“Does My Real Life Matter to You?” Creating a Trauma-informed Classroom

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are events that occur in a child’s life between the ages of birth to 17 that can cause trauma. These include experiencing violence in the home or community, being abused or neglected, exposure to suicide, or having a parent or family member incarcerated. Additional adverse events that disrupt a child’s development include experiencing famine, homelessness, natural disasters, pandemics, war, and other forms of trauma.¹ In the United States, 48 percent of children between the ages of birth and 17 years old have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience, while 30 percent of youth between the ages of 12 to 17 years old have experienced at least two. Globally, approximately 60 percent of adults report exposure to at least one ACE during childhood.² While these experiences can introduce trauma into the lives of human beings at any age, children—regardless of class, ethnicity, or religion—are particularly vulnerable to the impact of traumatic events.³

Trauma can be a catalyst for risky behaviors that manifest in the home, work, and school environments. Children and young adults in Adventist schools are not immune from ACEs.⁴ Valuegenesis researchers found that risky behaviors among Adventist youth were a reality; however, little is known about the factors driving these behaviors.⁵ And while we may not know if trauma informs these behaviors, we do know that these behaviors can be a cry for help as children and youth try to cope with the impact of the difficulties resulting from ACEs.

God knew what life would hold for human beings after sin entered the world. For that reason, the plan of salvation, designed to restore what would be lost because of sin, offers hope. Christian educators and systems play a role in implementing this plan. However, educators should remember that trauma-informed pedagogy in any subject area is not a panacea for students. It cannot and should not replace mental health services. Christian education systems, therefore, must ensure that teachers receive training in how to create trauma-informed learning environments. Such learning environments not only provide instruction in literacy skills such as reading, writing, and comprehension but also include support services. They seek to build partnerships with parents and guardians, obtain consultations with school psychologists, and use available counseling services.

Within the North American Division, the Standards for Student Learning in Adventist Schools articulates a worldview built on four key Bible-based concepts: Creation (What is God’s intention?), Fall (How has God’s purpose been distorted?), Redemption (How does God help us to respond?), and Re-creation (How can we be restored in the image of God?).⁶ The work of implementing trauma-informed practices to improve students’ literacy skills (see Box 1) aligns with the standards of Redemption and Re-creation. The purpose of this article is to highlight how the integration of pedagogical approaches such as phonemic awareness, dialogue journaling, gratitude writing, and visual literacy can help shape classrooms into centers of healing and restoration while, at the same time, accomplishing academic goals.

ACEs, Trauma, and Literacy Development

Vincent Felitti and his colleagues coined the term “Adverse Childhood Experiences” during their landmark study on childhood abuse and household dysfunctionality⁷, which was designed to describe the connection between adult lifestyle diseases and seven specific categories of adverse childhood experiences. An unanticipated finding of this study was that adults who had experienced multiple ACEs tended to have poorer physical and psychological health and were more likely to engage in behaviors that increased the risk of harm to multiple aspects of their health.

Since the release of the study by Felitti et al., the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other experts have expanded the original list of events. This list was expanded for a variety of reasons, including the understanding that trauma may not look the same for each person. Factors such as socio-economic status, race, gender, and physiological or psychological predispositions such as temperament influence how individuals respond to trauma (see Table 1 for a list of ACEs).⁸

However, not all ACEs result in trauma. Children can be very resilient. The determining factor is how the child responds to an adverse event. As Zepf states: “It is not the event that is the pivotal point, but the way in which it is experienced and processed.”⁹ Siegel defines trauma as “an experience we have that overwhelms our capacity to cope.”¹⁰ When children struggle to deal with the impact of adverse experiences, this will likely undermine their ability to learn because these experiences negatively affect the cognitive skills they need to engage successfully in the learning process. As a result, children who have been impacted by trauma are less likely to meet grade-level reading standards and may even experience a decline in their reading skills.¹¹ A child’s struggle with acquiring and mastering literacy skills (see Box 1) is often a manifestation of a brain struggling to juggle the impact of real life with the requirements of the academic environment.

