Special Issues, Volume 1: Trauma-Informed Teaching

Cultivating Healing-Centered ELA Classrooms

Sakeena Everett

• Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780814100127
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

This first volume of Special Issues: Trauma-Informed Teaching gathers some of the most compelling and practical recent articles across NCTE journals, addressing the importance of trauma-informed teaching and its recent developments in the field.

We live in a time that requires attention to trauma. Educators and students are learning how to move forward in this precarious time, which in many ways has amplified preexisting health, racial, economic, and educational inequalities. The pandemic has shaped us in ways we have yet to understand fully, but we know we must adapt and heal together. It is imperative that K-College educators not only consider trauma-informed teaching, but also healing-centered teaching practices. As we think through ways to support the most harmed people in our teaching and learning communities, we will move closer to a more equitable and just healing-centered profession.

Editor Sakeena Everett has curated this collection to show how to help K-College teachers integrate the most up-to-date approaches to trauma-informed teaching into their classroom environments. In this volume, you will find valuable insights, diverse perspectives, innovative and exciting pedagogies, as well as thought-provoking research methodologies that engage micro- and macro-level supports you need to get started today.

About the Special Issue series:
Most teachers and students across the country are grappling with several important issues. We hear from many educators who are looking for compelling and engaging approaches racial literacy, critical media literacy, and trauma-informed teaching. 

NCTE is responding to these needs with Special Issues, a series of books designed to directly address these pressing topics in K-12 and college classrooms today. The first volumes collect content on these topics from across all of NCTE’s journals in one place, to make the most relevant material accessible and practical. 

Edited by expert practitioners in the field, each volume contains teaching tips to help implement these approaches in classrooms.

Table of contents

• 09 Editor's Introduction
• 13 A School Is Not Meant to be Empty (poem)
• 14 Counterstorytelling This Historical Moment
• 17 Pandemic Pages
• 20 Culture, Loss, and Silence: It's on Us
• 24 From Crisis to Continuity: The Role of the LMS in the Future of Learning
• 28 Writing for Liberation
• 31 In the Black Radical Tradition: Poetry as a Praxis for Healing and Resistance in Education
• 38 Pedagogies of Complicity: Perspective Taking and Healing
• 42 Opportunity Centered Teaching for Racial Justice in Elementary English Language Arts Classrooms
• 50 What's in a Name? Language, Identity, and Power in English Education
• 55 In Dialogue: Transnational Childhoods
• 61 The Kid in the Back of the Class
• 65 From Rapport to Relationships: Shifting Our Practice from Classroom Management to Community
• 69 Access Fatigue: The Rhetorical Work of Disability in Everyday Life
• 82 Addressing Homelessness in Our Schools and Language Arts Classrooms
• 93 There's Hope for Us All: Transformative Moments
• 96 Texts of Becoming: A Parent's Plea for the Inclusion of Trans* Narratives
• 99 Trauma-Informed Writing Pedagogy: Ways to Support Student Writers Affected by Trauma and Traumatic Stress
• 112 Latinx Mothers and Daughters Defining Themselves through Art and Writing
• 119 Harm and Healing: Reading with an ABAR (Anti-Bias, Antiracist) Lens
• 125 #TeenPoetsMatter: Writing Critical Micropoems as Urban Social Critiques
• 133 Shining Light in Dark Corners: Choosing Heavy Books for the Classroom
• 138 Enhancing Students' Mental Health Literacy through the Paratext of Two Middle-Level Novels
• 141 Using Picturebooks to Teach with and against Social and Emotional Learning
• 154 Design Thinking in Reading Workshop: Flexible Strategies for Sparking Empathy in Middle Readers in the Time of COVID-19
• 161 I Don't Want to Write a Poem for My Dead Students (poem)
• 162 "Death didn't come up at center time": Sharing Books about Grief in Elementary Literacy Classrooms
• 173 When Teachers Hurt: Supporting Preservice Teacher Well-Being
• 177 Creating Space for Grief: Cultivating an Intersectional Grief-Informed Systemic Pathway for Teacher Leaders
• 182 Call for Manuscripts: Volume 2