Equity-Centered, Trauma-Informed Teaching w/ Alex Venet

Chris McNutt: Hello, and welcome to episode 90 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project. My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio. Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Lisa Sharfstein, Jeff Stewart, and Julie Wolver-Junkins. Thank you for your ongoing support. You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. In today's conversation, we are joined by Alex Venet. Alex teaches undergrad students at the Community College of Vermont, graduate classes at Castleton Center for Schools in Antioch University, New England, creates PD, is a community facilitator for Edutopia, co-organizes EdCamp Vermont and Trauma-Informed Educators Network Conference, and is soon releasing her new book, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, releasing on May 25, 2021. The link is in the show notes. We received an advance copy, and I cannot emphasize enough how much this book is needed and how much it resonated with me in my own practice. Alex not only perfectly outlines trauma-informed education, but places reflections, challenges, and paramount questions for us to rethink systems in education toward including and advocating for all students. In this conversation, Alex and I talk about shifting the system toward fostering critical wellness and systemic change for equity and joyfulness. So let's just start off by considering trauma-informed practices, so defining what those are and what they aren't. And I want to highlight your book, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, and you define it as rebuilding safety, social-emotional well-being, accepting students, building a new equitable system. In my experience, trauma-informed practice has been either like pushing through traumatic events or certain students who are displaying some kind of traumatic event, they're being pulled away from the classroom to, quote unquote, cool down. So could we talk about a brief overview of what it means to have an equity-centered trauma-informed education? 

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Alex Venet: So trauma-informed practices is this approach that I think everyone who does trauma-informed practices means well, but we know that meaning well doesn't always mean doing well. The way that trauma-informed practices has become a buzzword and in a lot of schools just turned into this thing of, oh, we have a cool-down corner or we teach breathing strategies, those types of things, which are important. I don't want to dismiss that helping students regulate and all that stuff is really important, but I've been observing over the past few years that that focus is sort of eclipsing everything else about trauma. And when I was looking into where did trauma-informed education come from, and moreover, where does the concept of trauma come from, the history is really interesting. And in both cases, the concept of trauma that we know today was really developed through the advocacy of survivors of violence. So the two main groups that were really advocating for people to see that their psychological pain was real were veterans of war and women survivors of domestic and sexual violence. And so these survivors really advocated and said, hear what we're saying and feeling impacted by violence is real. It's not just something you can kind of get over that makes you weak. And similarly, trauma-informed practice really came about through initially in sort of the behavioral health therapy counseling world, really trying to create environments that were more responsive and respectful of those survivors. And so, you know, then over the past 10 or 20 years, trauma-informed education becomes really a thing that gets, you know, I say in the book that no one owns the concept of trauma-informed education, which is great because it means that you don't have to say trauma-informed education, TM. And it's not you don't have to buy trauma-informed education from someone. But the problem is we're not always talking about the same thing. And so some people say that they're doing trauma-informed education by being more sensitive to the possible impact of trauma on student behavior. And that's an aspect. But to me, I really want to recenter trauma-informed education in the big picture of what is trauma and recognizing that trauma is a political concept. It's a social concept. It's not neutral. You know, things like systems of oppression cause trauma. And so if we as educators are trying to respond to that, it's not as simple as, oh, I made a calm down corner in my classroom. It's also attending to all those social political elements and how those play out in a school. 

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CM: I like the point you make about accepting students for basically what they're saying. I think especially now, more so than when I was in school, there's a perception amongst teachers about students that maybe they're too sensitive or like this generation, all they do is cry about things like that kind of stuff. And it seems like trauma-informed practices means that not only are we focused on what would be, I guess, deemed very serious, like homelessness, traumatic events at home, like that kind of stuff, but also just day to day realities of being a kid or a teenager. Right. 

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AV: Absolutely. And that goes back to understanding that idea of trauma and recognizing that, you know, in the popular understanding of trauma, I think people's minds will go to something really big and intense, like being assaulted or surviving a violent natural disaster. And those things certainly can cause trauma. But in the research base, trauma is also something that happens through living through a persistently dangerous environment or the cumulative effects of low level stress every single day. There's all kinds of things that can cause trauma. And in the trauma-informed education movement, often there's this big focus on the neuroscience of trauma and how trauma changes the brain. And I think that kind of it works to reinforce the idea that trauma is like a big lightning bolt moment that upends your whole life. But the reality is that a lot of kids and a lot of adults are simply living in a great deal of stress and the cumulative effects of that are trauma. And so to me, trauma-informed education is a few things. And and this is why I center it in equity, because it's not just about being responsive to those that we perceive have experienced trauma, but really redesigning the whole education system to recognize how trauma is happening inside our schools, not just outside or in the kids' homes, as some people like to assume. So trauma is happening inside of school. And also because of that, we can disrupt it. If there are conditions inside our schools that are traumatic, then that's our job to disrupt. So the way that I define trauma-informed education is that we're being responsive to the impacts of trauma that students have already experienced. But then we're also disrupting and preventing trauma that may happen in our school and in a larger way in our society. And those things to me are really grounded in equity work and and the work we're doing for equity in our schools is really the same work that we need to do to disrupt those things that cause trauma. 

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CM: Right. Right. And I think that you you call that work critical wellness. Right. So how do we then build those systems? 

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AV: So what would it look like in practice to have critical wellness, let's say, for students of color, LGBTQIA students, other marginalized groups, really anyone? Yeah. So critical wellness is a term coined by Tyrone C. Howard and his co-authors in this really fantastic book called All Students Must Thrive, which I highly recommend. And they define critical wellness as the idea of fostering wellness plus critical pedagogy plus critical race theory. So what they're looking at is the idea that we have to understand the ways that social, political, historical, economic factors impact our ability to be well. The way that I think a lot of teachers might think about wellness is, oh, did my student eat this morning? Did they sleep enough last night? Are they managing their stress and then maybe trying to address those elements of wellness by teaching about, oh, turn off your phone before you go to sleep. Here's like granola bar, have something to eat. But critical wellness would really be zooming out and looking at how are the systems preventing wellness and what's our role in that? So, for example, do students have access to health care? Do their parents have access to well-paying jobs and transportation? And I think for some teachers, that might feel overwhelming to start thinking about because, OK, well, what do I what am I supposed to do if my student doesn't have health care? But there's really no, it's tough. There's this both and that both. Yes, that's true. As an individual teacher, you can't fix all these social conditions. And as an individual teacher, you have a role to play. So even just something like teaching kids about their disrupted sleep, for example, if you're coming at it from a critical wellness mindset, then you could help students understand things like, OK, yeah, turn off your phone before you go to sleep. But you could also help them understand what it means to be living through, for example, a global pandemic and the collective trauma that we're all experiencing. You can help them understand the different economic factors that lead to grind culture and the idea of you can never work enough. You can help them understand basically how all those factors are at play so that, yes, they can try out some strategies, but they're doing it in a way where they're also developing sort of their understanding in their political consciousness. And to me, that's trauma informed education, because what you're doing is you're being responsive to the stress that's already there and you're preparing students to critically engage with the world so they can go out and disrupt those cultural pieces that are continuing to perpetuate trauma. 

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CM: I'm kind of seeing this with really three different branches. There's like the advocacy piece, which we'll tackle here in just a second, where teachers are going out and fighting for just causes. There's the teaching approach, which is you're teaching these tools of disruption where you're giving the kids the tools to think about these things and learn about these things. Is there also a branch of changing the systems in which you teach in, things that teachers could do, for example, like homework policy, discipline policy, et cetera, that would be more trauma informed? 

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AV: Absolutely. And I think policy is a great area that we don't look at a lot because it's not cool to look at, you know, it's not really fun to look at policy, but policy is so important and policy can really be all kinds of things, but are often the ways that dictate how we interact at school and really create those conditions for wellness. So, for example, you know, I was working with a school that was really looking at how to be trauma informed. And in my visits to the school, I learned that they had single stall bathrooms throughout the school, but those bathrooms were not allowed to be used by students. And therefore, students had to use one of the traditional gender bathrooms. And when I sat down and was able to talk to some of the students, they were upset about it. You know, some of the students who identified as gender expansive and didn't feel safe using those big traditional bathrooms, those single stall ones were right there, but the school policy was barring them from using it. And that to me is one of those things where if you want students to be well, we have to create conditions where they can feel safe and feel affirmed. And so for that school, one of my recommendations was make safe, accessible bathroom access a priority. You know, I think that's not the type of thing people expect to hear when they ask, how do we become more trauma informed? But part of being trauma informed is ending the things that could be potentially causing trauma inside your school. So, you know, there's policies like that. There's policies around attendance. There's policies around discipline. That is a huge area where we could potentially be trauma inducing instead of trauma informed. And so really looking at shifting those systems is essential. 

