Team profile by Christina Lewis, Eliza Heaton, Harper Wilkinson, Laila Dames, Makala Carrington, Fréderique Ndatirwa, Emily Peairs, Hannah Sutton-Adams, Noga Zerubavel, Jan Holton and Warren Kinghorn

Stress is prevalent in all classroom spaces, and the frequency of stressful situations can be impacted by trauma. While not everyone at Duke University might share the same stress or traumatic experiences, all students, faculty and administration impact how trauma is handled in the classroom and on campus.

Duke has invested in creating mental health services for all its students and reducing campus sexual assault rates, tackling the issue of trauma through a campus-wide approach. However, there is a strong need to attend to how stress and trauma exist in academic programs.

The goals for our team are to foster tangible practices and improvements in the education system to aid trauma survivors and facilitate a safe atmosphere that normalizes and encourages student well-being. Through student and faculty focus groups that build upon these ideals, our team’s data will be used to inform and build future efforts to support everyone impacted by trauma.

A Closer Look Into Our Team

What makes our group unique is not only our qualitative research but also how we build upon our learning/research in our team meetings. Effectively, our team functions as a trauma-informed academic program, directly providing insights from individuals involved with the learning environment. Our class works as a laboratory to implement our identified best practices for trauma-informed teaching and learning.

Here are some of our best practices:

• Naming Current Events: At each meeting, we start with a practice of naming current events, holding space for both the positive and negative events in our lives. This practice is meant to not only provide context to our class meeting but it allows each researcher to come forth with what is on their mind. What are we savoring? What is making us uncomfortable? How can we work effectively in a space that is composed of diverse feelings? It gives us a chance to relate to one another, make sense of current events and pave the way for an ongoing conversation about mental health and well-being.

• Trauma Stewardship: One team member leads the class in a trauma stewardship exercise directly following the naming of current events. Trauma stewardship can look like a breathing exercise, a guided meditation or a thought experiment meant to ground ourselves and help us become present. We believe that the best academic work can only be done with present and ready minds, and when the material can be heavy and/or distressing, carving out space to ground ourselves can make tasks seem less daunting. Each member is encouraged to lead the exercise, facilitating a comfortable and collaborative atmosphere.

A Closer Look Into Our Research

To develop best practices for trauma-informed teaching and learning at Duke, our team must fully understand the perspectives of students and faculty. Currently, we are in the “listening” phase of our research: through our student and faculty focus groups, our group can learn from our Duke community and their firsthand experiences related to trauma in the classroom.

We are currently working on disseminating our findings from the undergraduate focus groups through a manuscript and an op-ed. From our undergraduate focus groups, we identified five themes that impact the climate of the learning environment:

1. Student context
2. Faculty pedagogical decisions
3. University and classroom policy implementation
4. Faculty interpersonal skills
5. Barriers to psychological safety

By understanding how these themes affect the educational environment, we can develop specific teaching and learning practices that directly target these areas. For example, we can focus on eliminating shaming behaviors, facilitating peer support, increasing accommodations through administration and fostering effective communication from faculty/TAs. Our identified themes and sub-themes for the undergraduate focus groups are displayed below:

Developing Best Practices for Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning

Poster by Christina Lewis, Eliza Heaton, Harper Wilkinson, Laila Dames, Makala Carrington, Frederique Ndatirwa, Emily Peairs, Hannah Sutton-Adams, Noga Zerubavel, Jan Holton and Warren Kinghorn