Education and Resources
for teaching and learning to hold space
Recommended Reading
While not directly related to classroom methodology or materials, the titles below have been instrumental in fostering my awareness of trauma informed education.
Each of the titles below is linked to Amazon just in case you would like to order.
“ Twenty years of medical research has shown that childhood adversity literally gets under our skin, changing people in ways that can endure in their bodies for decades. It can tip a child’s developmental trajectory and affect physiology. It can trigger chronic inflammation and hormonal changes that can last a lifetime. It can alter the way DNA is read and how cells replicate, and it can dramatically increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes—even Alzheimer’s.”
These two short videos by physicians concerned with the effects of childhood experiences explain ACEs—a test for Adverse Childhood Experiences. Their findings my interest you not only in in terms of the students you teach, but in terms of yourself and your family as well
The Trauma Informed Classroom
“ Trauma is not solely dependent on what happens to us. Sometimes it is what we do to ourselves. It is the story we tell ourselves about what has happened, or it is the story we fail to tell, allowing experience to settle in our bodies and be remembered in sudden sweats, racing pulses, flushed cheeks, cramped stomachs...it is what the body remembers.”
Materials and Sample Lessons
Cultivating Space Within:
Using Literature as a Springboard for an Understanding of Self
Activity for Transcendentalism Introduction
Lessons for John Krakauer’s Into the Wild
Activities for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (name motif)
Additional Resources
I painted the image above based on a drawing Ryan Freeman sent to me from prison. He considered it an “inner landscape,” a “mind-scape.” It told me more than he was capable of saying with words at the time.