In the wake of Ferguson’s delayed start to the school year in response to the shooting of Michael Brown, National Journal reporter Janell Ross reached out to educators around the country—including the Center for Trauma & Learning in Post-Secondary Education (CTLPSE) at MassBay Community College---regarding the impact of trauma on academics. http://www.nationaljournal.com...n-prospects-20140908
Referred to me by the Trauma & Learning Policy Institute (TLPI), Ross and I discussed some of the relationship between violence and learning we see in post-secondary classrooms. Ferguson schools’ delayed opening offers an explicit example of less well-recognized reactions to violence we see in our classrooms every day. In describing student reactions to a campus safety officer in our classroom, I hoped to illustrate how community issues—such as students’ diverse experiences with policing—are not separate from teaching and learning. Campus and community issues do not exist distinct from one other, but mutually inform conditions and goals of both.
More specifically, Ross and I discussed how trauma and violence in private and community life clearly impact post-secondary issues such as persistence, retention, and completion. At MassBay Community College, we are impressed by the tremendous resilience our students demonstrate: Some of them have served in combat, survived domestic violence, political violence, or profound economic displacement.
Advances in medical technology and research have made it possible to identify specific ways in which the learning brain is adversely affected by these sorts of stressors over the long term, organically affecting brain, memory, attention, emotional regulation, academic relationships, and potentially higher order executive functions such as long range planning and establishing priorities. Unless post-secondary institutions understand the lived experiences of our students and orient our teaching and support services accordingly, we profoundly misunderstand the contours of both success and failure in post-secondary programming.
CTLPSE believes that our nation’s diverse academic community can be productively informed by cognitive, neuro-scientific and clinical disciplines to enhance student retention and success. CTLPSE also affirms that trauma and resilience must be understood within a mutually implicating social, economic, and historical context.
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick just signed into law the Safe and Supportive Schools provision, legislatively affirming the importance of trauma-informed practices to improving educational outcomes K-12. We need to continue such holistic attention to academic outcomes at the post-secondary setting.
TLPI has worked extensively with MassBay’s CTLPSE to begin to shape the nation’s first formal post-secondary response to trauma and learning. As we better appreciate the challenges and contours of the 21st Century student population and workforce, we are beginning to mindfully orient best practices in response to fundamental forces of learning. To learn more about trauma-informed schools and the groundbreaking work of the TLPI, please visit: http://traumasensitiveschools.org/. To learn more about CTLPSE at MassBay, or to become involved, please contact jtietjen@massbay.edu.
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