School Crisis Recovery and Renewal

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Three Texts to Help You Reflect on Your Grief-Responsive, Trauma-Informed Practice

By Brittany R. Collins
June 28, 2023

Categories: Trauma, Bereavement & Grief, Trauma-Informed & Healing-Centered Schools

Brittany R. Collins

Brittany is the author of Learning from Loss: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Supporting Grieving Students, in addition to over 50 articles on trauma-informed, grief-responsive teaching. She works with middle and high school students and teachers in the fields of writing, social-emotional learning, disability justice, and their intersections. Learn more here.

Pattern of many colorful books in playful arrangement

Have you been thinking about trauma and grief in connection with educational practice across your career? Or are you just dipping into what grief-responsive, trauma-informed pedagogy might mean for you and your students? 

Text studies across disciplines–from education to sociology to psychology–can shed new light on this multilayered approach to reflective practice and critical crisis inquiry. 

Below, I share three texts that I turn to for support, inspiration, inquiry and insight in hopes that they may infuse your work with strategies for care and connection. The following texts remind us that adults, too, hold grief, trauma, lessons learned and lessons-still-learning–all of which inform the ways in which we cultivate, confront, avoid, embrace, embark, and inquire within the teaching and learning space.

After each commentary, I offer prompts for reflection and writing that invite you to apply the texts to your own experiences in and beyond the learning environment. Research shows expressive writing–meaning writing that uses emotion words and follows stream-of-consciousness thought without regard to style or form–measurably improves psychological and physiological well being, supporting the utility of engaging with and embodying this pedagogy (Pennebaker & Chung, 2011). 

TEXT 1: Trauma Stewardship by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky (2009)

“If we are to do our work with suffering people and environments in a sustainable way, we must understand how our work affects us. We need to undertake an honest assessment of how our feelings or behaviors have changed in response to whatever trauma we have been exposed to” (2009, p. 41). 

So begins the third chapter of van Dernoot Lipsky’s Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others, exploring trauma exposure response–or the impacts, sometimes referred to as compassion fatigue or secondary traumatic stress, of bearing witness to others’ stories. 

van Dernoot Lipsky explores the personal, organizational, societal, and social implications of trauma and care, weaving considerations of equity, environmentalism, and indigeneity throughout cross-cultural considerations of holistic wellbeing. She shares actionable steps that individuals and communities can take to create healing spaces within and for themselves so that they are more prepared to do so with and for others–for example, by creating space for inquiry, engaging in compassionate awareness practice, cultivating community care outside of work, and actively processing that which we witness. 

Questions to hold in mind when reading, reflecting, and writing about your own practice: 

  1. van Dernoot Lipsky highlights that “there are a variety of ways that humans manage trauma, and in most of the world it’s through bodily movement, often dancing or other things music related” (2009, p. 240). 

    When have you noticed music, dance, or other forms of creativity informing your or your students’ approaches to healing? How could you infuse these elements more consistently into your practice–both for yourself and with your students? 

  2. van Dernoot Lipsky writes about the importance of community, especially when working with and around experiences of trauma: “Our microculture should support us in two ways: by showering us with encouragement and by holding us accountable. Its members must be people we can debrief with, laugh with, brainstorm with, consult with, cry with, and become better people with” (p. 185).

    Who are these people for you, at and beyond work? Do you feel supported by your current community? If not, identify 2-3 possible communities–through SCRR, perhaps–where you might forge a “microculture” to support you in your work.

TEXT 2: Emotional Inheritance by Galit Atlas (2022)

A compelling, thoughtful look into the inner world of a therapist, her clients, and the relationships they forge in a trauma-informed space, Atlas’s Emotional Inheritance explores groundbreaking science regarding intergenerational trauma rooted, through portraiture, in real-life manifestations of conflicts at once historical and ever-present, of “secrets [that] live as strangers within our minds, ones that we can’t identify, touch, or change, that are passed to the next generation as phantoms, felt but not recognized” (2022, p. 97). 

“When it comes to talking about trauma,” Atlas writes, “we always walk the delicate line between too much and not enough, between what is too explicit and what is secretive, what is traumatizing and what is repressed and thus remains in its raw, wordless form. We are usually caught in that binary between the two extremes because when it comes to trauma, regulation is always a challenge” (2022, p. 97). 

In this vein, Atlas inspires readers to consider the complexities of self-disclosure–the titrating of exposure to one’s own story, and others’ stories, of grief and trauma. She considers the ways in which our ancestors’ experiences live on in our own minds and bodies, and how intergenerational trauma can play out in our current moment. 

