'The mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence'

More thoughts on creating trauma-informed classrooms

For the last couple of weeks, I have been writing some reflections on what it means (in theory and in practice) to work to create trauma-informed classrooms. You can find the introductory post in the series here, in case you want to go back and read from the beginning.

In last week’s post, on “The Tyranny of the Normal,” I took a question from a reader and used that as my starting point. I mentioned that the reader had sent a second question, and that’s what I am going to focus on in this reflection.

They write:

I hear what you’re saying about resisting a model where you open up students’ skulls and dump in information. Yet, you are also wanting them to gain a greater understanding of the material which does, presumably, mean you need to take on the role of the expert. How do you find the balance between those?

Such a good question!

Power Differences

One of the aspects of the classroom that I want to keep in mind is that—no matter how ‘benign’ or safe a space the instructor may wish to create—the very structure of the educational environment (in late-stage capitalism, but also more generally across the past couple of centuries) is a space of unbalanced power.

As an instructor, I have a lot of latitude to create explicit or implicit regimes of discipline with my students. In broad strokes: I set the schedule and the pace; I pick the focus points of the materials; I police the edges of discussions; and I get to deploy my reactions a social dynamics on the page and in the classroom. All of these factors can contribute to moments of explicit or implicit joy or fear in my students.

And of course, the most explicit disciplinary factor of all: I am responsible for the evaluation of my students. I am expected to render a judgment—a grade—that describes each of them in terms of ‘mastery’ or ‘failure’ with regard to the course materials.

Of course, in these moments, I am also socially located as the arbiter of what is (and is not) a ‘proper’ response to the course materials and subject matter. In a typically functioning classroom, there is no one looking over my shoulder to ensure that I am doing that ‘correctly,’ or justly, or compassionately. That is to say, unless something is going very wrong, each classroom is a sort of ‘black box’ operation, where students come in one end, and leave the other end with an evaluation, and (short of looking at the syllabus, perhaps) not much is asked by deans or administrators about the process in between.

These are all the factors that are in my mind when I read the question above. This is what I understand as the referent when talking about ‘the role of the expert.’ That role (in my understanding) has less to do with a difference in mastery of the materials, and much more (in the classroom setting, at least) with the difference in social power around the engagement with those materials.

No Power is Neutral

There is a romantic notion of ‘benevolent’ or ‘benign’ power in the classroom. Educators deploy strategies of discipline to promote a narrative of ‘order.’ I have had colleagues who have signs over the trash can in their offices that say “Late papers go here.” or who have employed elaborate online analysis systems to “catch” plagiarists and cheaters.

All of this is justified, of course, by the idea that—in the classroom—everyone is there for the same reason: we are all there to master the materials, and only honest mastery counts or will be counted as legitimate. That is the naive perception of the classroom dynamic; using the language of Dan Olson from last week, that is the classroom’s normal.

This is where sensitivity to trauma can be useful for rethinking the entire classroom experience. When we talk about those who have experienced trauma, we are talking about those who have experienced a fundamental lack of control in a key moment of their existence (or perhaps, as in the case of complex traumatic stress, on multiple occasions).

With such individuals, the re-introduction to a situation where their agency is threatened, or where they again experience a fundamental lack of control, can be a re-triggering experience.

In other words, the fact that up to one out of every two persons in our classroom is coming there with mild to significant traumatic experiences (the statistic from the first post in this series) gives us ample reason to re-think and deconstruct the overt and covert power structures in the classroom.

Why? Because if up to 50% of our students are being re-traumatized by power differences, then it stands to reason that none of the power differences we employ can be (as we might wish or imagine) benevolent or benign.

That is to say, where we (the educators) might interpret a classroom moment as benign power used in service of the mastery of the material, a significant number of students might well be interpreting that same moment as simply an experience of triggering, re-traumatizing power difference. In those moments, those students will not be able to see past the trauma to “neutrally” engage with the material, no matter how benign we intend the presentation.

John Holt - How Children Learn and Fail

One of the theorists I keep coming back to when I think about pedagogy is John Holt. A couple of decades ago, I happened upon two of his books—How Children Learn and How Children Fail.

