Trauma-Informed Lens as a Literary Analytical Exercise
Sometimes a student of ours might smile. It’s harder to see that smile these days, literally. Yet, the potential to inspire that smile through our teaching still remains, regardless of our classrooms being in person with masks or not in person, though Zoom or Google Meet. Our shared occupation, teaching the reading, writing, speaking, and listening of the English Language Arts, is not built around explicit goals of inspiring smiles, joy or delight. So it is one of the greatest gifts of this occupation that we may be a part of those moments where a student smiles in our class, a smile borne not from a great grade alone, but the deeper joy of rightness, acknowledged through impressive grades or mastered standards, and finally experienced through quickly, yet profoundly, affirmative growth.
These are the good moments on the good days of a good profession. But we also have students who live with a barrier between our teaching and their ability to grow. If you’re a member of your school’s Student Assistance Program, that last sentence registers with you a little differently. It did four years ago for me, when I joined my district's SAP program and experienced my own profoundly affirmative growth in understanding those barriers. Mental Health professionals from UPMC and Western Psychiatric Hospital were my teachers, very knowledgeable instructors who shared intense anecdotes alongside fascinating research. I rarely smiled, though, because the content at hand was about how elusive the joy of rightness is for a number of our students each year. For the Language Arts teacher, we have a specific role within our students lives to be a positive figure of growth. Often in the AP classroom, we’re working with intense stories of humanity, presented specifically through the words of each author in our curriculum. How often are we offering a path of growth beyond powerfully tragic stories in our curriculum, especially in an AP or Pre-AP context? To offer this path, one that reduces the barriers to learning but with sufficient depth for those same standards, requires us to sometimes see our pedagogy, and even our curriculum, differently, outside the mechanics of measurable standards.
This is precisely where intensely brilliant and accomplished people like Nadine Burke Harris have outlined something practical that transformed me as a teacher. We are entering into a third decade with the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, and in the ELA profession, we should be engaging with this advancement of human understanding in a practical and humble way in our courses.
Towards the end of this month, I’ll be starting the Independent Reading portion of the Pre-AP Literature course I teach. I’ve had the standard literary lens options for that assignment as part of my pedagogy for decades, leading back to my internship year at Quaker Valley Middle School in the early 00’s, using John Noelle Moore’s Interpreting Young Adult Literature: Literary Theory in the Secondary Classroom as the launching pad. Like most of us incorporating literary theory, a student could choose to read a novel referenced on the AP Free Response Essay prompts, such as Catcher in the Rye, with a class lens, feminist lens, race/ethnicity lens, or archetypal lens. These stalwarts of late 20th century ELA teaching have provided generations of intellectual growth within the classroom, especially when tied to the practice of the IA Richards/T.S.Eliot school of close reading. But they are due for additions, revisions, and among teachers, a larger pedagogical discussion of how those lenses serve the greater human good of our students beyond the measurable standards. I suggest we start by adding a new lens, one suited to acknowledge what neurology and mental health counseling have both confirmed about the decade-long proliferation of student anxiety, an essential learning barrier. We need to offer a trauma-informed lens as a literary analytical exercise, in the same fashion as the lenses of the past.
I’ll be asking my students to consider the plot, the symbols, the characterization, the narrative point of view, and a number of other key literary elements that define how an author creates meaning in their text. That’s the core of literary analysis in the AP Literature classroom. But through a trauma-informed lens, I’ll be asking students to see where untreated trauma leads to further consequences in the setting of the story, for the directly traumatized, the people experiencing secondary trauma within the text, even those who might be sensitive to trauma in a text but may be suffering from compassion fatigue. We’ll use the ACES index as our concrete step for identification:
More specifically, without using the extensive questionnaire, students will use a general index for the ACES to view the character’s score:
ACEs Definitions
All ACE questions refer to the respondent’s first 18 years of life.
Abuse
Emotional abuse: A parent, stepparent, or adult living in your home swore at you, insulted you, put you down, or acted in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt.
Physical abuse: A parent, stepparent, or adult living in your home pushed, grabbed, slapped, threw something at you, or hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured.
Sexual abuse: An adult, relative, family friend, or stranger who was at least 5 years older than you ever touched or fondled your body in a sexual way, made you touch his/her body in a sexual way, attempted to have any type of sexual intercourse with you.
Household Challenges
Mother treated violently: Your mother or stepmother was pushed, grabbed, slapped, had something thrown at her, kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, hit with something hard, repeatedly hit for over at least a few minutes, or ever threatened or hurt by a knife or gun by your father (or stepfather) or mother’s boyfriend.
Substance abuse in the household: A household member was a problem drinker or alcoholic or a household member used street drugs.
Mental illness in the household: A household member was depressed or mentally ill or a household member attempted suicide.
Parental separation or divorce: Your parents were ever separated or divorced.
Incarcerated household member: A household member went to prison.
Neglect
Emotional neglect: Someone in your family did not help you feel important or special, you did not feel loved, people in your family did not look out for each other or feel close to each other, or your family was not a source of strength and support.
Physical neglect: There was not someone to take care of you, protect you, or take you to the doctor if you needed it, you didn’t have enough to eat, your parents were too drunk or too high to take care of you, or you had to wear dirty clothes.
Using this lens will reveal the craft of the storytelling, an understanding of the storyteller’s choice to engage us in the suffering of their story world. What specific words elicit empathy from us? Are we to see that character as traumatized, from the author's perspective, through explicit sensory imagery or direct characterization? Can a student not only find direct textual evidence, but identify the inferences that suggest the conditions listed above? These are text-dependent questions the Language Arts teacher is uniquely qualified to measure, to instruct, and to assess. Are we qualified to diagnose trauma? Not in a clinical sense. But in offering this lens, we not only expand close reading skills, but hopefully offer a few additional educational experiences about those who are qualified to diagnose and treat trauma.
First, who do we identify with in the text? If we are not the traumatized, are we somehow an indirect or passive part of the people or setting that actively or passively allows the trauma to happen? We can re-see our own humanity, both shared and rejected, and aim to be more open and available to the people in the world around us and their suffering. Second, if a student finds this type of analysis fulfilling, maybe they have a future in pediatrics, psychology, mental health counseling, or other related fields? Third, for those aspiring to write realistic fiction or even any engaging storytelling regardless of genre, a close analysis of powerfully emotional and insightful text can springboard an emerging author into a deeper understanding of the intensity carefully crafted text can contain.
This is certainly mature content, so I can not suggest this type of lens fits even in a 9th or 10th grade classroom. I asked school counselor Alaina Schrader, who works at the primary and elementary grade level, and she provided a suggestion for younger grades:
Try using some basic neuroscience or knowledge of the brain as a lens to apply to characters in literature. For example... "What part of the character's brain was activated when _______ happened?, etc. Trauma-informed education is really understanding behavior through the neuroscience lens, and depersonalizing behavior based on how our brains are wired. So even a basic understanding of the triune brain model helps a person understand the behavior of others and show compassion. (She teaches the triune brain model to 4th grade students at Avonworth)
As a teacher of any grade level, knowing the ACES index is helpful. Hopefully using this trauma-informed literary lens can help the ELA teacher not just improve close reading skills, but also counter the larger impact of sorting and labeling that the standard literary lens lends themselves to. A trauma-informed lens acknowledges both how we as individuals have our unique struggles but also how we share the larger bond to care for each other as members of the human family.
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