How Trauma Affects the Development of Literacy

During childhood, the brain is physically changed and shaped by each experience. Trauma interrupts the normal process of forming brain structures and alters the functions and connections into maladaptive processes. Although these neurological changes help children to survive their trauma, they may cause them to freeze in survival mode rather than thrive, thus impacting their capacity to learn.¹²

Children impacted by trauma experiences are more likely to struggle with retaining and quickly retrieving verbal information from memory.¹³ This has been attributed to shrinkage or reduced neurological activity in the brain structure responsible for memory (referred to as “fluency in reading” and apparent in other content areas that require reading).¹⁴ Traumatized children may also struggle to express themselves, both orally and in writing, and may exhibit delays in comprehending spoken language.¹⁵ They may also experience problems with visual-motor integration (which is necessary for proper letter formation and staying between lines when writing), computing, and maintaining auditory attention (which helps them identify and distinguish between letter sounds and words).¹⁶

The greater the number of trauma events learners experience, the more likely these academic problems will occur in various content.¹⁷ However, this does not mean that these challenges will prevent students from learning to read. Although the path of learning to read for trauma-impacted children may not be as straightforward as neurotypical children, there is still a great deal of hope. God designed the brain with the capacity for neuroplasticity, and this is a blessing. Children’s brains change to help them survive trauma, and with the right kind of environmental stimulation, their brains can adapt to help them thrive emotionally and academically.¹⁸

The Importance of Trauma-informed Practices in the Classroom

Students bring an entire spectrum of prior experiences with them when they arrive at school. These experiences are invisible strings that manipulate their ability to respond positively to even the best instruction. Like hunger and exhaustion, the adverse impact of trauma is one of these invisible strings. Trauma is intrusive. Vivid, recurring memories of traumatic events can constantly intrude on brain processes,¹⁹ disrupting their flow of thought and hijacking their attention.²⁰ This interrupts learning experiences because students must battle to banish unpleasant memories in order to give full attention to instruction.²¹

The language arts classroom is one example of a place where students can lose the battle against suppressing thoughts about their trauma. As students engage with reading materials, the content can easily serve as triggers for trauma experiences. Dutro writes: “Reading literature is often an emotion-filled experience. Encountering others’ experiences on the page can bring our own rushing swiftly, viscerally, back to us.”²² This reaction can also happen in other content-area courses where students are required to interact with narrative content. This raises the following questions: When students have these experiences, is there a space within the curriculum for them to talk about the reality of their current lived experiences? Do the actual stories of students matter in the classroom? And, are educators and the systems in which they work prepared to address these needs?

The literature establishes the needs of traumatized students: connection, stability, relationship, and safety. ²³ Teachers are uniquely positioned to meet these needs. It is true that “none of us are entitled to the details of a child’s pain,”²⁴ but so often, it is in the sharing that connections are made, relationships are developed, and students begin to feel a sense of belonging and safety in their classrooms.

Knowing and understanding students’ thoughts and feelings allows teachers to guide and influence their mental processing. A common practice in literacy classes, just before reading a story, is accessing ’students’ prior knowledge. This approach is suitable for other areas of content as well. ’Students’ real-life, sometimes traumatic, stories can be part of this prior knowledge. If the environment is not created so that students’ stories matter, teachers lose the opportunity to influence student thinking.

During His ministry, Jesus paid attention to deeply personal stories. Take, for example, the story of the woman with the issue of blood (Luke 8:43-48). Although the crowd was almost crushing Jesus, He stopped and listened to her story. Having Jesus listen attentively to her (in the middle of a crowd) was a part of the process that brought redemption and re-creation to a life wracked by 12 years of trauma. Like Jesus, we should endeavor to give value to the strings within the narratives of our students’ lives that pull and tug at them while they are in our presence. Engaging and including the stories of students can have spiritual and eternal implications.

Children’s trauma often occurs in the context of relationships—often with an adult who has the responsibility of protecting and nurturing them. This reality helps to shape their perception of God and spiritual things. People who have experienced trauma are less likely to see God as forgiving, present, loving, and fatherly. Instead, they are more likely to view Him as critical and angry.²⁵ This might help to explain why some trauma-impacted individuals struggle to reconcile their religious beliefs with their experiences as they process childhood trauma later in life.²⁶ Trauma accomplishes the goal of the enemy to hide the image of God from us as well as to erase His image in us. Roger Morneau, a former spiritist, revealed in his book A Trip Into the Supernatural that Satan delights in illiteracy because it is easier to successfully deceive those who are lacking in literacy skills.²⁷ The combination of trauma and illiteracy has disastrous implications. The work of educators then can be seen as crucial in the reality of spiritual warfare and the eternal destiny of their students.

