Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

This edited volume brings feminist theory, critical pedagogy, and trauma theory in conversation with one another in order to analyze how gender-based violence is being discussed in educational settings. Lines of inquiry include how and why this topic is being carried out, suggestions for the future, as well as recognition and respect for the emotional toll embedded within these important conversations. In the introduction to the volume, the editors lay the foundation for understanding how the genres and topics communicate with one another to contextualize learning as intellectual, emotional, reciprocal, and ever-changing.

The central theme of this suite of poems concerns the ideas of trauma, survivorship, and the nature of memory. Specifically, how we choose to move forward from trauma and how that will look different on any given day. Healing is a completely singular experience, and it colors how a survivor interacts with the world, with potential loves, and with themselves. This is further complicated by the dynamics of family and how trauma can become twisted within those relationships – creating and breaking trust in the process.

Using Margaret Price's concept of kairotic space, this chapter asserts that the first-year writing classroom is a particularly fitting place to explore topics like consent and sexual assault. However, I caution the importance of using a trauma-informed approach to these topics. I provide an overview of the distinctions between related fields: trauma-informed pedagogy, trauma theory, and disability studies in order to argue for a pedagogical approach that takes each into account. First-year writing instructors, as well as other instructors in the university, should strive to live in the discomfort that often emerges from difficult material not only because it is necessary for building a better society but also because it is pedagogically sound. Furthermore, I argue that in order to have a truly trauma-informed approach, we need to change the very foundations of the university.

This chapter follows the proposal, planning, implementation, and subsequent reflection on an interdisciplinary, team-taught seminar on gender-based violence in a humanities college of a medium-sized private university. A retrospective analysis provides a lens through which to evaluate the tension between progressive thinking and progressive pedagogy. Expert knowledge and feminist texts do not make a pedagogy trauma-informed nor radical. In a reverse of hierarchy and patriarchy, Skibba posits that facilitating agency, sharing vulnerability, and prioritizing emotional intelligence are key in engaging with students such that their learning and growth move beyond the confines the classroom, university, and job preparation.

This chapter argues that Eminem and Rihanna's 2009 “Love the Way You Lie” is a cultural artifact representing contemporary attitudes about domestic violence; thus, this chapter models a trauma-informed methodology for guiding students through analysis and discussion of these narratively violent texts. In so doing, instructors can help students recognize the discursive strategies through which stories about gender violence are constructed and examine what is at stake in telling and circulating these stories. The chapter begins by defining trauma-informed pedagogy and critical pedagogy, arguing that when used together in the classroom, they can promote empathy, self-advocacy, resistance, and resilience. The chapter then contextualizes the song and music video within the context of the #MeToo movement, encouraging instructors to validate the perception of students who experience allyship with Rihanna as a survivor. The chapter moves on to provide instructors with a model for guiding students both through semiotic analysis and close reading of the song's and video's narrative and visual discourses. This model pays attention to the lyric's reliance on the point of view of the unreliable narrator and pronoun shifts to interpellate listeners into the abuser's world view while also truncating the victim's testimony; this model also examines the content of the lyrics to identify gender violence mythologies constructed within both the abuser's and victim's narratives. Equipped with these insights, instructors can help students deconstruct the visual discourses of the video, which repeat the gender violence mythologies of the song lyrics.

This chapter focuses on an early British female writer's course offered at Ripon College, a small liberal arts institution in Ripon, Wisconsin, USA. The course was first offered during the spring of 2017 as Donald J. Trump began his term as president of the United States. The students and instructor aimed to make their classroom a place for honest and open discussions about the difficult socio-political environment as they continually sought connections between their own social concerns and those of the early women writers they studied. The essay focuses specifically on the group's study of eighteenth-century British author Eliza Haywood, her novella Fantomina, and her periodical The Female Spectator. Through their study of these texts, the group came to understand how their own stories mattered. They saw that their creativity was a tool with which they could navigate and resist political change. This realization manifested itself in the creative capstone project for the course – a student-author periodical based on The Female Spectator. The essay explains the instructor's pedagogical approach toward this project and features samples of the students' writing from both the periodical and their end-of-term reflective writings.

Gabrielle Civil, a Black feminist performance artist and professor, discusses developing and teaching her “Pleasure Syllabus,” a three-lecture module for a mandatory first-year undergraduate writing course. Grounded in Black feminism, especially adrienne maree brown's call for “pleasure activism” and Audre Lorde's embrace of the erotic, this syllabus aimed to consider and activate embodied knowledge. Contemplating pleasure (“what does and does not feel good”) also became a way to confront rape culture. With this module, Civil hoped to intervene in the rampant sexual violence happening on college campuses. She acknowledges the challenges of negotiating trauma and gender-based violence in the classroom. (Teaching about desire, sexuality, violation, and consent on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic was especially tough.) She shares specific strategies that supported her pedagogy and offers some suggestions for curricular planning while emphasizing that no one-size-fits-all approach exists to trauma-informed teaching. Her curriculum included visual art, music, graphics, and movement exercises along with critical/creative writing. Civil includes her actual “Pleasure Syllabus” and her module's signature assignment.