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CM: And with that, too, I mean, part of that process of making a more humane system also includes humanizing teachers themselves. And there's no doubt that teachers face a lot of challenges. This was true both pre-COVID, but speaking as a teacher, especially right now, it's pretty bad. So what steps can educators take to then make systemic changes, despite the fact they have to work within it? I mean, that's a huge weight on your shoulders at all points. You know, teachers often feel powerless to act to change systems that they are themselves in. What does that look like? 

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AV: You know, I don't know why I talk so much about bathrooms in my book, but I have, you know, maybe because bathrooms to me are sort of they're both a really real problem. And they're talking about humanizing teachers. Teachers joke all the time, oh, I don't even have time to go to the bathroom. To me, that's so deeply unfunny. Right. That that our school work environments are places where you feel like you can't even be the most basic of your human needs. So I think that's why I often return to this example of bathrooms, because what hope do we have of humanizing the rest of school if we can't even do that? So so I definitely understand that, you know, what it's like to be a teacher and feel like, well, I can't even meet my basic human needs. So how am I supposed to do this for my students? So one of the things I invite teachers to do is recognize that any shift that you can start making in the system is a great place to start. So you don't have to feel like, well, if I can't overthrow this whole thing right now, then I'm not even going to bother. So so just start wherever you feel like you have influence and inviting teachers to look at where do I have influence? You know, are you on a committee? Can you get involved with your union? Can you even just write to your school board member, you know, whatever the small thing is? And then within your own classroom, really look at the ways that you can disrupt those dehumanizing processes. So, for example, I talk about a teacher in the book who shared with me that in her school, they had these really archaic and I say archaic knowing that a lot of schools still do this, which, you know, you only have three bathroom passes per semester or something like that, which is super ableist and dehumanizing for kids. And just that teacher decided to just not use them to just refuse and say, my students can just go whenever they need to go. They can just access this when they need to. And so she sort of refused to be part of this dehumanizing system. And, you know, that comes with risk. And so we all have to assess what's the risk in my refusal and can I take whatever the consequences might be. But really looking at not not passing on the dehumanization that you are experiencing, which is way harder said than done, but really looking at how could I disrupt this? 

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CM: Yeah, there's there's two things that come up as you're talking about this that I think about. The first is, is that one of the most eye opening things for me when we switched to remote learning for a while was just how nice it was in some regards, because I could just experience life at my house, being able to have like a personal space to myself and I could look outside and walk outside even for a little bit. I have pets, I have cats. I could like there's just like simple things that are just so much more relaxing in spite of having to teach online, not having the social connections, all those things that were there. And then to that space of really building that coalition as you're talking about making the space less dehumanized. I think of Jonathan Kozol's work with building your small coalition of students up to have your back. I would imagine that if you build this space that is humanized where students know what you're doing and understand what you're doing and appreciate what you're doing, the parents, the guardians, the community members, et cetera, and also the students themselves are going to be there to defend you. Thing is, too, is that especially when it comes to like bathroom passes, homework policies, test stuff, I've always shocked by how little anyone seems to care when you disrupt those practices. Like I found myself in situations a lot where I've just stopped doing the thing and no one really says anything. I think we a lot of times assume that the principal, the superintendent, the district, whatever, has these very nefarious plans. They're trying to control everyone. We're really it's just that's just the way it's always been done. No one's ever questioned it. And when you finally stop doing it in question, they're like, oh, well, maybe we should change that. Or there's like a brief argument and then they get over it. There's an element of creative noncompliance there that works out really well. But as you just said, there's also an element of cultural and political capital that you have to play. I wouldn't do that if I was a first year teacher. But I've been teaching that for seven years. Probably could get away with it quite easily without a second thought. So really understanding our place within that system to change things. I also want to talk about building that classroom within a new system and equipping our students to create a more just society. And I would imagine that in order to create a more just society with our students, we also have to have just classrooms. But as I was reading the book, I found myself in this weird conundrum where it's like we're within a system that is unjust, but we also want to build a just society out of that classroom in that system. Is it possible for those two things to interlate? 

