I started out with the article discussing ways to help a traumatized student. I think we’ve all been there at some point in our academic lives. If it wasn’t something at home, it was stress from the schoolwork itself and the inability to “get” it.

Personally, my home environment was stressful in my early years. I wouldn’t say it negatively affected my academic life, if anything, that was my escape route. But, when I grew older, I inevitably started to shift focus to more personal interests through the internet and friends with the same curiosity. Life at home still wasn’t perfect, but I was comfortable knowing I was cultivating passions that were mine.

I remember a piece of the studio visit talked about allowing students to recognize they have knowledge within themselves and I think passion can guide that thought. Passion “ignites intelligence,” because the interest becomes so deep that the individual often ends up teaching themselves or seeking help on their own. I mentioned this in my first “about me” blog. I have so many passions and interests that became my interest through the internet. Meaning, I was exposed to it, something attached itself to me, and I was fixed on learning it because I was in love with what had been created.

“Wired To Create” also describes different types of creatives and the motivation behind their work. I think I’d categorize myself as someone who’s more engaged with the process itself rather than the urge to get to the final step of mastering the activity. Since I was little, I looooved watching youtube videos of people creating. I didn’t care what, honestly, I just wanted to watch. When I was old enough, I tried myself and I haven’t stopped trying since. The process can be so tedious, I often lose myself in it and that’s what I love most. So, I started focusing on my passions instead of robotic schoolwork whenever I found myself stressed or overwhelmed.

Bringing this back to AI, we fall back into the debate of whether or not the passionate and humanistic approach to learning is a stronger fit. Personally, i think it needs to start with that humanistic approach so the purpose is genuine. However, of course, it’s not a crime to try out the AI resources. Curiosity is one of the best learning tools and it’s obvious that everyone is curious about these resources, so I don’t think it’s helpful to steer clear of them. Just find the balance through practice & time.

This week I must face my fears and speak in public, but this time it is about a topic that moves me to the smallest cell in my body.

Trauma

Sometimes I feel that we use this word deliberately and do not recognize the background of it, the importance of its meaning and how it affects the lives of many people. For my presentation today I chose an article by Lisa Butler, PhD. and Janice Carello, MA., titled Potentially Perilous Pedagogies: Teaching Trauma Is Not the Same as Trauma-Informed Teaching.  It explores why and how trauma theory and research are currently used in non-clinical courses, such as writing, literature, film, etc. But, these kinds of courses and methodologies promote risky pedagogical practices that involve the exposure and disclosure of trauma, which brings harmful effects. Therefore, a trauma-based pedagogical approach must be built, thought and considered, which recognizes risks and prioritizes the emotional safety of students.

Teaching trauma through the curriculum

Trauma has become one of the most important fields of study in the humanities and these non-clinical disciplines have valuable information to offer about trauma. Well, there are risks to not observing trauma inside and outside the classroom, such as perpetuating shame, secrecy or stigma.

So, educators should try to reduce the risks of retraumatization and secondary traumatization.

But what does this mean?

Retraumatization is the triggering or reactivation of trauma-related symptoms.

Secondary traumatization or vicarious traumatization is related to the presentation and learning of the stories of loss and victimization of others. That is, exposure to traumatic narratives, particularly in circumstances where the listener is very empathetic or where he tries to be, generates symptoms of trauma. 

Trauma-informed perspective

To be informed about trauma is to understand how violence, victimization, and other traumatic experiences may have figured in people’s lives. Systems must then be designed to accommodate the needs and vulnerabilities of trauma survivors.

Safety should be enacted and ensured through efforts to minimize the chances of retraumatization, secondary traumatization, or new trauma.

So, educators must also strive to adopt a trauma-based approach in their teaching.

The most important statement for taking the first step is,

“DO NO HARM.”

Students between the ages of 16 – 20 when they arrive at university show that between 66% and 85% of them have been exposed to traumatic events and continue to be victims. This puts them at higher risk of developing post-traumatic stress, depression, substance use disorder and other psychological problems. And those who suffered or suffer trauma are more likely to drop out and other students may suffer secondary trauma.

What should we avoid?

An example that stuck around in my head was that of a teacher asking to write about suicide, sexual abuse and painful/embarrassing experiences, this promotes risky writing, as students feel anxious, panicked, depressed or suicidal. So, educators need to reconsider their teaching methods, because these symptoms can be misinterpreted as evidence of learning.

Then?

Pedagogical practice should reflect an understanding of the implications of trauma. That is, as educators we must learn about trauma, how it is taught, and how trauma survivors are taught.

It doesn’t mean we don’t talk about or address trauma, it’s recognizing that students need a space to talk, so it’s possible to integrate it into the curriculum in a safe way and teach how to listen and respond effectively.

The article proposes the following key points to address trauma in the classroom, as well as reduce risk and make educational practice more trauma-informed.

1. Limit overall levels of exposure,
2. Vary the intensity of the material.
3. Provide self-care material.

Or

1. Identify learning as the main objective and the emotional security of the student as a necessary condition for it.
2. Recognize that students have traumatic backgrounds that can make them vulnerable and susceptible to flare-ups.
3. Be prepared to provide referrals to counseling services or emergency care.
4. Appreciate how a history of trauma can affect academic performance.
5. Become familiar with scientific research on trauma, retraumatization and secondary/vicari traumatization, and recognize psychosocial and educational sequelae.

This week our 2 of our articles related to trauma students may experience at home, and it affects the student in the classroom. it can affect their learning ability which impacts them in the long run. This is something that has been going on for ages and puts a lot of students behind before they even had the chance to really engage in school. Unfortunately educators are not privy to the home life that their students may experience outside of their care, but have the opportunity to create a safe space within their classroom to give all students a fair option to engage and feel protected for the time they spend with their teachers.

Recently I was thrown into a conversation where we spoke about people who live in survival all their lives. Meaning they grow up always on defense in life. (I must say it is very ironic I just had this conversation with some friends and it is now a topic we are engaging in. Lets me know to stay in school lol)

I have friends who feel they have been in survival mode there who life. Constantly living with a chip on their shoulder almost and thinking the world is out to get them. They tend to be more independent due to being let down a lot in their life. Since childhood they felt they have no outside protection only themselves, which has led to the choices they have made. A big negative each person had was school and how it truly effected their mental as they developed amongst their peers. IP’s singled them out in classrooms and made them dislike school in more ways than one. This is understandable if since a child they individual has felt alone or afraid throughout life.

On the contrary I have felt quite the opposite. Yes I experienced things as a child that could have caused me trauma, but being in environments that helped my development instead of hindering it made it easy to work through these traumas. I never really ever felt like I had to be in defense through life, so I have been very naive to a lot of things. As I grew older I learned the way the world works. everyone is coming from different places, with different baggage which an effect how they view certain situations. I even had to learn to grow with my Fiancé and we in turn have taught each other a lot. I noticed things I would say to him would have his very defensive at times, even when I didn’t mean to be. 8 years later we have learned to communicate in healthier ways that makes us both feel comfortable, but he can’t shake that feeling he has been having since his childhood, so I know I have to approach him differently with certain stuff.

Being a parent now I make myself very aware of how I react to certain things around my children, and how I help them mange their stress. Like I stated earlier we will all experience trauma and we won’t know really how it affects us until we are older. For me right now since my children are all under 5 it is important for me to let them know that it is okay for them to feel their emotions, and experience them, but I don’t want them to dwell on them to long. Sometimes as parents we hate to hear our kids cry as we are making a bottle, but I read a parenting book that said if your child can see you are making the bottle, and they know the routine they are simply crying because their needs aren’t being met at that second, but if you the parent are doing what is needed by preparing the bottle, it is okay for them to cry it out and feel sad. They will soon be happy with the results. I want my children to learn to work through their emotions so when they do get to school they will learn to not take everything so personal in the classroom amongst others, and find healthy ways to channel their emotions.

When children reach school age it becomes a huge competition, even though they don’t tell us that. We are put into classrooms and may the best win ( or receive awards and achievements) while those who are not “behaving” or “acting out” are single out and usually children can see this. This creates a trauma for children in itself, and it’s a system we have yet to change or fix. We keep going because it works for most, but what about those that it doesn’t work for? They tend to grow up telling others how much they hated school, when in actuality they just experienced through a survival mode state, where they just wanted to get through it, or some even quit. There is no true way to measure how much trauma a child may be experiencing, but actions show a lot. Those who are living in survival mode are often withdrawn, defensive, and seen as problematic, when in reality they just want to feel like someone is there.

Pathfinder 1’s Trauma Informed Pedagogy and Pathfinder 2’s Theories of Care for Learning in Community are both engaging and innovative looks into the minds of children and how to cultivate their creativity and nurture them through trauma.

The readings are very insightful on the effects that a child’s upbringing can have on who they become in the future. The Passion section of ‘Wired to Create’ really expands upon this idea. The interviews from various famous musicians and artists, to the lesser known children who grew up to write sci-fi and other creative works, this passage is all about passion. It’s shows me the process of gradually nurturing one’s own great desire and main motivations in their lifetime.

I really enjoy the way that the author writes about each person’s child self discovering their passion. It’s not only precious, but it is also described very creatively too. Kaufman and Gregorie tell these people’s story the way that engaging storytellers do.

‘How to Help a Traumatized Child in the Classroom’ by Joyce Dorado and Vicki Zakrzewski is an equally engaging article. This one is more motivational when it comes to children’s development because this one is about nurturing the development of psychologically traumatized children. Children are fragile people since their children, so their childhoods should be filled with the adults protecting them, loving them, nurturing their personalities, teaching them morals and ethics, and all of the other vital aspects to childhood.

“According to the Children’s Defense Fund, one in three African-American boys and one in six Latino males born in 2001 will end up imprisoned sometime in his lifetime. These staggering numbers are tragic beyond words. But in order to change them, we have to change how we perceive the children behind the statistics.” This is a completely true statement, and it’s something that I am not new too, unfortunately. Growing up, I have always read and heard about young black, latine, indigenous children and other children of color being more likely to end up in prison, drop out of school before getting their diplomas, and not being able to find housing or a job among other inhumane circumstances. I always knew that I was lucky, because as a black boy who is also autistic and queer, I easily could’ve became a part of that statistic.

Trauma in childhood is complex and vast and severely difficult to navigate. In this article, I appreciate Joyce’s approach to handling children that need extra care due to their trauma. She makes excellent points about complex trauma. If the trauma response constantly re-ignites in the body over and over again, that child will not get the opportunity to process and recover at all from it. The vinyl record analogy works very well with this too. “Like a needle on a record player, complex trauma wears a groove in the brain. So when something non-threatening happens that reminds us of a traumatic incident, our bodies replay the traumatic reaction—mobilizing us to either run from or fight the threat, while shutting down other systems that help us think and reason. ” The song that is played back over and over again makes the groove in the record difficult to get rid of.

This quote, “When you notice that a child might be having a difficult time, start by asking yourself, “What’s happening here?” rather than “What’s wrong with this child?””, is something that I wish more teachers and adults took into account with children that act out or act “weird” in class. If more teachers were willing to think more about what was happening with or to their students rather than accuse them of misbehaving or treat them like criminals then children would be able to trust more adults with their traumas and fears. But I feel like that’d take the adults properly taking care of their own mental needs and traumas first, since most traumatized kids that don’t end up in prison can also grow up to be in the teacher position. And as Joyce says in the fifth strategy for teachers:

“5) Take care of yourself. This actually should be number one! The metaphor of putting on your own oxygen mask first before putting it on the child is very true in this situation.”