Examples of Trauma-informed Practices in the Classroom

Trauma-informed students should have access to the expectations for the work they are required to complete. A common way to do this is by setting goals or giving them a rubric so they know exactly what is being assessed in their work. Teachers should focus on the strengths and successful aspects of the first production and guide them toward expanding their work. A primary goal is to empower students’ ability to express themselves in meaningful and comprehensible ways. As they gain confidence in self-expression, the teacher can weave in strategies for them to assess their own reading and writing using technology.

The classroom is a good place to interrupt and reshape the developing narrative about God in the minds of trauma-impacted children. It is an avenue through which children can be taught to use their religious beliefs as a coping mechanism.²⁸ They can be taught the truth about the evil enemy, who has caused the adversity in their lives, and the good, kind, loving God who fights for them daily. An example of how teachers can intentionally incorporate the standards of redemption and re-creation into their curriculum is the use of trauma-informed literacy practices to teach reading. This pedagogical approach provides a safe environment and opportunities for students’ real-life experiences to have a place in the instructional process. Approaches such as phonemic awareness, dialogue journaling, gratitude writing, and visual literacy can help bridge the divide between learning and mental health by fostering what Brunzell calls psychological resources for well-being, skills students need to succeed.²⁹

Phonemic Awareness Instruction

The National Reading Panel’s report defined phonemic awareness as “the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken words.”³⁰ Phonemic awareness instruction focuses on identifying, differentiating, and manipulating the sounds in oral-language units.³¹ This skill is foundational to literacy and precedes phonics instruction. When young children experience adversity, their phonemic-awareness skills become vulnerable to the impact of trauma.³² Phonemic-awareness instruction is especially helpful for young elementary-age readers struggling to pay close attention to and learn the sounds that make up words. However, all students can benefit from phonemic awareness instruction, which can be delivered in whole class, small groups, and individual settings.³³

Children who have experienced trauma often feel that they have no control over what happens to them. Mastering phonemic awareness and phonics skills gives them a sense of empowerment and freedom as they learn to independently decode written language and access the content presented in this way. Jesus knew He had a very short time to prepare His disciples for a lifetime of ministry. He used the three-and-a-half years He had with them to lay the foundation that would give them a firm platform and prepare them for the challenges they would face. In the same way, teachers have only a short time to equip their students with literacy skills through daily phonemic awareness exercises.

Dialogue Journaling

Dialogue journals are written conversations between a teacher and a student that take place regularly (daily, weekly, or as scheduled) over an extended period (whether a single semester or throughout the school year).³⁴ A journal could be a physical notebook or a digital document. In it, students can discuss life events, describe personal interests, ask questions, make requests, communicate needs, and express feelings. Although journaling can also be left open-ended, specific prompts can be given to students to direct the content they write in order to increase the academic value.³⁵

A dialogue journal is an excellent place to ask students to express themselves using opinion-style writing or to begin working on a personal narrative piece they will develop over time. Students should be allowed to combine modalities of expression in the journals along with writing. Some options include drawing, coloring, painting, creating comics, and scrapbooking.³⁶ Journaling can be a whole-class activity that is a part of the classroom routine during language arts or other subjects a few times a week.

The interactive nature of the dialogue journal allows the student an opportunity to let the teacher into his or her world, which is often misunderstood by those who misinterpret their trauma-related behaviors. This is a sacred trust, and the teacher, in turn, must be prepared to process what is shared—since sometimes, what is shared might be emotionally challenging to read. Student safety is the goal, so while the teacher’s response may include reading and responding, it could also include following up with a time to meet with the child to talk about what is written or working with school counselors to actively address deeper, more challenging experiences or file mandatory reports. The goal is to provide a space for students to dialogue and establish a relationship based on trust while also building academic skills.³⁷

Gratitude Writing

Gratitude writing allows students to acknowledge benefiting from the presence of something or someone in their lives or receiving something of personal value from someone.³⁸ This form of writing can be non-directional or directional. A non-directional gratitude writing exercise is one in which the writer uses whole sentences to articulate a list of things for which he or she is grateful. This list could lead to writing short paragraphs around the sentences. In directional gratitude writing, the writer addresses his or her gratitude to a real or imagined person in a letter.³⁹

Scripture is replete with exhortations to be thankful regardless of the circumstances (Psalm 107:1; 1 Corinthians 15:57; 1 Thessalonians 5:18). However, children experiencing trauma may find it difficult to be grateful. Like the traumatized Israelites who could not appreciate God’s blessings in the wilderness, children who are experiencing adversity can have a negative overall appraisal of life.⁴⁰

