Restoring Students' Innate Power

Trauma-Responsive Strategies for Teaching Multilingual Newcomers

Louise El Yaafouri

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781416630753
• eBook ISBN: 9781416630777
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book explores the effects of trauma on newcomer students and presents stress-mitigating strategies that empower these multilingual students as they transition to a new environment.

Diverse insights and experiences bring high-powered learning spaces to life. However, the cultural backgrounds of newcomer students and their families can be very different from the dominant norms of the new community, resulting in misalignments that constitute a persistent challenge. In addition, the process of arriving can exacerbate stress. Entering a new school or classroom means situating oneself within a new context of language, culture, community, and shifting personal identities.

This transition shock contributes to a sense of diminished power.

In serving these students, we can't afford to leave transition shock out of our conversations about trauma. We must not only stitch together pieces of culturally responsive practice and trauma-informed care but also become practitioners of stress-mitigating strategies that empower newcomer students. We must focus instruction on our students' unique identities. We must restore their power.

In Restoring Students' Innate Power, newcomer educator and cultural competency expert Louise El Yaafouri presents

* An understanding of transition shock and how stress and trauma affect recent arrivers.
* The four pillars of transition shock and how they affect learning.
* How students see themselves and how the cultural aspects of their identities inform teachers' work in mitigating transition shock.
* How social-emotional learning links to trauma-informed practice.

This book isn't exclusively about trauma; it's about restoring power. The distinction is critical. Focusing on the trauma or traumatic event roots us in the past. Restoration of power moves us forward.

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Chapter 1

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Understanding Transition Shock

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All children experience stress. In fact, stress is natural and very often can be healthy. It can help us avoid danger, tackle an impending deadline, or work up the courage to audition for the middle school musical.

However, some children experience unusually high levels of tension and anxiety. This may originate from an isolated moment of intense impact or from a prolonged period of heightened unrest. In some cases, stress can become debilitating. This is when we start to see signs of trauma, which occurs when the experience of distress is significant enough to overwhelm an individual's resources to make sense of or manage it or to restore normative status (Anderson et al., 2004; Kreuzer, 2016).

Events or circumstances that may be perceived as traumatic affect different people in different ways. Not everyone who endures adverse life experiences will exhibit symptoms of trauma-affectedness. Nevertheless, for others, exposure to extreme or persistent adversity can dismantle their entire sense of belonging, safety, and self-control.

Shifting Our Language: Trauma to Transition Shock

Throughout this book, we'll lean into the idea of transition shock. I prefer this term over the more commonly used trauma, especially when we consider our work with recently arrived emergent multilinguals (RAEMs). I'd like to invite you to make the same shift. As we know, words have meaning, and the language we use is important. The distinction between trauma and transition shock is noteworthy.

We can think of transition shock as a broader, more encompassing experience. Transition shock captures a spectrum of factors that activate the fight-flight-freeze-submit response system. Various mechanisms "live" under this canopy, each with the capacity to overwhelm an individual's self-regulatory processes. They include persistent stress, transition-related anxiety, trauma, traumatic stress, high incidence of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), vulnerability, and culture shock.

As educators of RAEMs, we can't afford to leave transition and culture shock out of our conversations about trauma. After all, how these aspects are experienced and managed can influence integration and prosocial outcomes for RAEMs. Moving away from a reliance on the term trauma to a more inclusive vocabulary invites recognition of the multitude of experiences that lead to students' possible power interruptions.

But what exactly is culture shock? In The Newcomer Student: An Educator's Guide to Aid Transition (Kreuzer, 2016), I explain it this way:

Culture shock is elicited via exposure to social, physical, or cultural elements that are perceived by an individual to be unfamiliar, unsafe, or unpredictable. Shock may be characterized as individualized manifestations of the human experience at a particular time, under a given set of circumstances. (p. 29)

Simply, culture shock is the process of adjusting from one set of social norms to another. It can sometimes resemble grief to the extent that it generally follows a predictable cycle of transitional stages on the way to acceptance and integration. I refer to these stages—honeymoon, negotiation, adjustment, mastery—as the four corners of culture shock.

The honeymoon period is a romanticized one, full of awe and discovery. Stress factors may be delayed by fascination and a sense of wonder. The negotiation phase, which often begins approximately three months after resettlement (though every student's trajectory varies), signals reality setting in and is marked by frustration, fear, homesickness, detachment, and physical discomfort. The adjustment period (typically encountered 6–12 months post-transition) is one of acceptance and sense-making. Anxiety is reduced as maneuverability and self-efficacy are increased. Finally, the mastery (or bicultural) stage is generally achieved from one to five years post-resettlement and indicates an ability to navigate freely and successfully in the new culture.

