Abstract
Children can experience trauma in multiple ways and spaces which can have profound effects on their development and impact student engagement, approaches to learning, and student outcomes. In this chapter, the authors break down various types of trauma, adversity, and stress that can contribute to delays in children's development. Schools can impact children's pre-existing trauma (or cause new trauma), even unintentionally, and children's classroom behaviors can signal that trauma may be affecting them. Teachers can use instructional strategies that both buffer students to potentially mitigate the harmful effects of systemic and compounded trauma, and also meet academic learning goals. The authors provide some suggestions on how to use literacy learning strategies in elementary school to support learners, especially those who may be historically marginalized due to systemic conditions like racism. They conclude by providing their thoughts on how future research can continue to identify evidence-based ways to support vulnerable learners.
TopDefining Stress And Trauma
Let’s begin by understanding what trauma is. Simply experiencing emotionally unpleasant events is not in itself traumatic, despite how the term is frequently used colloquially. Trauma is a term even psychologists tend to define differently, and a commonly accepted understanding remains elusive – as experts are themselves subjectively applying meaning – but it is generally accepted as “the experience of certain events and by universal or specific cognitive or emotional reactions to such events” (Dalenberg et al., 2017, p. 27). These events can include high magnitude stressors (HMSs; referring to the nature of the event), acute stress (a HMS that has an immediate significant impact), and traumatic stressors (those HMS events that cause long-term impact emotionally or cognitively). HMS events can be happenings like assault, disasters, combat, homicide of close friends or family members, etc. (van der Kolk et al., 2005). Dalenberg and her colleagues (2017) suggest we could develop a more nuanced understanding of trauma and its effects on individuals by distinguishing between the types of events “commonly associated” with HMSs that generate acute stress and the types “that have been followed by a constellation of trauma-related symptoms” or changes in behavior and perspective (p. 27). Each of these varying viewpoints on the causes and impacts of trauma and attempts to define trauma, however, are focused on individual experience, usually resulting from a singular event, but trauma can also affect groups of people.
There is a growing body of scholars and scientists studying more expansive understandings of trauma. For example, emerging research is beginning to suggest that individual trauma may be heritable. Inherited trauma, or genetic trauma, refers to how trauma can be transmitted to offspring, either through behaviors or epigenetic mechanisms, the nongenetic influences on gene expression that affect how our bodies interpret the genetic code in our DNA (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018). For example, let us imagine someone who has experienced intimate partner domestic violence. They may unconsciously tense, flinch, or otherwise express fear bodily around people of the abuser’s same gender and physical appearance. Their children may perceive the parent’s behaviors, even subconsciously, and internalize a similar fear thus “inheriting” the fear behaviorally. Alternatively, assuming the victim of domestic violence was a pregnant female, the physiological stress response she may experience during instances of domestic violence can trigger the release of stress hormones that affect not only her, but also her fetus. If the fetus is also female, theoretically the mother’s stress hormone can also affect the eggs already in the fetus’ body, potentially impacting how the genetic code of the DNA is interpreted by three generations. These examples illustrate two different ways trauma may be generational and affect families.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Determinants: Environmental and social conditions in a person’s living, learning, or working environment that affect health and wellness outcomes, either positively or negatively.
Trauma: An emotional, cognitive, physiological, and/or behavioral response to a deeply distressing or disturbing event.
Instructional Strategies: Techniques teachers use to help students become more strategic, self-regulated learners where they can effectively select strategies to accomplish a particular learning goal or task.
Epigenetics: The study of how traumatic events and the subsequently triggered behaviors in response to trauma can affect how bodies interpret genetic coding in DNA.
Social Justice (in Education): The equitable distribution of resources, interventions, and teaching/learning environments such that all children feel welcomed, safe, supported, and valued academically, socially, behaviorally, and physically. It also refers to instructional practices that specifically engage in critical and transformative work to disrupt social injustice.
School-to-Prison Nexus: The statistical tendency that children from “disadvantaged” backgrounds are more likely to become incarcerated as a result of increasingly harsh, punitive school and legal policies that disproportionately impact historically marginalized students.
Adverse Childhood Experiences: Events children experience that can act as high magnitude stressors, are cumulatively impactful, and have lifelong health and wellness outcome implications.
Toxic Stress: The prolonged activation of the body’s physiological stress response system, often stemming from chronic stress and the lack of a supportive caregiver buffering these experiences, that prohibits the body from recovering fully, which can cause long-term trauma responses.
Elementary Education: In the US, compulsory education begins at the elementary school level (although kindergarten is not required in many states), and elementary-aged students typically range from 4-11 years old depending on whether the school includes pre-kindergarten and/or 6 th grade.
Children’s Literature: For the purpose of this chapter, this is literature that includes picture books and some chapter books that can be effectively and appropriately used with elementary school-aged children to read for pleasure, to accomplish a specific learning goal, and/or to facilitate discourse on a particular subject.
Systemic Trauma: Trauma resulting from the systemic and maintained practices and procedures that cause direct or indirect harm to communities or specific groups of people in physical, psychological, emotional, economical, educational, and other ways.
Historically Marginalized Students: Students, who by virtue of their race/ethnicity, gender, geographical location, language, learning status, sexual orientation, religion, physical/cognitive abilities, etc. have been pushed to the margins of the educational system and are therefore underserved or disadvantaged.
Inherited Trauma: Also frequently referred to as transgenerational trauma or genetic trauma , this is a growing theory that trauma can impact our behaviors and reactions and/or our DNA through epigenetics such that future generations are affected behaviorally, cognitively, or emotionally.
Trauma-Informed Education: An approach to education that attempts to understand, redress, and disrupt the academic, social, emotional, cognitive, and physical impacts of trauma and adversity on students.