Building a Trauma-Responsive Educational Practice

Lessons from a Corrections Classroom

Em Daniels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367499624
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000482812
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

This timely manual presents a new perspective on teaching and learning focused on countering the impacts of trauma on adults' ability to learn. Within its detailed and useful approaches, Daniels provides a road map for building a trauma-responsive teaching practice grounded in the principles of Trauma-Informed Care, and emphasizing the need for educators to develop a rigorous practice of self-care.

Prison classrooms, in particular, demonstrate the intersectional and overlapping nature of systemic, historical, and individual traumatic experience. People who rediscover themselves as learners while in corrections classrooms have a unique and powerful perspective to bring to the work of ending mass incarceration, and the role of education and learning in that ending.

The concepts and framework presented in the text aim to expand how we define "working with trauma." Through this redefinition, we better align teaching and learning as counters to the impacts of trauma. As this alignment transforms educational philosophy and practice, we have an opportunity to repurpose the nature of education itself, and shift toward learning how to learn.

Although this book contains content specific to corrections educators, or those aspiring to teach in prisons, its concepts and activities are applicable to any environment or situation in which adults need to learn. Adult educators, front-line personnel in any public service role, librarians, legal professionals, judges, lawyers—all can benefit from the expertise shared in this book.

Chapter 1 Learning Our Context

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048312-1

As humans who are also educators, it is our responsibility to understand our context; how and where we are placed in our systems, groups, constellations, and relationships. These elements of who we are, and how we exist in the world also define who we are and what we bring into classrooms and learning spaces. This is not a new statement, but the call to understand ourselves more deeply has taken on a renewed urgency, driven in part by our collapsing climate, in part by increasing demands for systemic transformation and change around the world.

For those who work in institutions of higher education, the urgency is even stronger. Higher ed has long considered itself home to thought leaders and innovators possessing knowledge vital to our continued well-being. Higher ed has also been a bastion of Euro-White privilege, systemically denying access to BIPOC, disabled people, refugees, immigrants, and people living in poverty. This is changing, however, as the rise in communications and mobile technology make knowledge sharing less dependent on institutions of higher learning.

Colleges, designed to gatekeep and control access to information and upward mobility, find themselves floundering, unable to adapt swiftly enough to rapid waves of change. People who have been traditionally denied access and sent quietly on their way no longer are quiet, as long-silenced voices begin to loudly demand change. Lifelong academics, only now being required to examine their positionality, find themselves on uncertain footing, as cultural and academic norms shift and morph. The traditional roles of power and privilege no longer provide protection against systemic or individual examination.

We are complex beings, capable of holding complicated and opposing ideas. To believe that we are defined by only one aspect of ourselves is to deny our full capacity to learn, integrate, and grow. There are people who are grievously harmed by dominant culture and systems, and weaponizing context is a distraction, a way to avoid dealing with shame, guilt, and anger at either our own privilege or our own ignorance. It is both possible and imperative that we understand our places and roles in dominant systems in an effort to reduce harm to ourselves and others.

We all hold space in systems of oppression, and few of us exist in singular roles. Most of us have multiple, varied identities, and we may prioritize this or that one, depending on the circumstances of the moment. When I write about knowing our context, it is a call to see our gestalt; to lift ourselves from a background we may not recognize as our habitat.

Basic Concepts

There are certain concepts foundational to understanding the connections between trauma, mass incarceration, and corrections that are heavily referenced, but not deeply explored in this text. My recommendation is that you research these topics yourself, or use this book in conjunction with learning about these other concepts. It is a lot of learning; much of it is going to take time to process and integrate into your practice. Give yourself plenty of space to reflect, talk with other people, and develop your thinking.

Dignity and Compassion

Treating people with dignity and compassion is non-negotiable in any trauma-responsive practice.

One of the hardest things to learn when working with people carrying high loads of trauma is what you can and cannot ask, and when it is appropriate to ask what. Even mental health professionals, if they are acting in a teaching capacity, need to consider their questions with great care. If you are a mental health practitioner, be cautious about where you engage in therapeutic work—public environments are not safe spaces for many people. Do not allow your curiosity to intrude upon another person's well-being.

A best practice for prioritizing relationships is to treat people as their innate humanity and dignity require—as worthwhile, deserving, fully complete beings who need offer no justification for who they are or their life circumstances.

Intersectionality

Trauma in education and prisons is racialized and intersectional. Hill Collins has written extensively about intersecting oppressions (Hill Collins, 2019), and Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) coined the term “intersectionality” to explain how interlocking systems of oppression specifically harm Black women. Since its origination, the term has entered the mainstream conversation and Crenshaw, in a 2017 interview, noted that “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects” (Columbia Law School).

Mass Incarceration

Mass incarceration disproportionately impacts BIPOC and disabled people and communities. It is the modern-day extension of Jim Crow laws and slave labor, further exacerbated by racist drug policies and militarized police forces across the United States. The New Jim Crow (Alexander, 2012) is one of the current definitive texts on the history and impacts of this extension of slavery and Jim Crow.

Organized Education

Organized education and learning are different, although there are overlaps. The phrase “organized education” includes all of our education-focused institutions, from kindergarten through post-doc, public and private schools and universities—any organization or institution whose primary purpose is to deliver education. These institutions have become cultural and economic gatekeepers, in part by diverting BIPOC and disabled children off the main pathways that provide access to economic mobility and, in too many cases, into the criminal legal system.

Educational systems and processes are designed from an exclusionary perspective, which means that for many, success is the exception, not the rule. Although it may try, organized education is not always a process for growth, development, and expansion, but rather a tool to bind the mind and spirit of those who do not or cannot fit into its rigid confines. For those who do not fit its narrow measure, success in such an environment requires extraordinary levels of compromise and compartmentalization, as well as sacrifice of the self. Even less often does this success result in true inclusion. In building such a rigid and exclusionary system, we have given ourselves no room for growth and expansion, no room to seek and integrate a balanced approach.

Despite this, I want to be clear that structured education is important. It is one way to transmit a shared understanding of the world and teach us how to think about, compare, and learn from common experiences. Like other major innovations, such as agriculture and science, organizing what we have learned and passing that learning on to our peers and next generations has been an enormous benefit for the human species. Without a transformative re-alignment, organized education will continue to perpetuate harm, falling far short of its potential as a life-affirming and creative endeavor.

School-to-Prison Pipeline

The school-to-prison pipeline starts impacting BIPOC and disabled children almost as soon as they start interacting with society. Foster care is a parallel pipeline, and organized education is a connector across the two. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (2018) and the Marshall Project (2021) have both produced extensive, well-researched materials and recommendations.

Systemic Racism

Systemic racism exists and organized education is one of the structures that both protects and extends its survival. The Aspen Institute defines systemic racism as “A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity” (2016). Dr. john a. powell prefers the term “structural racialization,” noting that “[it] is a set of processes that may generate disparities or depress life outcomes without any racist actors. It is a web without a spider” (powell, 2013).

Terms and Phrases

This section defines or explains why I’ve chosen to use certain terms and phrases. Some are already in use; some are new or being used in a new context. With the rapid pace of linguistic shifts, it is likely these terms will need updating or additional conversation in the near future.

BIPOC

As defined by the BIPOC Project, the term BIPOC is used to “… to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context” (2021). BIPOC is a term with its own complications, according to Jonathan Rosa and deandre miles-hercules, in a 2011 public discussion of the term “women of color” led by Loretta Ross. As acknowledged by these scholars, there is no “one size fits all” language or term when it comes to discussing race and ethnicity (Grady, 2020).

Ross notes, when reviewing the history of the term “women of color,” that “[the term] has been flattened and lost its political meaning. Unfortunately, so many times people of color hear the term ‘people of color’ from other white people that they think white people created it,” she said, “instead of understanding that we self-made it ourselves. This is a term that has a lot of power for us. But we’ve done a poor-ass job of communicating that history so that people understand that power.”

miles-hercules notes that this is an ongoing struggle with language around race, especially as more and more white people enter the conversation. People are concerned about using correct language and not offending, but when any one particular term is adopted and used indiscriminately, it becomes problematic, and can, as Ross stated, begin to lose social meaning and power. Dichotomous Euro-white thinking also plays a role, as saying “Black is beautiful” (for example) is quickly interpreted as “white is ugly.” Defusing this dynamic requires exhaustive effort, and results in less impactful language.

I have chosen BIPOC as it seems to be the most inclusive term, keeping the prior considerations in mind.

Cultural Rebalancing

This is not a new term, although it has been used mostly in contexts of economics and diplomacy. I use it in this work as a call to integrate and balance our approach to learning and education. I could have written under the blanket phrase “cultural competence,” but “rebalance” is a more active term, and suggests that we act on the knowledge we gain.

It is not enough to know that other cultures exist.

Knowledge is a first step but without considered action, becomes a largely useless, theoretical endeavor. Putting knowledge into practice is not easy, especially knowledge that is outside of our familiar spaces. People who have only ever experienced (both in their childhood and adult education) one way of knowing may find changing their practice extremely uncomfortable, as they are asked to imagine not only experiences different than theirs, but worlds with different values, ways of relating, knowing, and understanding information.

It is not possible for members of the dominant culture to facilitate and lead while they are working to adjust and rebalance themselves. The work of cultural rebalancing must be led and facilitated by members of the de-prioritized culture. When done in this manner, the process itself becomes part of the rebalancing, and is both a means and an end. This presents problems, as BIPOC leaders are already exhausted and tapped out from surviving in racist systems, let alone teaching people how to deconstruct and transform those systems.

One solution to this seeming paradox is to pay BIPOC leaders well, provide hefty resources, and enforce accountability measures for anyone involved in this transformation. Educators should be on the leading edge of cultural rebalancing by looking to BIPOC to lead our efforts, integrating new knowledge into teaching practice, and bringing different ways of knowing and being into learning spaces.

Carceral Spaces

Most of my direct experience in corrections education has...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Learning Our Context
• 2 Learning Is the Human Condition
• 3 Learning and Trauma
• A Note on Chapter 4
• 4 Learning and Teaching in Harshly Controlled Environments
• 5 Learning to Expand
• 6 Learning, Growth, and Evolution
• 7 Learning Outward
• Index