For educators, these insights validate the necessity of culturally responsive practice and encourage deeper considerations of the contexts in which students live, how their intersectional identities, histories, and the “funds of knowledge” (Moll, 1992) that they bring into the classroom can deepen academic and relational learning. 

Questions to hold in mind when reading, reflecting, and writing about your own practice: 

  1. “Leonardo started coming to see me two years earlier, right after a breakup with his partner, Milo. In the first months, he couldn’t stop crying. He said that although he knew he and Milo never got along, his pain was intolerable. Two years have passed and his agony has not diminished… ‘Somehow I’m stuck,’ he says, and we agree that at this point it seems like his grief is not just about Milo anymore. We try to understand what it is that he lost when that relationship ended” (2022, p. 72). 

This passage presents an example of the ways in which loss compounds loss; each loss we encounter in our lives can connect to and build upon other losses that we, or our ancestors, experienced–causing multilayered grief to arise. 

When have you experienced grief or loss at work that is “not just about” the loss at hand? How did this experience make you feel? 

How were you able to make sense of, or what is your current understanding of, that complex loss? What did you notice or perceive about others’ responses? 

Did they align with your own? Why or why not?

  1. Building on our exploration of a trauma exposure response in van Dernoot Lipsky’s book (above), consider this quote from Atlas: “It is only when we process our own sorrow that we can offer a truthful space of mutual vulnerability and emotional honesty, a place where we can recognize the other and don’t try to know better, to fix or give optimistic advice. Instead we are available to be with, listen, and bear our own pain with the pain of another human” (2022, p. 201). 

    When have you experienced such an interaction, either as listener or storyteller, in the learning space? 

    Recreate that moment on the page, and list–as if as ingredients–the contributing factors that made that moment of vulnerability so profound. 

    Was it, if you were the sharer, your listener’s facial expressions or silence or tone of voice? Was it, if you were the listener, the way your own story lended you empathy, or a question you posed that particularly resonated with someone in distress? 

    Revisiting powerful exchanges can help better prepare us to both share and receive stories of loss with students and colleagues in the future.

TEXT 3: The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy by Elizabeth Dutro (2019)

Complexifying our conceptions of what is “allowed” in the English Language Arts classroom, Dutro explores student and teacher self-disclosure regarding topics of grief and trauma, arguing that challenging life experiences deserve to be held and leveraged in the educational space in ways frequently circumvented. 

“Supporting children in the midst of challenging circumstances,” Dutro writes, “also means designing literacy curriculum and instructional practices that invite and value difficult experiences, rather than silencing such experiences as inappropriate for school or rendering them invisible in the texts and talk of classrooms” (2019, p. 5). 

This “critical witnessing,” as Dutro terms it, is operationalized throughout the book by way of curricular strategies, discourse frameworks, and case studies illustrating the pedagogy in practice.

Questions to hold in mind when reading, reflecting, and writing about your own practice: 

  1. “I wish for all children and teachers to be caught up in a collective feeling that each young author’s writing matters, that each member of the community has something important to say, and that those ideas can be expressed, valued, and honored… That is the key reason why I wish that personal narrative could be the launch unit for each school year at every grade level. Writing stories from the ‘I’ position lays a path to building a classroom community grounded in testimony and critical witness” (2019, p. 59). 

    Taking Dutro’s words into account, what is your wish for “all children and teachers”?

    How, in your work with students, do you already incorporate opportunities for storytelling and sharing? How might you incorporate additional opportunities for members of the learning community to share “from the ‘I’ position”?
  1. An important part of incorporating sharing experiences into the classroom is scaffolding those experiences so students have agency to opt-in, choose what, how, and with whom they share, and titrate the content of their disclosure. Dutro speaks to differentiation, writing: “Importantly, children [in a classroom she observed], knew they could share their stories in any language they chose and, if they felt strongly that they didn’t want to include their narrative or be the one to share their story, they also had the option of not sharing or of having a peer or [the teacher] read their story” (2019, p. 51). Choice is an important element of trauma-informed, grief-responsive practice. 

    How do you already incorporate choice and scaffolding into your work with learners? What instructional objectives do you hold around differentiation, and why?

    As you read Dutro’s book, pick one unit or assignment you anticipate facilitating in the coming year, and try to weave one or two additional elements of choice, the cultivation of agency, into the design of those experiences. 

As you engage with these authors’ insights and write about your own, I encourage you to team up with friends and colleagues, a professional learning community, SCRR networks, or online learning groups to share your thoughts and stories, bear witness to others’, and brainstorm in community about how we can all create more grief-responsive, trauma-informed spaces with and for youth while caring for ourselves. 

For even more reading, check out: