Helen Elizabeth Stokes
Tom Brunzell
Judith Howard- 1Faculty of Education, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
- 2Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Editorial on the Research Topic
Trauma-informed education
Trauma-informed education has emerged as a novel approach to teaching and learning to support children and young people at school. Acknowledging interdisciplinary advances from the fields of neurobiology, therapeutics, wellbeing and social justice scholarship, the paradigm of trauma-informed education is relatively new. It is necessary in a service-rationing education sector to ensure that efforts toward improvements in teaching and learning approaches encompass the impacts of chronic stress experienced by today's students. These stresses result from increasing levels across the world of child maltreatment, family instability, lingering impacts of COVID-19 and other health troubles, economic uncertainty, political instability, and other continuing community concerns (Hammerstein et al., 2021; Drotning et al., 2023; Leigh et al., 2023).
As childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences can have detrimental impacts across the lifespan and on education outcomes, proactive pathways of support often require a mosaic approach. These include evidence-based and evidence-informed interventions which encompass but draw far beyond teacher pre-service training or professional development focussed primarily on academic planning and delivery (Maynard et al., 2019). So far, trauma-informed education has incorporated novel understandings of neuroscience and the integrated nervous system as connected to the body's regulatory needs for stress regulation and relational health (Costa, 2017). From attachment-aware perspectives, trauma-informed education advocates for relational pedagogies to ensure teachers exemplify unconditional positive regard, restoration and repair for students whose behaviors can rupture the classroom community. It builds upon legacies of social emotional learning (SEL), resilience studies, restorative practices in schools and the like (Ma et al., 2020; Durlak et al., 2022; Martins et al., 2022). It is informed by culturally-responsive pedagogies and values toward educational equity and an emancipatory mindset through education (Gay, 2018). It is centered upon the voices, perspectives and lived experiences of students made vulnerable by systemic factors of social and economic disadvantage (Stokes et al., 2019).
Trauma-informed education provides a new vista to teaching professionals, school leadership teams, and education researchers to integrate allied fields. This is in the service of a singular practice narrative to ensure school-aged students contending with complex, unmet needs for learning receive differentiated pedagogical intervention to increase their capacities, capabilities, and readiness to learn. Two articles in this Research Topic address this area. These include articles on trauma informed instructional practices (Stokes); trauma informed culturally responsive behavior support (Schimke et al.). At its foundations, trauma-informed education employs an interdisciplinary approach to remind teachers that learning is not stress free. Many students struggle because they have lower baselines for stress tolerance and cannot yet manage their own escalation or dissociation within the classroom in times of learning or social struggles. To address this, teachers and educational support staff need specific training in trauma-informed education. A number of articles address this area. They included: considerations for the delivery of trauma informed professional learning for teachers (Koslouski and Chafouleas; Koslouski); trauma informed initial teacher education (L'Estrange and Howard) and trauma informed education for teachers working in remote areas (Brown and L'Estrange; Brown et al.).
Trauma-informed education also directly addresses teacher workforce retention and burnout (Brunzell et al., 2018). Stories of meaning-making at work (Brunzell et al.) provide perceptions of teachers' understanding of the impact of working with children impacted by trauma. Providing measures of educator self-efficacy around emotional coregulation furthers this understanding (Lindstrom Johnson et al.).
There is much work to be done to ensure that trauma-informed education reaches its potential as a sustainable field of enquiry yielding practice innovation. It is necessary to promote a system-wide trauma-informed response to bolster schools to meet the increasing needs for safety, relationships, and learning within classrooms and beyond. The work on developing national guidelines for trauma aware practice begins this process of system support (Howard et al.). Innovation must build upon findings well-established in the trauma-informed literatures. This Research Topic features promising practices, evidence of impact, policy support and future directions for the paradigm.
Author contributions
HS: Writing–original draft. TB: Writing–original draft. JH: Writing–review and editing.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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References
Brunzell, T., Stokes, H., and Waters, L. (2018). Why do you work with struggling students? teacher perceptions of meaningful work in trauma-impacted classrooms. Aust. J. Teach. Educ. 43, 116–142. doi: 10.14221/ajte.2018v43n2.7
Costa, D. A. (2017). Transforming traumatised children within NSW department of education schools: one school counsellor's model for practise – REWIRE. Children Aust. 42, 113–126. doi: 10.1017/cha.2017.14
Drotning, K. J., Doan, L., Sayer, L. C., Fish, J. N., and Rinderknecht, R. G. (2023). Not all homes are safe: family violence following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. J. Fam. Violence 38, 189–201. doi: 10.1007/s10896-022-00372-y
Durlak, J. A., Mahoney, J. L., and Boyle, A. E. (2022). What we know, and what we need to find out about universal, school-based social and emotional learning programs for children and adolescents: a review of meta-analyses and directions for future research. Psychol. Bull. 148, 765. doi: 10.1037/bul0000383
Gay, G. (2018). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Hammerstein, S., König, C., Dreisörner, T., and Frey, A. (2021). Effects of COVID-19-related school closures on student achievement-a systematic review. Front. Psychol. 12:746289. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.746289
Leigh, J. K., Peña, L. D., Anurudran, A., and Pai, A. (2023). “Are you safe to talk?”: perspectives of service providers on experiences of domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. J. Fam. Violence 38, 215–225. doi: 10.1007/s10896-022-00359-9
Ma, L., Zhang, Y., Huang, C., and Cui, Z. (2020). Resilience-oriented cognitive behavioral interventions for depressive symptoms in children and adolescents: a meta-analytic review. J. Affect. Disord. 270, 150–164. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2020.03.051
Martins, J., Cunha, J., Lopes, S., Moreira, T., and Rosário, P. (2022). School engagement in elementary school: a systematic review of 35 years of research. Educ. Psychol. Rev. 34, 793–849. doi: 10.1007/s10648-021-09642-5
Maynard, B. R., Farina, A., Dell, N. A., and Kelly, M. S. (2019). Effects of trauma-informed approaches in schools: a systematic review. Campbell Syst. Rev. 15, 1–2. doi: 10.1002/cl2.1018
Keywords: trauma-informed education, social emotional learning, relational pedagogies, professional learning, teacher practice
Citation: Stokes HE, Brunzell T and Howard J (2023) Editorial: Trauma-informed education. Front. Educ. 8:1264629. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2023.1264629
Received: 21 July 2023; Accepted: 24 July 2023;
Published: 15 August 2023.
Edited and reviewed by: Douglas F. Kauffman, Medical University of the Americas–Nevis, United States
Copyright © 2023 Stokes, Brunzell and Howard. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Helen Elizabeth Stokes, h.stokes@unimelb.edu.au