Human and Professor: Using Trauma-Informed Pedagogy to Reimagine Teaching in the Wake of COVID-19

Abstract

In recent years, trauma-informed pedagogy has begun to grapple with the ways in which structural oppressions such as racism and colonialism are themselves reproduced through the neoliberal university, greatly impacting student learning. Through this lens, the denigration of Black Language within discourses of standardized English or the absence of Black academics on a syllabus are shown to be much more than mere symptoms of bias or oversight. Alvarez and colleagues explain that such factors actively reproduce an environment in which racial trauma risks being triggered for students of color, who may then find it much more difficult to learn. In my own field of composition, this situation has long been recognized by anti-racist academics calling for the celebration of Black Language as a matter of both racial justice and pedagogical necessity