They were revolutionary for me, in particular, because Holt unearths and interrogates how schools, from the very first moments with young children, begin the process of socializing them to be docile by terrorizing them.

Sometimes the terror is overt, as in when a child is ridiculed or punished. More often, however, the terror is covert. A child is made to feel that they are inadequate, or that they will not be treasured or loved, of they do not please the teacher.

As Holt observed, this leads to disastrous, and counter-educational, results:

For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them. [from How Children Fail, emphasis mine]

By the time students get to graduate school where I encounter them, they have become extraordinarily well-socialized. In most cases, they will never need to be presented with a direct or overt threat to get them to conform to the social expectations of the classroom. Instead, as with Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, they will be self-monitoring and self-regulating in the classroom.

But what this means is not that efficient learning, or indeed any learning, is occurring. Instead, what we can expect is that up to half the students are sitting in the classroom in a state of trauma or terror, but they have been so well socialized that they have learned to hide it from the instructor, and in many cases even to hide it from themselves.

But this socialization does not lead to efficient learning. Following Holt’s insight above, it leads instead to the destruction of the possibility of learning, and even to the destruction of intelligence itself.

By which I mean this: the unreflective structure of the “normal” classroom, based as it is around the naive deployment of “expertise” as a power difference, creates the situation where students are led to less learning, and less active intelligence, by their very participation in that structure.

(In a future post, I will say more about the connections between the insights Holt has about young learners, and my assertion that the dynamics remain in place for adult learners. For now, if you are interested, let me suggest an excellent essay by Herbert Kohl, called I Won’t Learn From You, that addresses the issue.)

Strategies Against ‘Expertise’

Given the observations above, it makes sense to return to the original question:

Yet, you are also wanting them to gain a greater understanding of the material which does, presumably, mean you need to take on the role of the expert. How do you find the balance between those?

If we seek to be trauma-informed, we must intentionally construct situations in the classroom that undermine the centrality of the instructor as the ‘expert.’ That power dynamic must be named, when possible, and actively opposed in practice.

One technique I have found particularly helpful was developed by Myles Horton and his colleagues at the Highlander Folk School back in the early 20th century. Horton has described it in folksy terms in interviews. At other points, as when he had a series of recorded discussions with Paolo Friere, he became more theoretical. But the basics of the pedagogy is this:

Since I chose to work with poor, oppressed people, I had to take into consideration that they’d never been allowed to value their own experience; that they’d been told it was dirt and that only teachers and experts knew what was good for them.

A trauma-informed classroom can proceed by re-valuing and re-centering the voices of the students as the experts—not only of their own experience but of the materials of the course itself.

This re-centering allows them to become active interlocutors with the course texts, and with each other in the classroom.

As-such, the centrality of “the lecture” (and the lecturer) is dethroned. In the place of that dramatic “expert,” the instructor becomes the facilitator of a discussion amongst adults who have things to say about how the text (and their ideas about it) are important to them and speak to their concerns.

This means that the instructor will need to adopt a radical posture of affirmation. It is not the job of the instructor to act as a gatekeeper in this situation or to say “no” to an idea. Rather, it is incumbent on the instructor to seek for the connecting points of an idea to the emerging themes of the discussion.

In my own practice, I have come away from these classroom moments amazed at the things that I learned about a text or a set of ideas. My students, when allowed to take the reins of their own educational moment, have shown again and again that they do not need to be led or forced to find the aspects that interest or anger them.

Clearly, this is not a perfect solution to the power dynamics in a classroom, but this is one effective strategy for beginning to dethrone the instructor as the sole “expert” in the educational moment.

The results are not a magical loosening of trauma or terror, but it does allow for the emergence of some different dynamics in the pedagogical moment, and those can result in a return of agency and voice to the students, and may even be the first steps toward deeper healing.

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As I mentioned, this is part 3 of a series on “creating a trauma-informed classroom.” You can read part 1 here, and you can read Part 2 here. I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment, and if you want to ensure you get access to the whole series, please consider subscribing. Also, if you think others would benefit from reading these ideas, it would be wonderful if you would share them. Those links are below. Thank you.