A large number of RAEMs in U.S. schools present as or identify with the adjustment domain. This is the space where integration takes root, and it can be separated into three subcategories: isolation, adoption, and integration. If we were to place these on a spectrum, isolation and adoption would be on the two ends; they have opposite values. Of course, neither end of the spectrum is particularly healthy, although isolation tends to be more destructive. What we want RAEMs to achieve is a balance—a "sweet spot" in the middle of the spectrum we identify as integration (see Figure 1.1).

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Figure 1.1. Adjustment: The Third Domain of Culture Shock

Isolation

• Marked by disengagement or conflict with the new culture.
• A likelihood of returning to the point of geographical origination (or staying exclusively within one's original cultural group, even in the new setting).
• Feelings of separation and exclusion from both the heritage culture and the new culture are likely.
• Fractured identity.

Integration

• Marked by an ability to recognize positive attributes of the origination culture (C1) and the new culture (C2).
• An ability to participate fully in the new culture without loss of the old one.
• Likely to experience social acceptance, emotional well-being, self-efficacy, cooperative relationships, and general productivity.

Adoption

• Marked by the utter identification with the new culture at the expense of the old one.
• Likelihood of complete or near-complete loss of language (L1), heritage culture, and sense of loyalty toward the origination country or culture (C1).
• Social separation between the self and family members/cultural community is probable.

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Integration is dynamic. Imagine you are standing in the middle of a playground teeter-totter, trying to keep the entire thing balanced with both ends off the ground. To do this, you need to have one hand and one foot on each side of the center. Constant readjustment is necessary to stay centered.

Both sides of the beam have value and worth. In fact, they are both necessary to the function of the teeter-totter. If too much weight is applied to either side of the center, one side may fall to the ground. It is possible, however, to lean into one side more than the other and still keep both sides elevated. Perhaps you take two steps left of center. The right side will rise slightly, but you'll probably still be able to keep both ends raised.

Integration is this middle space. Here, there's an agency to exercise cultural mobility, as represented by the leaning to one side of the teeter-totter. RAEMs, in particular, may lean deeper into the ethnic culture from which they originate or with which they identify—or they may shift more weight into certain aspects of the new culture. They may even toggle back and forth between the two. Most of the time, though, they'll be able to find or return to a degree of balance that feels uniquely good to them.

A student's sense of integration-related equilibrium is meaningful when we consider trauma-informed moves that are at once effective and culturally affirmative. The space on the teeter-totter that children occupy is part of their power. Do they lean further into their ethnic identity? Great! What can we connect to and capitalize on in this space? By contrast, if more weight is centered on the other end, can we more mindfully affirm the home culture and language? In either case, how a student is positioned in the process of integration can give clues about how we can tailor interventions that honor and enhance their innate power.

Meet Rujan

In August of 2019, I opened my email to a LinkedIn alert. It was a message and connection request from a student at a Colorado university, and I recognized the name immediately.

Rujan joined my 3rd grade (Newcomer Level 2) classroom a few months after the school year had already gotten underway. Despite arriving with virtually no background in English, he had progressed enough to warrant an early transfer from Newcomer Level 1 into my class.

This was my second year teaching in a newcomer-only setting, and I was still acutely aware of how underprepared I was (despite an excellent college experience and a few years of "regular" teaching under my belt) to meet the dynamic learning needs of each of my students.

A firm relationship with Rujan's family was in place before Rujan joined our learning group since his cousin was already in my class. Still, the relationship began with a home visit, and I started volunteering with an adult ESL group where Rujan's mother was a member. We took a number of field trips with the adult group—mostly to museums and local attractions—and as a result of those experiences, Rujan's mother revealed more of herself and her family's story.

My bond with the family grew. Often, I'd pop by their apartment complex to say hi and end up drinking tea with the entire extended family, grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins included. Hospitality was embedded into every part of their existence. We'd pore over family photo albums, and they'd share (typically through one of the children as translator) the rich history of the family—of Nepal, Bhutan, the beauty of the countries, and the simple ease of being … and then of refugee camps, fires, flooding, and airplanes to the United States.

Now Rujan was a grown young man studying philosophy, on a med track, and hoping to pursue neurological sciences. His LinkedIn message was incredibly well spoken. I zoomed in on his picture and saw a confident smile, Western-style business suit, and a Nepali tilak on his forehead. He'd made it.

Let me clarify, though. By "made it," I mean that he'd not only managed resilience and academic accomplishment but also achieved integration. Rujan had learned to navigate the world of his new home without compromising the integrity of his personal and cultural identity.

This, I believe, is what we most want for our students. A checklist of academic "can-dos" is not the goal. Those skills are important, but they are just conduits through which students' fullest selves can be expressed. Without question, Rujan needed to learn how to read and speak English, understand biological life cycles, and solve mathematical equations to move toward graduation and successfully engage with the world. These are all essential skills.

Rujan undoubtedly learned the skills we taught him, but what is the larger, combined goal of these content objectives? Is it to pass benchmark tests? No. Is it to enable greater access toward becoming whatever it is the child aspires to be? Perhaps.

I've embedded the stories of various students throughout this text, yet we'll return to Rujan in each chapter, leading up to his thoughts on resiliency.

Here's Rujan:

My life message (or perhaps it is more fair to say my family's message) is deeply rooted in the upbringings back home in Nepal. Amidst constant struggle with corruption in government, civil distress, and our very own battles with poverty, we saw hope, an immigrant ambition for better. My parents, though uneducated by today's metrics, had profound understanding that if there was any way to escape this generational cycle of life and death muddled by inhumane poverty in Nepal, it would have to be a life of proper education and opportunity elsewhere. Their wishes seemed hollow and unrealistic to many, but that is what we all were taught growing up. A life of better requires Herculean undertaking and was filled with constant worries. It was better to be content with how little we had, or so we were told.

In my early education in Nepal, life took a turn for my family. A fire burned our whole village and rendered us with only a few blankets and no place to call home. This marked the end of a chapter in my family's story in Nepal. We were not the writer of this chapter though. We had little say in how it would end and to describe its suddenness. Nevertheless, we told ourselves that this next and new chapter in our life, which we were about to embark on, would be written by us and us entirely. Thus, the journey to a better life ensued; my parents left what they knew and called home to fly over an ocean to uncharted territory. That in itself brought forth daunting challenges.

Transition Shock and the Brain: An Overview

Significant stress affects the human brain at the molecular level, resulting in explicit physiological, psychological, and emotional changes (Teicher et al., 2003). How the brain is affected by stress can have implications for social, academic, and economic well-being (Anderson et al., 2004; De Bellis & Zisk, 2014; Frater-Mathieson, 2004). Let's explore a snapshot of this process.

First, we'll talk about the brain stem and limbic system. Together, they comprise the emotional center of the brain. The thalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala are all parts of the limbic system. These elements work together to activate our fight-flight-freeze-or-submit response (Bremner, 2006; Himelstein, 2016). Here's how it works, in brief:

• A stressor (say, a door slamming loudly) comes in. It gets picked up by the outward senses (the slam is heard; responses and expressions on others' faces are seen and interpreted).
• The message is instantly transported to the brain stem and limbic system, where the thalamus captures the signals and consolidates them into one of two categories: emergency or nonemergency.
• Nonemergency messages are routed to the prefrontal and cerebral cortexes for closer examination and more deliberate problem-solving.
• Emergency messages are sent to the amygdala, which fires up its "alarm," initiating a fight-flight-freeze-submit response (Harvard Health, 2017; McEwan & Gianaros, 2010). Once activated, this defense circuitry dominates brain functioning. If you've heard about the brain being "hijacked," this is where and when it happens.

Transition shock confuses this built-in alarm system. The thalamus of a trauma-affected person is more likely to skip over this sorting process. Instead, it simply sends all incoming messages directly to the amygdala. The amygdala, now receiving both emergency and nonemergency information, becomes hyperactive. Its fight-flight-freeze-or-submit switch is left on—even in situations where no immediate threat exists (Blue Knot Foundation, 2020).

The amygdala is part of the limbic system, which is largely responsible for integrating sensory input, regulating emotions, storing and retrieving memories, ensuring focus, and producing responses to various sti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Understanding Transition Shock
• Chapter 2. Inviting Culture into the Trauma-Informed Conversation
• Chapter 3. Understanding the Link to Social-Emotional Learning
• Chapter 4. Connect: Beginning with Relationships
• Chapter 5. Protect: Cultivating Trust and Safety
• Chapter 6. Respect: Engaging Student Voice, Choice, and Collaboration
• Chapter 7. Redirect: Crafting Sustainability
• Chapter 8. Looking to the Future: The Restoration of Power
• Appendix: Blank Templates
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright