The academics who write about trauma-informed education have the ear of administrators and professors right now. My professional email and social-media feeds are filled with tweets, links to articles, or announcements about conferences and webinars designed to help faculty members recognize how trauma might be affecting their students, whether it arises from the effects of the pandemic or from a student’s particular life experiences.
These very pages have featured all sorts of articles about pandemic trauma — its effects on the university work force, its influence on the “return to campus,” and its meaning for “trauma-informed chairs.” A burst of new books have been published or are coming soon: Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education (2021), Lessons from the Pandemic (2021), Trauma-Informed Pedagogies (2022).
As someone who has been teaching in higher education for more than 20 years and writing about teaching and learning for almost that long, I have to admit that I never gave much thought to the subject of trauma-informed education until the pandemic really hit its stride. That seems like a shameful admission now. In retrospect, I know I encountered students in the midst of some kind of trauma who sent me signals — words spoken in confidence in my office, or committed to the page in an essay — that they were perhaps hoping I would pick up on. Did I do enough?
Even throughout much of the worst months of the pandemic, I probably was not as sensitive to such signals as I should have been. If you had asked me then how to deal with these students, I would have pleaded ignorance: I’m not trained to help people through life crises, and the only thing I would have known to do was encourage a student to visit the campus counseling center. That’s an important step to take, but probably not enough for a struggling student who really needs a community of support — one that includes sympathetic and informed teachers.
I have been doing a lot of reading on trauma lately and learning much from it. But I confess: Those lessons have had far more of an impact on me thanks to my own health crisis over the past six months. Regular readers of this monthly column might have noticed its absence since September 2021, during which time I have been working to put my life, and the life of my family, back together again following months of trauma.
My saga began in October 2021, when I had disturbing episodes of my heart racing and beating in wildly, irregular rhythms. Eventually, after one of those incidents, I drove myself to the emergency room where blood tests revealed that I’d had some kind of “cardiac event” that wasn’t a heart attack.
Eventually I was diagnosed with myocarditis, which causes inflammation in the heart muscle. Many cases of myocarditis arise in response to a viral infection and resolve themselves as the heart fights off the virus. My heart didn’t get the playbook. The inflammation spread into every part of my heart, until it apparently decided that it had enough and opted to shut down. As one of the cardiologists said to me at my bedside one day, “You have a few useless pounds of muscle where a beating heart used to be.”
Eventually they found a donor heart which matched my blood type and body size. I received a new heart on December 22. But at some point during or shortly after the long transplant operation, I had a mild stroke. It didn’t seem like a very mild stroke in the immediate days and weeks afterward, when I couldn’t remember how to spell the names of my children, articulate the day of the week, or even recall my birth date. For my devastated wife and children, that was perhaps the moment in which it seemed my luck would never turn.
But it did. It’s been three months since my transplant surgery, and I am healing. So far my body seems to be making peace with my new organ, and the effects of the stroke are diminishing on a weekly basis (with the help of physical and speech therapy). During the time I spent in the hospital, and then healing at home, I have mostly been in survival mode, trying to do what the doctors and my body tell me to do — gain weight and muscle, take (many) medications, walk every day, check in constantly with the transplant team.
But as my body recovers, the healing of my mind has been slower. Some days I feel overwhelmed with guilt for the suffering I have inflicted upon my wife and children — now weighed down by their own traumatic experiences of seeing me pass back and forth in front of death’s door so many times. Other days I feel survivor’s guilt for all the patients I saw in the hospital who didn’t make it. Why am I here and they are gone? During the day I keep myself busy, but at night, I sometimes lay awake for hours, replaying memories of my experiences and wrestling with these feelings into the light of the morning.
Therapy will help. And one wise perspective came from my favorite therapist, my oldest daughter. She spent two years counseling homeless women, most of whom had experienced various forms of trauma. I was talking with her about my own feelings when she said something that not only resonated personally but also made me think about what we can do for our students and ourselves in higher education.
“One of the ways that our brains deal with trauma,” she said, “is by dissociating ourselves from it. We disconnect from our experiences, and this gets in the way of dealing with it. At the same time, we can’t just sit down all the time in our traumas. You have to work to put your mind into other places. You can think of it almost like a more productive kind of dissociation from your traumas, in which you lose yourself in new things that you are experiencing, or new actions that can become meaningful to you.”
I had already started doing that, without realizing it would help. After my doctors cleared me to venture into uncrowded public spaces, I made my first visit out of the house and chose to go — naturally, for an academic — to a used bookstore. Browsing the shelves, I encountered an intriguing-looking book about ancient Greece. I had studied the subject in high school and college, but it had been a long time since I had really thought or done any sustained reading about Greek literature, philosophy, or civilization.
Could those same healing powers of learning help many of our students, too?
I think so. Certainly what we do as educators can benefit from the work of both trauma theorists and the folks who help translate their ideas into educational practice. We can all become better informed about the impacts of traumatic experiences on our students, and fortunately, we have lots of new resources on trauma-informed teaching to help us to help them. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that, because you’re not a trauma expert, you can’t contribute to the well-being of traumatized students — even if that assistance is limited to knowing when and how to connect them to professional help.
But beyond that, the last six months have reminded me of the role that faculty members play in giving students an opportunity to lose themselves in the fascinating and beautiful subjects we bring to the classroom. We should not lose sight of the fact that learning can be a joyful experience — and even a healing one.
A colleague said to me recently that the logistics and challenges of teaching through a pandemic have left her depleted and exhausted. The only thing that kept her going: the hours when she could get into the classroom with her students and have great discussions about literature. Those conversations enabled her to turn away, at least for a little while, from the collective trauma created by Covid-19.
My daughter’s words reminded me that there is healing power in learning. Whenever I am cleared to return to the classroom, I will never again take for granted the gift of that power. I hope it will continue to inspire me — and the students who will join me on the journey — throughout the new life I have been given by my new heart.
Source: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-healing-power-of-learning