; namely Metalogue; where two clever people converse about an important topic.
One of the things they talk about a lot is the idea of Rhythm, as a strategy for making people become calm. We intuitively rock a baby, moving our weight from foot to foot, we shush them rhythmically. As adults we tap our feet, and listen to music; sing and so many more things to bring us calm and balance.
One of the ‘strategies’ they mentioned as most powerful was simply walking, and walking in nature as especially rhythmic - bringing the many rhythms of nature to bear upon your rhythmic natural walking. Seems like a clear and easy strategy.
In classrooms the question of headphones and music is a vexed one - which students will find this rhythmic quality calming, those effected by trauma and those not so much? Well, and how do you make a consistent rule that doesn’t favour one group and disadvantage the rest? And how might you explain these differences to groups of students who are far from developed when it comes to empathy and understanding?
The thing that brought me to understand trauma better came far too late, as with most things in education - as a young teacher where breaking up fights within class was something that happened - it would have been good to know something about this!
But regardless, a student joined my class that showed signs of trauma, so I got reading! My first exposure to Trauma informed practice in any meaningful way was the Downey & Downey paper (2007) ‘Calmer Classrooms’ which is something of a core paper for teachers.
This taught me that in many respects students with trauma can have the opposite responses or reasons for carrying out behaviour to non -traumatised students. An agitated and jumpy student might not be being cheeky, but actually be quite stressed or heightened from interactions with others. Maybe they are uncomfortable and nervous rather than full of bravado. Reading between the lines and trying to understand the antecedents more than the behaviours was something I’d learnt about studying my Diploma of teaching ASD students - but here it was further confounding to unpick what was happening behind darting eyes.
One of the things that really stuck with me here, was the comment that Trauma Informed practice as undefined and not universally understood. And since I’ve noticed that everyone is talking about TiP (Trauma Informed Practice) it seems like this might be a space where there are questions yet to be answered.
Indeed, many schools all over Victoria are using the Berry Street model, it makes me wonder how utilitarian this approach is and what the numbers of trauma affected students is within these school populations and if a better approach might be something more broadly applicable?
This is because from this book, trauma is deeply Individual, and personal. One particularly compelling note is their Old spice example - A student was being ‘triggered’ (having a physiological response) by the use of Old spice as a deodorant, just as a person who inflicted trauma upon him had.
Now this isn’t a ‘logical’ response, one that can be reasoned with, indeed the student, not the teacher knew it was happening. They just noticed the response, acting out, running, hitting, etc.
It was only once Bryan noticed this that they could begin to unpick what was happening, something that without the rare example of expert oversight would remain uncommon within schools.
The obvious link here is the impact of Racism and generational trauma, something deeply significant within Australia, notably the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island community. Indeed this link was made within the book itself. So perhaps reframing trauma as a deeply connected part of being an Indigenous Australian, but I don’t often see people making that link.
The manner that Self Care and staff and teacher well-being was important was a big component that related to education, just like Dunning (2022) noted. And the way tha Self regulated moments are important to model support for students.
Lots to unpick for teachers awake to the needs of their students - a great read!
Having said all this, the common stat that is shared around is Thy 72% of students have experienced some form of trauma. In addition, the idea of the ‘curb cut effect’ (Johnson & Fox, 2003) has relevance here - in short: putting those little cutouts into curbs means that wheelchair users can access the footpath more easily - but so can people using prams and so much more. So the small changes has ‘ripple effects’ pun intended, or so the idea goes.
Where do you stand? Has a focus on trauma been a positive change, or does it mean ignoring other interventions also worthy of consideration?
References
Downey, L., & Downey, L. (2007). Calmer classrooms: A guide to working with traumatised children. Melbourne: Child Safety Commissioner.
Dunning, P. (2022) A Profession Under Pressure: How Squeezing Teachers Punishes Kids. In Empowering Teachers and Democratising Schooling: Perspectives from Australia (pp. 19-28). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
Johnson, D. M., & Fox, J. A. (2003). Creating curb cuts in the classroom: Adapting universal design principles to education. Curriculum transformation and disability: Implementing universal design in higher education, 7-21.
Winfrey, O., & Perry, B. (2021). What happened to you?: Conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing. Boxtree.
Running Word Count (the second 100,000): 23,905