Monika Fabijanska's groundbreaking exhibition The Un-Heroic Act showcased 20 representative artworks to survey the iconographic variety of representations of rape in contemporary women's art in the United States since the 1960s. Organized by the Andrew and Anya Shiva Gallery at John Jay College, City University of New York in 2018, the exhibition's wide range of pieces was brought together in dialogue for the first time to confront prevailing sexual violence misconceptions, rape myths, and to fill the void in women's art history.

In this chapter, Fabijanska is interviewed to glean insight into the curatorial strategies she deploys as challenges and sensitivities surrounding rape play out in the context of an art exhibition and catalog. Although The Un-Heroic Act has attracted substantial media coverage and scholarly attention, the role of curatorial intention and considerations in mediating difficult content to viewers in an educational setting, and shaping understanding of a complex issue, has not yet been explored in depth. Through this interview, these pertinent questions are unpacked.

Addressing some of the curatorial challenges she faced, Fabijanska brings to light the value that exhibition texts, audience engagement programs, contextualizing comments, and teaching hold. She shares her careful selection process, highlighting the necessity of taking a collaborative approach and working toward crafting “safe spaces” within which difficult questions can be broached.

Julia Rose Sutherland details a 2021 installation project featuring a series of sugar-casted ambered bodies. The collaborative exhibition reflects upon the relationship between BIPOC people, sex work, fetishization, and community care. By creating edible sugar casts from specifically BIPOC women and trans folk, the work references the exoticization of diverse people to fulfill colonial appetites, reducing human identity to an object of desire. This body of work addresses loss but at the same time showcases care, ancestry, and a taking back of both the body and sexual agency – taking back our bodies – no shame, just perfection in each pose.

Julia Rose Sutherland highlights the heart of her feminist practice as an indigenous artist: Feminism for everyone and feminism every day. From detailing her mixed media usage to collaborative project dynamics, Sutherland reemphasizes the urgent need to continue to highlight and address ongoing settler violence forced upon the land, women, and communities. By keeping histories and the work of knowledge keepers close to her individual work and pieces created with others, Sutherland demonstrates the complex and layered steps vital for navigating patriarchal institutions and questioning multiple systems of oppression through art in order for everyone to be “heard in their entirety.”

I consider the following question: given my commitment to creating an inclusive classroom environment where students of all backgrounds and skill levels can feel comfortable taking emotional and intellectual risks, how do I responsibly teach a course on American Life Writing in which students both read and write narratives of trauma, many of which stem from gender-based violence? With the rise of the #MeToo movement, especially, many survivors of this kind of violence feel compelled to share their stories as a way to heal themselves and to create communities of care and support. In some cases, this kind of disclosure can be restorative. But it is also important to recognize that sharing one's narrative of trauma does not always serve as a path to healing and wholeness. There is also power in choosing to tell part of one's story, sharing one's story only with a certain audience, or not disclosing one's story at all. The works that I assign in the seminar highlight these different paths to healing and model for students the ways in which a confessional model is not the only model for dealing with trauma. In this chapter, I first describe how feminist pedagogy shapes my teaching. Then I outline my approach to teaching life writing, focusing on how I teach texts that highlight trauma and how I teach the personal narrative assignment. Finally, I reflect on how these pedagogical practices might inform our larger conversations about gendered oppression, trauma, and healing.

Engaging with the interconnected dynamics of the classroom, this chapter draws from Audre Lorde's “Uses of Anger” to consider how empathy may be cultivated as a soft skill for stronger interpersonal relationships. Jocelyn E. Marshall highlights the need for mutual vulnerability between instructor and student, where vulnerability is understood to be a mode of resistance in regards to patriarchal and hegemonic higher education institutions and learning standards. By braiding queer feminisms with interdisciplinary approaches, the trauma-informed pedagogy upholds radical empathy as the linchpin to Lorde's advocating of articulating anger with precision, listening intensely, gaining new insight, and enacting change. In creating spaces to practice and further develop empathy, the trauma-informed pedagogical approach aims to empower students with agency and equip them with skills for self-accountability and holding others accountable.

Rather than seeing affect as an “aspect” of experience at odds with the supposedly “rational” or “academic” activities of the classroom, affect determines the experience of life itself – including how we teach and how we learn. Through ethnographic vignettes, this chapter explores the challenging and risky terrain of “trauma affect” within the context of an international women's university in Bangladesh. In response to this exploration, the chapter then discusses the importance of “teaching from the heart” in higher education (HE), or in other words, of using trauma-informed or affective pedagogies in responding to the pain of others.

The conclusion highlights the vulnerability necessary to engage in this analysis and reminds the reader that this work is being shared in an effort to open, share, and enrich. This volume has created spaces in which mutual aid and understanding within the concepts presented, the intellectuality suggested, and the actual teamwork needed to write it are prioritized. In so doing, it suggests that we must continue this work collectively, in concert with one another, and in resistance to the standards of oppression that have molded the institutions in which we exist.