Working Toward Trauma-Informed Praxis: Reflections on a Shared Learning Process
Ghunta, J. Kelly, Ute
Ghunta, J.
Kelly, Ute
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2024-03-22
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Abstract
The work of disrupting hierarchies and transforming oppressive structures is both intellectual and deeply embodied, an engagement with the world around us and the worlds within us. Attending to the causes and impacts of trauma is one important way of bridging these dimensions. This chapter reflects on our learning from conversations and collaborations that began in 2017 when Juleus was a student in the Peace Studies M.A. program at the University of Bradford (UK) and Ute was his dissertation supervisor. Our collaboration has been a process of conscientization and deepening reflexivity, a back-and-forth between lived experiences and academic insights. Our reflection takes a collaborative autoethnographic approach (Chang, Ngunjiri & Hernandez, 2012) and is written in separate voices to make differences in our experiences and perspectives more visible. We begin with brief overviews of our journeys into Peace Studies at Bradford. We then reflect on how we connected and collaborated there during Juleus' dissertation and the questions it raised around making sense of difficult personal stories in academic contexts and beyond. We continued exchanging ideas and questions after Juleus left Bradford, and over time, this led to an awareness of the need for trauma-informed practice (SAMHSA, 2014) in education and other areas of society (Ghunta & Kelly, 2019). Principles for trauma-informed practice include safety, trustworthiness and transparency, collaboration and mutuality, and engagement with cultural, historical and gender issues and inequalities (SAMHSA, 2014). Our reflections suggest both that these principles are important and that their realization in practice can be challenging because they demand significant personal, interpersonal and structural work. The final part of the chapter describes how we have taken this learning into our separate contexts and explores some of the questions that are central to trauma-informed pedagogy and praxis in light of the hierarchies and inequalities that characterize much of the world in which we live and work.
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Ghunta J and Kelly U (2024) Working Toward Trauma-Informed Praxis: Reflections on a Shared Learning Process. In: Williams HMA, Huski H and Noto CM (Eds) Disrupting Hierarchy in Education: Students and Teachers Collaborating for Social Change. New York : Teachers College Press.
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Book chapter