Disentangling the Reproductive From the Liberatory in Urban School Contexts: Trauma-Informed Practice for Racially Just Systemic Teaching

Abstract

The writing in this issue is inspired and springs from what hooks and Duncan-Andrade have called critical hope. A transgressive hope invoked by critical scholars and practitioners for centuries. Hope that strives, at every turn, to break systems of oppression that produce and reproduce trauma. Hope for the ways in which we can leverage trauma-informed practice (TIP) as a practice of liberation. In this special issue, authors illuminate how TIP can advance collective goals of urban education as liberation, speaking to multiple facets of urban education, as advanced by Milner and Lomotey, with particular attention to youth voice, multidisciplinary perspectives, policy, teaching and teacher education, and families and communities.

The writing in this issue is an act of critical hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009; Freire, 1994; hooks, 2004). Not the sort of “hokey hope” that reifies fallacious ideas of meritocracy, but instead the transgressive hope invoked by critical scholars and practitioners for centuries. Hope that strives, at every turn, to break systems of oppression that produce and reproduce trauma. Hope for the ways in which we can leverage trauma-informed practice (TIP) as a practice of liberation.

The study of trauma in urban educational settings is replete with what we have named occupational hazards. While designed with the intention of addressing the pain caused by trauma, TIP runs the risk of actually inflicting pain when enacted without attention to systemic inequality. We believe that this constitutes an occupational hazard for those professions which seek to support individuals, but may perpetuate harm unawares. We, as educators, are at risk. At risk for harming others. For school-based professionals, and for those in other service fields, developing an awareness of this potential for harm is critical for the responsible enactment of TIP. And, at the very same time, alongside those traumas and hurt there is also the promise of liberation and healing.

We write together about the ways in which TIP, when suffused with critical lenses, can gather together these two pieces of fabric. How can we leverage the great innovation of TIP so that it can be a practice of liberation? How can we refuse and disrupt the reproduction of the systems of inequality that have pervaded our schools?

As a chorus of scholars and practitioners, we join our voices with those of other Critical Race Theorists who together use the theory as a north star (Love, 2019) to light the way forward. We join our colleagues in the fundamental commitment to upending systems of oppression that themselves cause trauma. And, to reimagine and re-story TIP so that it can be truly a practice of liberation.

Yet, we know that each of us swims in the sea of Whiteness, and that, in every move toward change we bring our individual and collective histories, as we strive to invent ways of being that none of us have seen in the institution of U.S. public schools, ever. David K. Cohen wrote about this problem with deep empathy for the challenges of revolutionary endeavors:

…the teachers and students who try to carry out such change are historical beings. They cannot simply shed their old ideas and practices like a shabby coat, and slip on something new. Their inherited ideas and practices are what teachers and students know, even as they begin to know something else. Indeed, taken together those ideas and practices summarize them as practitioners. As they reach out to embrace or invent a new instruction, they reach with their old professional selves, including all the ideas and practices comprised therein. The past is their path to the future. Some sorts of mixed practice, and many confusions, therefore seem inevitable…. (Cohen, 1990, p. 323)

We know that we are reaching with our old selves, bringing with us our own lived experiences, trauma, and history. And yet, we use Critical Race Theory as a way to lead us forward, refusing the perversion of TIP and seeking, together, to put to page and to enact new models that approximate and come much closer to the promise of Systemically Trauma-Informed Practice (SysTIP).

A Timeless Tension

As the trauma of the racist and viral COVID-19 pandemic rages (Kendi, 2020), we are humbled by the striking number of youth who are experiencing immense pain; and we continue to see calls to prioritize TIP in educational settings. These calls form a cacophony, demanding more and more from teachers and students. It is no small irony that we are demanding that teachers work without adequate support (Marshall et al., 2022), to make up for dramatic pandemic-related learning lags (Modan, 2022), while tasked with building relationships and prioritizing youth mental health. And this, at a moment when politicians and communities seek to silence teachers, quite literally even censoring their use of words that seek to affirm gay and gender nonconforming youth (Appleton, 2023), banning books in the name of “anti-Critical Race Theory” (Walker, 2022), and permitting centuries-old oppression to continue to reach its tentacles into classrooms. This tension is nothing new. It is just one more moment when we demand that teachers, increasingly isolated and overworked, show up for others and inhabit a system in tatters. It is not hard to see how our educational system perpetuates trauma, not only on students, but also on teachers. An insightful social worker once referred to this kind of layering phenomenon as “trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma.” Neither children nor adults can thrive in such hostile environments. They can barely survive (Love, 2019).

And, there is so much brilliance happening amidst this present moment. Not instead of the trauma but alongside it. Not with the support of a system, but despite how our educational system continues to demand herculean work from educators and meritocratic resilience from children. We believe that humanity, ambition, care, and hurt can coexist. Collins and Bilge (2016), critical theorists who call for attention to intersectionality, point to the power of a both/and frame, writing that it “shifts from analyzing what distinguishes entities…to examining their interconnections. This shift in perspective opens up intellectual and political possibilities” (pp. 27–28). Two things can be true. TIP can perpetuate harm, and it can open up possibilities. Youth themselves can see these two things at the same time: the rigidity and harm that occurs in schools, as well as the hope and possibility for liberatory practice that exists at the same time (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Art illustrating the “old school” ways of schooling and the beauty of possibility by high school student Gabriella Alvarez.

We see these tensions and the possibilities to imagine TIP anew alongside those in classrooms and school communities around the country.

A Critical Issue

In this special issue, we join ongoing conversations with urban educational spaces to highlight liberatory, SysTIP, while unpacking and disrupting harmful approaches to TIP. Defined as a decentralized movement of educators seeking to address the many impacts of trauma within the education system (Duane & Venet, 2022), TIP has the potential for transformative action in schools (Blitz et al., 2020). Yet it is often enacted and constructed without explicit attention to systems of racism and social inequity (Khasnabis & Goldin, 2020; Venet, 2021).

Working across quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this issue brings together scholars on TIP, liberatory practice, and multicultural education to engage scholars and practitioners in the active and ambitious considerations of the weaponization—and the possibilities of disruption—of TIP. As such, in this special issue, we focus on the following overarching questions:

How and in what ways can trauma-informed practices be weaponized, leading to the production or reproduction of trauma for students?

How can educators, scholars, and policymakers center SysTIP?

In attending to these questions, this issue illuminates how TIP can help advance collective goals of urban education as liberation. The articles speak to multiple facets of urban education, as advanced by Milner and Lomotey (2021), with particular attention to youth voice, multidisciplinary perspectives, policy, teaching and teacher education, and families and communities.

First, two articles provide a theoretical and contextual setting for the necessary work to upend harmful practices. Howard et al.'s “Racially Just Trauma Informed Care for Black Students” (2023, this issue) illuminates the pervasive anti-Blackness that permeates the institution of schooling. Their piece offers critical principles for dismantling racism in schools by establishing third spaces, infusing racial equity training in teacher education, ensuring that professional development explicitly names anti-Blackness, making a sustained commitment to recruiting and retaining more Black staff, and more. Kim and Venet’s “Unsnarling PBIS and Trauma-Informed Education” (2023, this issue) does the arduous but necessary work of disentangling the relationship between Positive Behavioral Intervention Supports (PBIS) and TIP. Through application of Annamma's (2017) pedagogy of pathologization frame, the authors offer a close read of PBIS materials to demonstrate the incompatibility between PBIS and trauma-informed education, the possibility for harm, and suggestions for the work ahead.

Four empirical papers, then, fit together as puzzle pieces, creating an image of what SysTIP is and can be. Duane's “Showing the good and bad together: A Participatory Exploration of Strengths and School-Based Trauma with Black Elementary Youth” (2023, this issue) utilizes youth participatory methods to interrogate the role of schools in causing trauma for Black youth, while simultaneously amplifying the strengths, generational wealth, and assets of children and their families. Student-generated art and poetry supplement the narrative analysis to illustrate the complexities of schooling for Black elementary children. Farinde-Wu et al.'s “Teach Like a Black Woman: A Trauma-Informed Black Feminist Praxis” (2023, this issue) considers the racialized landscape of U.S. schools and invites “attention to the revolutionary consciousness” of Black educators. Their findings, framed as love lessons, offer insights for cultivating spaces that promote healing. Goldin et al.'s “Deciphering Truth: Teaching About The Systemic Nature Of Trauma” (2023, this issue) provides a case study design that explores the teaching and learning of SysTIP in a teacher education context. In analyzing both instruction and student data, the authors problematize the notion of defiance, push against singular views, and encourage the countercultural work of unpacking the nestedness of trauma in schools. Haynes et al.'s “Planting the Seeds of Culturally Responsive, Equity-Centered, and Trauma-Informed Attitudes Among Educators in Urban Schools” (2023, this issue) analyzes the influence of trauma-informed professional development, with a keen eye on racism and racial trauma. The authors find that educators benefited greatly from an explicit focus on the systems that perpetuate harm, and an opportunity to expand critical consciousness when enacting TIP. Finally, Casimir's “Pain, Peaceseeking, and Pedagogy: A Book Review of The Peace Chronicles by Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz” (2023, this issue) reviews the breathtaking “musicality” in the way that Sealey-Ruiz “lifts her pen and voice to resist & persist.” Her words are an invitation to create a roadmap toward liberation.

Together, the scholarship in this special issue contributes to definitional, theoretical, and practical gaps (Milner & Lomotey, 2021) of TIP in urban schools, by considering trauma as a systemic problem — moving away from focusing on individual deficits and pathologizing children (Petrone & Stanton, 2021), and moving toward understanding trauma as contextually situated and socioculturally constructed (Hulgin et al., 2020). Each article names the systemic nature of trauma, addresses the current ways TIP produces harm, and actively works toward reenvisioning TIP as a practice for freedom. It is from this space of critical hope that we welcome the reader to join us in dialogue and in action.