For example, literacy instruction can be enhanced by the incorporation of gratitude.⁴¹ This includes teaching children how to recognize when someone is being kind, as well as how to evaluate the intentions of the kind individual and the benefits of being a recipient of kindness. Froh and colleagues referred to this as learning schematic help appraisals.⁴² A teacher could explore completing a mini-language arts unit around a book that deals with gratitude, perhaps even in dealing with a difficult situation. Within this unit, students would be assigned activities such as Counting Blessings. As the teacher works through the book, students could be given the prompt: Think back over the past day, then list up to five things in your life for which you are grateful.⁴³ Or the teacher could ask students to write down one thing for which they are grateful, along with a few sentences explaining why. This could be embedded in a unit focused on expressing ideas or combining sentences.

If gratitude writing is done in the form of a letter, the students may be asked to take the activity further by delivering their letter to the person about whom it was written. Knowing that a real person will receive their letter can increase motivation and give students’ writing an even sharper focus. When a student who has experienced trauma sees the delight and joy such a letter brings to someone else, his or her negative appraisals about life are likely to decrease.

Visual Literacy

Visual literacy (VL) uses imagery to help learners find meaning⁴⁴ and can include skills such as questioning, analyzing, and making personal associations.⁴⁵ The processing of visual imagery can enhance comprehension of written and spoken texts.⁴⁶ VL is useful for helping students explore works of art that accompany written words in trauma-related picture books (or other types of literary texts). This method is beneficial for students who struggle with comprehending print.

The thinking routines embedded in the Artful Thinking program (http://pzartfulthinking.org/) provide good questions teachers can ask to help students use images to foster connection, critical thinking, creativity, and comprehension. For example, they can invite students to explore various viewpoints using the Step Inside thinking routine. In this activity, the teacher asks students to look at a picture. (The image may or may not be embedded in a trauma-related narrative.)

The teacher then asks students to choose one person from the image and pretend to be that person. Students may seek to answer the following questions, whether orally or in writing:

• What can the person feel?
• What might the person think?
  
• What might the person know?
• What might the person believe?
• What might the person care about?

These questions help students connect their knowledge, experiences, feelings, and thoughts with the narrative and create a personal connection to the story. They can help students develop empathy for themselves and others.

Caring for the Teacher in the Trauma-informed Classroom

Trauma-informed practices that allow student stories to matter in the classroom align with the biblical injunction to “bear. . . one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2, KJV). Teachers, too, have their own stories and burdens. Making space to hear the stories of their students requires a great deal of emotional and psychological capital, which can be overwhelming and can result in compassion fatigue and burnout.⁴⁷ To combat the potential impact on mental health, teachers must not only receive training on how to be trauma-informed but also how to be intentional about self-care. Taking mental-health days, setting boundaries around work time, keeping a journal, getting adequate rest, making time for light aerobic workouts, minding their diet, and maintaining their trust in God are all part of a solid self-care routine.⁴⁸ Teachers might also consider mental health therapy if they are still battling with the impact of their own trauma from childhood.

Teaching is a very demanding ministry. Like Jesus’ ministry of teaching, it also often comes with the work of healing the broken, not just in body but also in spirit. Jesus often had to withdraw and spend time in quiet solitude to connect with His heavenly Father in order to be fully present while serving those traumatized by the daily realities of life. Ultimately, successfully undertaking trauma-informed teaching demands a constant connection with God. Prayer before, during, and after classes should become a lifestyle. As teachers bear the burdens of their students, they can lean on God as well as their professional and social circle of friends to help them.

Conclusion

Adverse childhood experiences between the ages of birth to 17 often lead to trauma, which can interrupt cognitive development in children. Globally, educational systems must invest in training so that educators are prepared to provide students with care while ensuring their academic success. Attention must also be given to helping educators preserve their own mental health as they engage with students whose experiences might trigger an emotional response. Pedagogical approaches such as phonemic awareness, dialogue journaling, gratitude writing, and visual literacy can be used in the general classroom to help students build their literacy skills. Above all, educators and educational systems must work together to shape classrooms into centers of healing and restoration.

This article has been peer reviewed.

Caddabra Brown

Caddabra Brown, EdS, is a doctoral student at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, U.S.A. She holds a BA in Secondary Education (Literature and History) and an MA in Education (Curriculum and Instruction) from Northern Caribbean University (Manchester, Jamaica). An educator for 10 years, she has worked as a classroom teacher in secondary, vocational, and tertiary settings, as well as a school psychologist at the elementary level.