Despite a growing awareness of trauma-informed care in the university and an emerging consensus that trauma-informed practice should be integrated into university structure, culture and curricula, trauma-informed practice is still not consistently operationalised, or even well understood, in Australian universities.
To date, most trauma-informed change efforts have focused on decolonising the curriculum, embedding Indigenous knowledges and cultural capability in the classroom, and creating culturally safe spaces that build academic confidence and resilience.
In Australia, as in other postcolonial states, these practices are important for redressing the trauma of colonisation and for building more diverse, equitable and inclusive learning environments. A decolonised curriculum, for example, acknowledges and actively works to dismantle epistemic injustice, which can manifest subtly through dominant cultural perspectives and more explicitly through biases in assessment design, reading materials and resource allocation.
These practices, however, are typically conceived as teaching and learning interventions that are employed by individual educators or disciplines, rather than as a comprehensive framework that is adopted by the university as a whole. The problem with this piecemeal approach is that trauma-informed practice requires a systemic embrace rather than a siloed response. In other words, to be effective, trauma-informed organisational change must occur at the micro, meso and macro levels. It must be embedded in individual practice, coordinated across departments and services, and reinforced through university policies and processes. To put it even more simply, trauma-informed care must be the norm across all areas of the university.
- Resource collection: Decolonising the curriculum
- Knowledge and approaches needed for trauma-informed teaching
- Spotlight guide: Making university safe for all
So, before we can assess a university’s readiness to be trauma-informed, we need to first understand how trauma-informed care is apprehended and enacted by both academic and professional staff.
Recently, we conducted focus groups at our university to better ascertain how academics, administrators and student support staff perceive the purpose and value of trauma-informed practice, and how they perceive their capacity to contribute to organisational change.
We discovered that while most staff were united on the importance of trauma-informed care, several myths persist about what trauma-informed practice is (and is not). Some academic staff, for example, conflated teaching about trauma with trauma-informed teaching, confused trigger warnings with trigger points and, perhaps most alarmingly – given the prevalence of trauma exposure and risk among university students – misjudged trauma-informed practice as “the business of psychologists” rather than educators.
Myth 1: Trauma-informed teaching means teaching about trauma
Teaching students about trauma is not the same as trauma-informed teaching.
Trauma-informed teaching is an educational approach that recognises the risks of retraumatisation and secondary traumatisation for students and seeks to mitigate the impacts of trauma by prioritising and protecting emotional safety.
Learning about trauma, on the other hand, involves the study of trauma theory, ethics and experience, which can be taught in clinical disciplines such as psychology, counselling and social work, as well as in nonclinical areas such as the creative arts and humanities.
Of course, in the classroom, students can learn about trauma and be taught through trauma-informed pedagogy. For example, in a nonfiction writing course in which students appraise cancer memoirs, the teacher might use sensitivity reads and syllabus disclaimers – trauma-informed teaching and learning strategies – to prepare students for potentially distressing content, to promote choice in reading material, and to ultimately respect learner autonomy. At the same time, students might learn, through the course reading, that trauma narratives are often repetitive, rhizomatic and disjointed.
In this scenario, then, students learn about the characteristics of trauma stories and at the same time undertake this learning safely through pedagogical practices that are designed to accommodate the needs of cancer survivors and caregivers, while at the same time minimising the potential for either new trauma or further harm.
For this reason, trauma-informed practice does not require students to disclose their trauma stories or histories, nor does it propose that pain is a precursor to learning. Trauma-responsive teaching is not teaching that is informed by an educator’s own trauma, nor is it teaching as therapy.
Myth 2: Trauma-informed practice can be applied to any situation
Another common misconception about trauma-informed teaching is that it is a single strategy or technique that is suitable for all learners and learning environments.
In fact, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to trauma-informed care, just as there is no right or wrong way to experience trauma.
Trauma-informed practice is not a magic bullet.
At its core, trauma-informed practice is a holistic approach to service delivery that is grounded in an understanding of, and responsiveness to, the negative impacts of trauma, and which uses tools and strategies to promote growth, healing and resilience.
In the classroom, for example, trigger warnings are one (contested) method that educators use to alert students to potentially distressing material. As a subtype of content notes, trigger warnings focus on the needs of individuals with trauma experience or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Trigger points, on the other hand, are common stressors or pressure points in the learning journey, such as the lead-up to exams, the approach of a viva or the wait for a visa extension.
Similarly, trigger warnings should not be confused with triggers (sensory reminders of a traumatic event) or with warning signs or symptoms of trauma exposure.
Myth 3: Trauma-informed care is only for clinicians
Trauma-informed care was initially developed to improve clinical practice and social service delivery. However, trauma-informed practice and its various applications and benefits extend beyond the clinical setting and the human services.
Trauma-informed care continues to gain momentum in higher education, with an increasing number of university leaders and administrators recognising that systemic change is critical if the university is to both meet the needs of its students and staff, and to function as a healthy, well-adjusted organisation for its many stakeholders, including the community at large.
Institutions, like individuals, are not immune to crisis.
Certainly, trauma-informed care recognises that academic and professional staff who work with students who have experienced trauma may also be exposed to secondary or vicarious trauma, and that front-line staff need adequate training and support to prevent burnout and compassion fatigue.
Trauma-informed practice, in this respect, is everyone’s business.
Kate Cantrell is a senior lecturer in writing, editing and publishing; India Bryce is a senior lecturer in human development, well-being and counselling; and Jessica Gildersleeve is professor of English literature, all at the University of Southern Queensland.
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