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The dual traumas of racial injustice and COVID-19 have caused academics to question many assumptions about how and why we teach. Faculty are reassessing their pedagogies, even as the need for transformative learning remains. A trauma-informed, restorative pedagogy can help address the needs of our students and world. Emerging from the wisdom of trauma theory and restorative justice, faculty may be able to enact practices that are more conducive to learning, create safe classroom environments, reduce hierarchy, and promote empathy during these difficult times if they understand how trauma works. Understand Trauma Understanding how trauma affects the brain is essential for trauma-informed pedagogy. Trauma occurs when individuals experience an event that threatens the self at a physical, psychological, or spiritual level. Posttraumatic stress may also result. Individuals experiencing posttraumatic stress struggle with intrusive symptoms like flashbacks and numbing symptoms like attempting to avoid people and places that hearken to the trauma. Given that the dual pandemics are ongoing, some individuals may be experiencing posttraumatic stress symptoms but others may not be in a “post” phase yet. Stuck in the midst of the trauma itself, students may have difficulty concentrating or engaging in decision-making and problem-solving. This occurs because trauma inhibits the prefrontal cortex as the brain relies more on those parts that control basic survival. This explains the “brain fog” many of us have experienced. Trauma’s effect on the brain means that students may have trouble following directions or assignments. So it’s important for professors to state expectations clearly, repeatedly, and preferably through ways that engage multiple senses (i.e. making assignments and lectures available in both written and aural form). Create Safety in the Classroom Safety is the most fundamental step in trauma recovery. Without safety, it’s impossible to have the cognitive space to create meaning or the trust to reconnect with others. Trauma-informed pedagogy recognizes the need for classroom safety. Faculty can create physical safety by moving classes online to prevent viral spread or by following the best practices for in-person gatherings, which might require socially distanced desks, a classroom mask mandate, and directed traffic flow. But physical safety is just the first step to creating a holistically safe pedagogical space. Psychological and spiritual safety are also needed. To create psychological safety, professors can be transparent about how trauma impacts the teaching and learning process. It may be helpful to ask for student feedback at several points during the term and to do so with a genuine openness to recalibrating syllabi, class structure, and assignments. To create spiritual safety, faculty may want to begin with a meditation or silence and do the same after a break. Leaving space for reflection during classroom conversation can also feel spiritual grounding. Reduce Hierarchy Restorative pedagogies emerge from restorative justice practices, which categorize the court system as hierarchical and anti-relational. Lawyers engage in antagonistic speech with witnesses; judges issue rulings. Clients are largely silent. Conversation as we know it doesn’t exist. The classroom can function similarly when professors see themselves as having prized knowledge that they must transmit to intellectually deficient students. Professors’ voices thus receive privilege over student voices, creating a space that is hierarchical and, to some degree, unsafe. To implement a pedagogically restorative space, professors may want to consider their own power in the classroom and to engage in practices that flatten classroom hierarchy. Flipping the classroom, offering options for assignments, and doing the occasional circle process can help here. Faculty can also create more space for creativity in the classroom and in assignments to reduce the power given to the written and spoken word as privileged ways of knowing. Promote Empathy Brené Brown says that empathy is “feeling with people.” When we empathize with someone, we place ourselves in their situation and try to know something of their experience. Empathy can be a restorative pedagogical practice because of its capacity to humanize. Professors can promote empathy in the classroom by first creating a safe pedagogical environment, because it is impossible to take a step towards empathic vulnerability without safety. Professors can also create empathic learning environments by giving epistemic credibility to underrepresented groups, and by exposing students to ways of being that are different from their own. A trauma-informed, restorative pedagogy has the capacity to enrich student learning because it emerges from the realities in which we live. By understanding how trauma works, creating safe classroom environments, reducing hierarchy, and promoting empathy, faculty can offer students a transformative opportunity to learn during a tender time.

