Teaching the Whole Person

It’s been a very intense, unusual few weeks for everyone, myself included. In the world of education, everything has been turned topsy-turvy by the Coronavirus pandemic, and since education ventures make up the vast majority of my professional and academic lives, I’ve seen a lot of upheaval in all directions. I apologize if this post is a bit rambling, but my brain has been full and I haven’t been able to take a break and defrag my hard drive.

I’m not sure any of us are in a place where we can make sense of things just yet. Being a trauma survivor, I see a lot of trauma indicators in the people I interact with on a consistent basis – the vacillations between flat numbness and crippling anxiety, difficulty remembering what time it is or even what day of the week we’re on, the desperate search for basic supplies that now seem critical (though a week or so ago we took them for granted), and more than anything else, the steady, overwhelming fatigue that I hear about from almost everyone.

I had the tremendous opportunity this week to attend a virtual presentation on trauma-informed teaching presented by Alex Shevrin Venet. Alex is very active in teaching, working with undergraduates at the Community College of Vermont in Winooski, and teaching in-service teachers at both Antioch University and Castleton Center for Schools. She is an amazing educator, and I was really blown away by the session I attended this week. She mentioned that she may run another session soon, and I’ll share it here if she does. I highly encourage you to attend a training with her if you ever have the opportunity!

It’s strange the way we hold trauma in our bodies, and the ways it can make itself known when we least expect it. I’ve done a lot of therapy and healing over the years, and for the most part I can go weeks or months without thinking about my traumatic experiences. In this session, learning about the needs of students with traumatic experiences and how we can best create safe spaces for them to learn and thrive felt very validating for me. Alex reminded us that we can’t often tell traumatized students from non-traumatized students (and that many students wouldn’t even be able to identify themselves as traumatized). Because of this, the best way for us to address their needs is to assume that all of our students need the nurturing, consideration, and care that help make education a positive experience for trauma-survivors.

One part of the conversation felt deeply personal to me. One of the other people on the session asked about concepts like “grit” and resilience”, and how these ideas can make students who’ve survived traumatic experiences blame themselves for the effects of their trauma. Alex said “you don’t become traumatized because you didn’t ‘resilience’ hard enough”, and I found myself inhaling sharply. I didn’t realize that I’d been waiting for someone to tell me that for nearly 15 years. I myself talk about resilience and tenacity a lot in the sense of not giving up on a particular task or project when you don’t get it right the first time, but I will absolutely be careful in how I use those terms in the future.

The evening before, I’d received an email from one of my own professors, Dr. Shannon Hilliker, with whom I am studying Communication, Technology, and the Knowledge Building Enterprise, and I mentioned the email on the call with the other participants when someone asked about supporting college students. Dr. Hilliker sent the following message to us, her students (shared with permission):

I wanted to share her email here for a few reasons. Now that I am both a teacher and a student, I often get the opportunity to learn not only what is being explicitly taught, but also to observe the practices and habits of my professors, and this is one of those times where doing so has been enormously instructive for me.

• She’s acknowledging that the world has changed around us between when we started out and the finish line of our course. This is significant, and it’s coming up in a lot of ways in all parts of my work. The concerns I face as an individual are now significantly different than they were when I planned out my work load and registered for my classes. The concerns my students face are likewise multiplying in ways that none of us could possibly have expected. This acknowledgement by itself is so important in our relationships with students. It lets them know that we understand that the decisions they need to make now may be very different than they would have been without this pandemic.
• Flexibility of expectations. This is another monumental part of how we work with students in the current moment. Once we understand that the world is a radically different place than it was two weeks ago, and that we’re all carrying a lot more stress than we were, adjusting our expectations for students’ work capacity is one of the best things we can do for them. It gives them the breathing room they need to make healthy choices for themselves when it comes to managing their stress, and to take care of themselves and the people around them.
• Dr. Hilliker also addresses us as whole people and not just students in a class. In a graduate program in Education, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who didn’t think that education is a high priority. The students I’ve met and worked with in the School of Education graduate programs at UAlbany have all be diligent, hard-working people. Many of them are already working teachers who come home every evening only to put more time in pursuing their graduate studies. We all value education very highly. But as human beings, sometimes other things have to come first – our health, our families, our own jobs and students and the people who rely on us. Sometimes it can be hard to figure out a way to balance that all, but when we acknowledge that our students have busy and complex lives that have all been thrown into disarray, we’re more likely to hear back from them when we invite them to communicate with us about how they are doing, which brings me to the next point….
• The invitation to connect. More than anything else right now, this is the biggest need I see in the people around me. We all need connection more than ever, and with her invitation to reach out, Dr. Hilliker is volunteering herself as a connection and a resource for us during this time. It can be really hard to reach out to a teacher when you feel like you can’t hold up your end of the class contract, but that is made immeasurably easier when your teacher acknowledges your hardships and invites you to reach out.

I can’t speak for my peers in the class, but reading this email made me feel like I had permission to take a breath and stop the mental cacophony for a few minutes. I should be able to follow through on my plan for my assignments and classes, but being able to slow down mentally makes that so much easier to accomplish, because I can turn off the panic response and approach things with a much calmer brain.

It’s a feeling I’m always trying to give my students, honestly. I don’t ever want them to avoid talking to me because their work isn’t proceeding the way they’d like and they’re worried about getting a lecture or are hesitant to face the stress of the situation. It’s one of the reasons I love the flexibility I have at work to meet each student where they are and set a finish line that makes sense for them, along with a timeline that they can manage. I know that’s not possible in every education setting, but I do believe that the more we focus on meeting our students where they are, and the more we encourage trust and mutual connection, the better off we will all be.