Abstract
This chapter examines the effect of trauma on brain development and the subsequent impact in the academic setting. Childhood trauma is overwhelmingly common and has repeatedly been noted to have serious detrimental effects on children's developmental trajectories. Adolescents with trauma histories have a number of affected skills of which educators need to be especially aware. These skills include learning, memory, executive function, and emotion regulation. Fortunately, educators have a number of instructional practices at their disposal to help children with trauma histories, including classroom-level strategies like stimulus variation and structure and routine, coupled with high expectations. It is suggested that trauma-informed practices be implemented at the classroom and school-wide levels.
TopBackground
There are many ways in which children can experience trauma. There is a lack of consensus regarding what experiences constitute childhood trauma, as well as its very definition (Kalmakis & Chandler, 2014; Oh et al., 2018), but perhaps the most well-known conceptualization of trauma is known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti, head of Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, California, investigated why over half of all participants in a San Diego obesity clinic dropped out of the program despite all of them making great strides in their weight loss goals. Through a series of interviews with hundreds of patients, Felitti et al. (1998) found a shocking commonality among patients who had left the program. The majority of these patients had experienced sexual abuse as children. It appeared weight gain was a perceived solution to problems these individuals faced as children and, as one participant stated in an interview, was thought to be a way to prevent further abuse, as in “Overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be” (Felitti, 2019, p. 788). Indeed, interviews indicated patients’ earliest experiences continued to influence them even decades later. Years after this initial finding, this realization would compel Felitti and Dr. Robert Anda, a physician epidemiologist, to plan the ACEs study. Between 1995 and 1997, over 17,000 Kaiser Permanente patients were asked about their exposure to the following seven categories of early adversity:
- 1.
Witnessing violence towards the child’s mother;
- 2.
Household mental illness;
- 3.
Household substance abuse;
- 4.
Parental separation or divorce;
- 5.
Household incarceration;
- 6.
Abuse (emotional, physical, or sexual); and
- 7.
Neglect (emotional or physical)
Key Terms in this Chapter
Adverse Childhood Experiences: Traumatic events that occur prior to age 18, originally considered to include categories of trauma (neglect, abuse, household dysfunction), but due to recent research includes more experiences.
Toxic Stress: Harmful and/or chronic levels of stress that are experienced without a buffer.
Stimulus Variation: The instructional practice in which the teacher varies the instructional strategies utilized within a lesson to keep the learner’s attention.
Stress Response: The body’s response to stressful stimuli that prepares an individual to deal with the stressor by fighting it, fleeing from it, or playing dead (fight-flight-freeze).
Academic Feedback: The instructional practice of giving students specific feedback regarding their responses, assignments, etc., that is more than just whether something is correct or incorrect. This feedback is given to help students understand what they did right and how they can improve.
Resilience: The ability to rebound and adjust from a stressful or traumatic event.
Multi-Tiered System of Support: Focuses on the collection of data for both baseline and progression purposes, research-based instructional interventions taught with fidelity, and support over time.
Response to Instruction and Intervention: An academic component of multi-tiered system of support.
Executive Function: A series of skills necessary for individuals to hold multiple pieces of information in mind at once, to shift between tasks, and to inhibit less desirable behaviors in exchange for more desirable ones.