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The Summer Peacebuilding Institute is offering the following courses online in February and March for professional development (no academic credit available). Click the course title below for course description, days of the week, and times of courses. Introduction to Restorative Justice Designing Powerful Solutions With(in) Community Circle Processes Economics for Emancipation To apply for SPI Online courses, click here . Partial Scholarships and Organizational Discounts Partial and matching...

By Kate Cray, Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images, The Atlantic, January 25, 2022 When the CDC recommended COVID-19 vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds in early November, adult publications rushed to explain what the move meant for families, schools, and the pandemic at large. While most of the media competed for grown-up attention, a different network of sources targeted the group most affected by the news—but first, it had to explain what a vaccine is. The children’s-news landscape...

By Adam Gabbat, Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters, The Guardian, January 24, 2022 Conservative groups across the US, often linked to deep-pocketed rightwing donors, are carrying out a campaign to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities. Literature has already been removed from schools in Texas, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. Librarians and teachers warn the trend is on the increase, as groups backed by...

By Andee Tagle and Audrey Nguyen, Photo: Oscar Wong/Getty Images, National Public Radio, January 21, 2022 If I (Andee Tagle) called you ordinary, how would that make you feel? If I told you I had an average day at my ordinary job, and then went home to my ordinary family, would you think of me as unsatisfied? Unambitious? Unhappy even? As author Rainesford Stauffer says, it's time to reevaluate the power of an ordinary life. "The concept of the best life serves as a social script," she...

By Carolyn Jones, Photo: Alison Yin/EdSource, EdSource, January 25, 2022 N early everyone has experienced a degree of anxiety or depression due to the pandemic. But for young Black people also confronting persistent racism and ever-widening inequities, the current moment has led to an acute crisis in mental health. The suicide rate among Black youth, which for years trailed that of Asian and white students, has doubled since 2014 is now twice the statewide average, far exceeding all other...

By Tara Parker-Pope, Photo: Andrew B. Myers/The New York Times, The New York Times, January 24, 2022 It’s time to start feeding your brain. For years research on healthy eating has focused primarily on physical health and the link between diet, weight and chronic disease. But the emerging field of nutritional psychiatry studies how foods can make us feel. “Many people think about food in terms of their waistlines, but it also impacts our mental health,” said Dr. Uma Naidoo, a Harvard...

There is something very powerful about being able to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, stress or pain. Resilience has been defined and used to describe a person who bounces back from intense difficult circumstances. More often than not, with resilience comes deep personal growth that prepares a person for what’s ahead. Resilience drives us to stand strong; it is a process of adapting & moving forward. Trauma can be debilitating. It is life altering. But there is another truth...

[Editor's note: Dr. Harise Stein at Stanford University edits a web site — abuseresearch.info — that focuses on the effects of abuse, and includes research articles on PACEs. Every month, she posts the summaries of the abstracts and links to research articles that address only ACEs, PCEs and PACEs. Thank you, Harise!! — Jane Stevens] Child Abuse Clemens V, Köhler-Dauner F, Ziegenhain U, Fegert JM. Predictors of Parental Coping During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Survey in Germany. Front Psychol.

In 2015 the Traumatic Stress Institute (TSI), in partnership with Dr. Courtney Baker of Tulane University, noticed a research-to-practice gap in the trauma-informed care (TIC) field. In short, TIC interventions of all sorts were trending, while at the same time there was limited empirical evidence to quantify the impact of TIC. This is what inspired the development of the ARTIC (Attitudes Related to Trauma-Informed Care) Scale , a measurement tool that assess staff attitudes towards...

By Robert Saners, Image: Linda Chao/UCSF, Berkeley News, January 7, 2022 A recent study links anxiety behavior in rats, as well as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in military veterans, to increased myelin — a substance that expedites communication between neurons — in areas of the brain associated with emotions and memory. The results, reported by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Francisco (UCSF), provide a possible explanation for why some people are...

By Jennifer Rainey Marquez, Georgia State University News, January 21, 2022 The pandemic has taken a substantial toll on mental health — and for a subset of Americans, COVID has emerged as a source of traumatic stress that may predict post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, according to a new study led by Georgia State University. The research shows that the association between COVID traumatic stress and PTSD is stronger among individuals who have repeated experiences of past trauma. The...

By Jennifer Bauwens, Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters, The Christian Post, January 23, 2022 Every social movement has advocates on each side of the issue offering critiques and ideas that could change the tide of public opinion. This is certainly true of the women's movement in the United States. Regardless of your ideals and what side of the debate you take, it is undeniable that this movement has informed and educated our society on issues of trauma, domestic violence and abuse. In 1968, one...