MOUNT MARY RESEARCHERS AND FACULTY STAND AT THE FOREFRONT OF BUILDING TRAUMA-SENSITIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS THAT FOSTER RESILIENCY AND SUPPORT CHILDREN
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ike a storm cloud looming over a child’s head, trauma is a condition that inhibits learning and paints a bleak forecast for long-term health.
Trauma can be intensely personal — every child reacts differently to profound emotional suffering – but when it happens within populations of students it becomes an institutional issue as well. Educators struggle with the question: How can school environments become more sensitive to students who endure ongoing abuse, neglect, dysfunction and other forms of trauma? Based on Mount Mary University’s longtime focus on trauma treatment, researchers at the University are implementing strategies for creating trauma-sensitive learning environments.
SHIFTING FROM CAUSE TO RESPONSE As a school counselor at a Milwaukee Catholic high school in the mid-1990s, Carrie King, Ph.D., played a number of roles with the students she served. She remembers seeing the same group of kids over and over again for chronic behavior problems. They all had different labels — post-traumatic stress, abuse, personality disorders — “a big constellation of symptoms,” she recalled. Yet they shared a commonality, an inability to control their behavior to the point of causing a disruption in the classroom and forcing the teacher to send them out. No matter what got them there, they all landed in the same place, the school office. The term “trauma” has become a blanket concept that covers the various types of conditions and circumstances that can cause compromise a person’s ability to respond to situations and environment in ways that are emotionally,
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