猫爪影像

Perhaps now more than ever, adult educators are paying attention to the impact that personal and community trauma has on adult learners鈥� ability to learn and pursue their goals. The turn toward mental health, understanding trauma, and creating healing-centered educational spaces is a welcome one.

Trauma has a direct effect on our capacity to learn and retain information. In her piece 鈥�,鈥� Karen Gross (2019) states that we live in a world filled with trauma, and that its symptoms are often invisible or misunderstood. While trauma and its impacts are omnipresent, the pandemic helped to reveal the depths of inequality in our systems as well as the chronic trauma associated with these inequities. Financial insecurity, constant exposure to stress, unrelenting racialized violence, threat of eviction, deaths in families and communities, in addition to the consequences of unrelenting social inequities, are all potential triggers for heightened traumatic responses.

Those most affected by systemic inequities and persistent trauma are disproportionately people of color and immigrants. When these adults are our students, using trauma-informed and healing-centered practices will increase their opportunities to learn and pursue their education and career goals. Using trauma-informed and healing-centered practices is an integral part of enacting our values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Massachusetts鈥� approach to trauma-informed practices in adult education

The good news is that there are strategies to address trauma in teaching and learning, and we can use professional development in adult education to teach them. In Massachusetts, we offer sessions to help individual educators use trauma-informed practices. We also encourage leaders to take a program-wide approach,鈥攊ncluding classroom and advising strategies, strong community partnerships and referrals, and educator self-care and boundary setting鈥攖o develop and apply trauma-informed practices. Our professional development aims to first build understanding of trauma, and then introduce instructional and administrative strategies and skill development through scenarios, group work, and reflection. The following objectives from a recent session on trauma-informed advising and programmatic practices illustrate this approach:

• Participants will articulate the impact that traumatic experiences can have on a student鈥檚 ability to engage and persist.
• Participants will identify program-wide procedures and referral practices to improve the physical and emotional safety of their program.
• Participants will recognize the signs of compassion fatigue and practice self-care strategies.

Our presenters draw from evidence-based sources to educate on trauma, and facilitate peer-generated scenarios and group problem-solving to practice applying new knowledge. For example, presenters teach the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration鈥檚 core principles for relationship building (realization, recognition, response, and resisting re-traumatization), to establish trust and facilitate healing. When working through scenarios in small groups, we discuss how safe spaces cannot be commanded, and that people who are most impacted by the effects of trauma should be the architects or co-architects of creating safe spaces.

The following are statements from adult educations who have participated in these sessions:

Becoming more trauma-informed is a question of adapting practices, not just taking in information and saying 鈥極kay, I get it!鈥� So multiple opportunities to learn are important.鈥�

“Thank you. By far, this has been one of the top most helpful trainings for my position. And so absolutely necessary.鈥�

What You Can Do Now

These suggested resources and actions are curated from the SABES resource library or pulled directly from the sessions mentioned above.

Read

• Updated resource collection: 鈥�鈥�

Take Action

• Review and use the .
• Use this with your program staff to identify where you want to develop more trauma-informed practices. Applicable to all states and based on the Massachusetts Flexible Framework for Implementing Trauma-Informed Educational Programs. The evidence that you present in each of these areas will facilitate conversations about and creation of procedures to increase compliance with trauma-informed practices.
• Establish clear referral practices and share with all staff. Program policies should describe a consistent and equitable process for how, when, and where to refer students for mental health support. Make sure mental health services are linguistically appropriate and culturally competent. Establish a program-wide check-in for staff well-being. Encourage self-care strategies and normalize the effects of vicarious trauma or compassion fatigue.

Update, Spring 2024

As we continue to deepen our understanding of trauma and how to best support the field of adult education, we are updating our approach and our resources to reflect the following lessons learned:

• The shift from 鈥渢rauma-informed鈥� to 鈥渉ealing-centered鈥� practices encourages us to move away from diagnostic thinking and towards creating healing spaces for all learners.
• Trauma-informed and healing-centered work needs to be supported by leadership as a program-wide practice.
• Staff at all levels of the program should be supported with trauma informed and healing centered practices in acknowledgement of their own trauma as well as secondary trauma.
• Trauma informed and healing centered strategies should be adapted to linguistically and culturally accessible to learners, which comes from a deeper understanding of our students needs and backgrounds

To understand this shift, please review our latest resource collection and three-pronged approach to healing centered practices:

• Updated resource collection 鈥�鈥�
• Review and use the

References:

Ginwright, S. (2020, December 9). The future of healing: Shifting from trauma informed care to healing centered engagement. Medium. https://ginwright.medium.com/the-future-of-healing-shifting-from-trauma-informed-care-to-healing-centered-engagement-634f557ce69c

Gross, K. (2019) Trauma Impacts Adult Learners: Here鈥檚 Why. Retrieved from: The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2014a). SAMHSA鈥檚 concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach (HHS Publication No. 14-4884).

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SABES is a project of 猫爪影像, funded by the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Dani Scherer oversees professional development in the areas of career pathways, advising, and ADA resources and training for SABES. Please contact dani_scherer@worlded.org with any questions or comments.