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AV: I think absolutely. And to me, I just love the idea of critical questioning and inviting students into that process and helping them see sort of those invisible power structures that are around them, being transparent in what we're teaching. I think about in my teacher at the community college here and there is a text that I was mandated to teach as part of this first semester seminar and it was Plato's allegory of the cave. And if I'm designing my own syllabus from the ground up, honestly, I don't really want to teach that text that much. I think there's more I think there's some texts that are more engaging and that I feel more connected to, but it's my requirement. I have to teach this text. So when I taught the text, I would also do a portion of the class where we looked at it and we said, this is the text out of all possible texts in the universe that our college is requiring all first semester students to read. Why do you think that is? And we would have a whole conversation about what do you make of this? Why? Why do they want you to learn this? What do they want you to take away from it? If you could choose something else, what would you choose? So just really simply write like stripping away some of the mystery of why are we learning this and inviting students to see themselves as to recognize the power of their own voice and trust their own opinion and perspective and really validating to a lot of students don't really like that text because it feels inaccessible and the language is sort of antiquated. And and when we would move into this conversation about why this is required, a lot of them would feel really validated like, oh, it's OK that I don't like this. It's OK that I can trust my my own perspective on this. And to me, that's really that's pushing back on a culture where when you experience trauma, you're often very discounted. Your perception of events is often silenced. And so when we build up environments where students can really learn to trust their own voices and their internal narratives, to me, that's that's a beautiful way to humanize the classroom. 

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CM: Do you ever find yourself in situations where students, when you bring up these disruptions, kind of reject the notion? Speaking of Plato's allegory of the cave, the people that don't want to see the world in 3D, like you come in and make that analysis like what what do you do in the circumstance where students are just like, no, this is the way it is. It's how you learn stuff. I don't believe in any of this. 

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AV: You know, I'm a huge fan of the phrase both and so the idea that either or thinking often creates false dichotomies. And so when we say both and you're kind of holding the nuance of situations. And so I always talk about that no matter who I'm teaching. So whether it's high school, college, first years, my in-service teachers that I teach in graduate classes. So so they're familiar, you know, they know that I'm all about the gray area. And so often I'll just try to frame things as, you know, people in the world see this issue a couple of different ways. Here are some of the ways that that people see this issue. Here are some of the things that might go into you developing your own understanding of it. And so really, again, is holding space for people having their own mind and trusting their own mind while also, of course, building that criticality and helping push folks forward. You know, I will sometimes also talk about how when we learn new ideas, sometimes our system feels threatened by them. And so learning to recognize when we feel that resistance and name it and sort of work with with that. So, you know, all those great metacognitive skills, I think that we talk about in teaching are a part of this humanized classroom. 

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CM: So I want to shift real quick from we've been talking for a little while here about changing systems that kind of impact everyone and focus just on making a more inclusive, traumatic, informed classroom. But and there's also teachers that find themselves in locations where you are dealing with serious traumatic events like you're teaching in an area maybe that has high crime. I don't know. There's something going on where it's difficult and you find yourself in an environment with a system that is in that cutesy wellness style of learning. How do teachers connect and help students who are facing serious trauma when the system itself seems to not necessarily be dealing with it as well as they could? 

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AV: First, I'll just put in my little challenge back to you of not labeling some types of trauma as more serious than others, but I understand your question, which is that when we're recognizing and we're feeling that people are experiencing trauma in ways that are feeling really impactful, you know, systems often do this cutesy wellness thing of, you know, I define cutesy wellness as things that on the surface are pretending to support our wellness, but actually are doing nothing to address the root causes. So, you know, the principal bringing in donuts or the teacher turning on a five minute mindfulness yoga YouTube video at the start of class, you know, those types of things. I think that part of why those cutesy wellness things can feel so insulting when you experience them is sort of the lack of acknowledgement of witnessing your pain. That idea of showing up as a witness is something that is a theme throughout the literature on trauma. And I'm thinking in particular of Judith Herman, who wrote the book Trauma and Recovery, which is sort of a classic text about trauma, really talks about this idea that society would rather not talk about trauma because when we acknowledge trauma, we have to look in the face our failure as a society to protect people from violence, especially children. And so people would much rather push things under the rug. And so when you slow down and simply witness someone's trauma, you're pushing back against that norm that would rather you forget about it. I think also of the idea of witnessing in the classroom, there's a scholar named Elizabeth Dutro who writes about how do you write and read about trauma in the literacy classroom. And she also talks about this idea of witnessing and sort of showing up as in reciprocal relationship to witness the lives of your students without requiring that they divulge all kinds of details to you, but still making space for everybody's experience to matter in the classroom. 

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CM: Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project podcast. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education. You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at Human Restoration Project. Thank you.

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