How to Help a Traumatized Child in the Classroom – Joyce Dorado, Vickyi Zakrzewski

“The Body Keeps the Score” by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk

Of course, the comparison that Dorado and Zakrewski provide between the grooves within the brains of students who can’t “rely on a close caregiver for comfort and safety” to the damaged grooves of a vinyl record causing it to skip. Beyond all of the tips and steps that they provide throughout their relatively brief article, however, I still suggest that the most important thing that a teacher can do for student going through the ringer is to make them feel valued enough to fill a seat within the classroom, but most importantly by YOU, the teacher.

Make them feel as if their presence makes a difference. Like a vinyl record, once scratched, you’re scratched. No tampering with that, and no one wants to replace their original pressing of Comus’ ‘First Utterance’ … no way! Just like that specific pressing of that record, each student is far too rare.

This is why all of the formulaic and “kind and compassionate” niceness that they present falls on dominantly deaf ears to me. The Kolk article did even less for me because of all its dense psychology. Psychology was never my thing; to me it just boils down to calculated explanations of the the abstract nuances of the human experience. I like my abstractness to “go dreamy” (to quote Papa David Lynch). This may not seem very teacher-like of me, trust me I’ve studied it all and studied it all well, but I think its more important to present my perspective as the kind of student-range that these texts are getting at.

Or, at least, as close to such as I can recall. I’ll do my best.

Everyone is different, I know, and I have not been diagnosed with any sort of traumatic (x), so I apologize for any insincerity or ignorance expressed on my part.I didn’t like any of that sort of overly-apologetic Robin Williams-type of stuff when I was a student, and nor did the sorts of students that I was cool with. It always seemed condescending and position-based (“I’m the teacher, you’re the student” sort of dialogue, my friends and I much preferred to talk to teachers as we all were. As human beings).

Ala, such methodology-based dialogue made me feel more dissociated that I already was, to whatever extent, as if I was more of a problem to nurture rather than someone that a teacher legitimately wanted to guide or uplift.

For all of its technical psychological density, the Kolk article did pull my attention in stating that “traumatized people simultaneously remember too little and too much.” Once again, this is not to claim that I was super traumatized or anything, but things happened, and things lingered. This reminded me of all the times that I would vent for entire class periods to the teachers that made me feel like I belonged, and cared enough to listen.

Did every problem have an answer that my teachers were capable of delivering? No, so them asking me “what’s the matter” in a contrived manner never really came about (from the GOOD teacher’s, that is). Maybe a call to meet them in the hallway and a whispered “what the fuck!?” here and there. I don’t suggest that coin of phrase, specifically, but I think it’s important for teacher’s to speak the language that they share with their students.

Rather, they would just allow me the comfortability to vent. In a way, they were also enabling me to think more critically, not academically but environmentally, in regards to my own life. When they would chime in it was often to provide me with stories and experience from their own lives that maybe weren’t even directly related to the problem that I held at hand, but fit the emotions that I was conveying.

Sometimes they would even play a song that had a warm note or a cacophonous wall of noise that they knew would hit my cathartic bitter spot. Point is, they were showing me a vulnerability and openness that made me feel like I was valuable enough to get better.

Now, perhaps my own teaching experience may hinder my ability to view things from that outside perspective and role that a teacher technically HAS to portray within a classroom. I only ever taught high school during the whole online COVID-era, so most of the students present that I taught were never actually present. My perspective here is, admittedly, likely skewered. In some cases I’m certain that those kind of formulaic methodologies are most appropriate, and that not every student is like I was.

Some of them might crave that forced niceness that repulsed my edge-boy self as a teen, but I think that student sensibilities are far more case-by-case.

Still, I don’t know if I can ever fully side with boiling something as complex as emotions and trauma to a “How To” guide or psychological jargon over a sincere attempt to understand the experience that a student is uniquely going through. That’s like serving as a human representation of artificial intelligence, you’re just stripping away the soul away from the human experience, that inexplicable quality that abstractly connects us.