If I get shot in my classroom – I’m gonna be mad! Yesterday, a friend told me her church and nursery school were having shooter-on-campus drills for the staff and children. I wondered when our school was going to do the same.  Sometimes my colleagues and I joke about what we would do if an active shooter came into our building. We joke about ways to protect ourselves by fighting back or by fleeing. One colleague said not to plan to assist her in the event of an intruder because, given the opportunity, she would be the first one out of her office window. I made a mental note to see if I could climb out of my window. Thinking about myself climbing out of my basement window tickled me until I remembered it was a strategy to avoid getting shot. The list of schools, churches, and public events that have become killing fields is growing. News reporters occasionally entreat viewers to stay sensitive to the victims of these tragic events.  Interviewers of distraught family members work hard not to appear prosaic. While we do not want to mute our reactions to reports of gun violence, the numbness is difficult to prevent. One of the nine people shot by the 21-year-old white supremacist in the 2015 Charleston church massacre was the grandmother of an alumna. Grandma was at Bible Study when she was savagely murdered. When my student and I get together for lunch, we still talk about the aftermath of the killing and I help her grieve. The amount of effort I have given to the teaching craft has not included ways of staying alive in the face of a gunman in my own classroom (most of the assailants are men). Heretofore, the challenge and un-safety has been in ideas. The danger of classrooms has been in coaxing fearful or belligerent students into new meaning making strategies, or different ways of understanding old traditions. Now, the real danger of potential gun violence feels like domestic terrorism. I am afraid, I am unprepared, and I feel edgy in the familiar safety of my own classroom. The possibility of gunplay in my school looms thick yet wispy in the ethers. I struggle to make sense of this faint paranoia because I know it affects my teaching. In my Teaching Teachers to Teach course, should I teach self-defense and strategies for emergency evacuations? Should I review with students the open-carry laws of the state and nation? Should course preparation include time at the gun range? Suppose classroom attire included Kevlar vests and running shoes? Could I shoot back at a student who was shooting at me? The first time I saw someone shot, I was 9-years old. One school night, my dad and uncle were going to the post office to mail household bills. I gladly tagged along because I enjoyed being with them. Our routine was that once we arrived at the post office, I would be handed the bundle of envelopes, then I would leap out of the back seat of the green Pontiac, dash up the stairs and deposit the letters into the outside mailbox for quick delivery to their addressed destinations. With my uncle driving, we rode with ease - the radio playing, my dad and uncle chatting and me enjoying the view from the back seat. My uncle turned the corner onto a one-way street – we were about a block from the post office. Without warning, shots rang out! --- “POP! POPPOP!” – I struggled to see out of the window because my uncle, with cat-like reflexes, had slammed on the brakes, shifted the car into reverse and, with foot flooring the accelerator, began backing out of the street - all in one gesture. Since this was before the days of seat belts, my child-body shifted wildly with the momentum of the car. Even so, I saw a group of teenage boys chasing a lone boy who was limping as he ran. The limping boy ran across the street, up on the sidewalk, and then collapsed. A boy who was chasing him had a gun at the end of his outstretched arm. That boy ran over to the collapsed boy and pistol-whipped him as he lay on the sidewalk. As if the scene had been choreographed by Alvin Alley, they all ran off down the dark street, into the night, as if on cue - all but the collapsed boy who lay bleeding and dead on the sidewalk. My uncle’s skillful driving sped our car backward around the corner and away from the mayhem. Uncle commanded the car out into the intersection, then gunned the gas, propelling us forward into streets with no shooting teens. I stared from the back seat in horror.  My beloved friend Zenobia is a retired warden from New York City corrections department. She spent twenty plus years on Rikers Island and other prisons. Years ago she used to talk with me about the ways of assessing a room for my best escape in the event of unexpected emergency like a gun being fired in the room. When we would sit in restaurants, she would casually ask me over her menu to tell her where the exits in the room were. I was to have noticed them and made mental notes as we walked into the space. Most days I could not answer the question because I had failed to take notice. I did not like this game. I resisted her teaching because I deemed those skills as needed only in places like prison. The applicability of Zenobia’s lessons for my classroom setting is soul withering. Tomorrow, I’m gonna call her and ask for a refresher lesson.  I do not own a gun because if I did I would undoubtedly use it.  I would use it when I felt fearful or angry.  I do not think clearly when I am fearful or angry.