Can an AI help in saying the appropriate things? I assume so.

Can it predictably boil down the psychology behind whatever issue is at hand? Better than I can!

Can it out-impact the most pivotal trauma-dump sessions that I shared with my favorite teachers as a student? Most doubtful.

The two readings that I picked that were provided, went hand in hand. I feel like one gave the background clarity while the other was educating you on what to do with that background. The body that keeps the score reading went into detail how to get through the difficulties that arise from your traumatic past by revealing the psychology behind them. However that is not always easy, getting through your traumatic past if you are unaware that you are reacting in the first place. That’s where How to Help a Traumatized Child in the Classroom comes into play. It mentions how a child’s behavior is a result of chronic exposure to traumatic events beyond his or her control. With a minor degree in psychology, I have studied that many of our traumatic events that happen in our lives stay in our subconscious, and when things are kept there we are unaware we act and do things a certain way, because we don’t even know that we are doing them.

As an educator myself, I found how to help children in a the classroom reading to be very insightful, in other words in resonated with me more than the other. I liked how it brought points to discussion but also awareness. I am guilty of occasionally having to raise my voice every now and then. Because sometimes I am not going to lie, it seems to be the only way high school kids will listen. While I try to stir away from yelling and really getting to that point with my kids, I never thought how that could provoke any trauma they keep in. Classrooms should be a safe space for children of all ages, and I as an educator, it is my responsibility to do so. I definitely kept not of creating a calm environment and adapting classroom’s mindfulness. I am a big believer in energy transfer which is why I always try to remain calm and together when I am around anyone else. I know that energy is a big mood shifter, and when I keep my own self happy and calm, it transfers and is picked up by others. Because I also know when I am having a bad day, I can make someone else almost have a bad day too.

Being an educator is a hard job, and it often comes with many challenges. Especially when you have kids who don’t want to listen. But these readings were a reminder to keep my peace, protect my own energy, so I can also be everyone else’s peace as well. Trauma is an interesting thing, and the way it stays with us forever is an ongoing issue we will always have to work on. But as an educator, I can help be a positive light for my students.

“I thought it would be easier if we were just one color, black or white. I didn’t want to be white. My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds.” – James McBride, The Color of Water, 1995.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, McBride has made his mark through his talents as a musician, screenwriter, and his award-winning work as an author. One of his famous books, The Color of Water, tells the story of viewpoints from different worlds and how those worlds come together and interact with each other. The book follow the story of his mother, Ruth McBride Jordan, who was an orthodox Jewish women from Poland raising him along with seven of his other brothers and how they viewed each other.

A.I and Their Influence on The Current Writers

As mentioned in a previous article, the A.I. have improved drastically over the years, being able to emulate voices similar to that of a human, establishing chat boxes, and even generated A.I. bots that are capable of having real time conversation. There has been an new introduction, called ChatGPT, which have taken the markets by storm. So much so, that multibillionaire companies like Google are trying to implement their own version of the A.I system. However, there’s more to ChatGPT than what is discussed on the surface.

One key feature that has been play tested with the users of ChatGPT is the emulation of humanist voices. Specifically from historical people’s writing and the tone used. For instance, a person can ask ChatGPT to write a political response to the recent Roe v Wade in Malcolm X’s voice, and it would generate a response pertaining towards that. This can open the door to many possibilities as it can lead to topics such as false identity as it can implement their tone and use of words. However what separates the A.I chat from the humanist is through the feelings and emotions embedded through their piece.

We often write and categorize things based on input on and intuition. Generally, through our sensitivity, we often create some of the most profound pieces here in society. Since the A.I system is ran through the internet database, though it may copy the tone, they would never be able to fully implement the person as the human mind is often complex and hard to compromise.

How McBride’s writing may be implemented through the world of A.I is that it would capture the structure of the diversity of the African American culture and how the culture differentiates from other cultures, however it would not capture the soul and depth of the message McBride would want represented in society.