By Addison Duane, Simona Goldin, and Debi Khasnabis
The superhero. The savior. The painting on the school cafeteria wall that reads, “Even on your worst day, you are still a child’s best hope.” The insistence that teachers are in the business of “saving lives.”
These narratives, and our nation’s continued denial of systemic racism, infiltrate our schools. At the same time, trauma-informed educational practices continue to gain in popularity across the U.S. and globe. This is not surprising, as we enter the third year of a global pandemic where more than 140,000 children (and counting) have lost a caregiver to this deadly virus (National Institutes of Health, 2021). We raise serious concerns about this proliferation, given that most popularized versions of trauma-informed practice fail to center race and racism (Goldin & Khasnabis, 2020; Khasnabis & Goldin, 2020).
In our article, we analyzed educators’ tweets authored during the early months of COVID-19 school closures. We unearthed an insidious, common stance within many educator ideologies around trauma and trauma-informed practice: White saviorism.
A form of White supremacy, White saviorism in education is predicated on the belief that White teachers can and should “save” youth of color and those living in poverty. This stereotypical hero–teacher narrative permeates popular media as well as everyday life. We sought to uncover the ways these discourses pervade educator thinking and interaction by looking carefully at nearly 3,000 educators’ tweets. Our analyses revealed that educators regularly reproduced the savior narrative, with implied racial messaging, through the following themes:
- Assuming school is a/the safe space
- Blaming children and their communities for trauma and systemically constructed injustices
- Deficit-framing children and their communities
- Performatively virtue signaling
- Using trauma to deny access to ambitious academic content
For example, one educator tweeted, “Pray for the kids who are unable to self-distance from individuals in their homes who [sic] unsafe & toxic … Many of those young people use schools & community centers as a safe place…”
As we wrote in our piece, herein lies the danger:
“[E]mploying trauma-informed practice absent a focus on race and racism enables White saviorism to fester and guide the enactment of trauma-informed practice.”
It doesn’t have to be this way.
In our analysis, we also uncovered moments where educators speak back tothese problematic saviorist distortions. These interventions, modeled by educators on Twitter, provide clarity and inspiration for how we, as a field, can steer away from racist interpretations of trauma and instead toward liberatory realizations. Using what we call “systemically trauma-informed practice” (SysTIP) exemplar tweets as illustrations, we have developed two necessary moves for thinking critically and pushing back against racism: identifying and interrupting.
Identifying includes critically examining our own assumptions and frames, inviting a different lens, and naming what is happening. Interrupting is the process of speaking back to problematic distortions while dislodging racism. In our article, we elaborate the specific moves that educators can take to do this critical work of SysTIP.
Dena Simmons writes “we cannot tweet away racism” (2020). Nor can we tweet away the harm Whiteness causes every day in schools. But we can recognize and interrupt White saviorism, especially as it is embedded in statements about trauma-informed practice, children, and their communities. We can also see and understand how the system of schooling itself perpetuates racism and trauma.
We charge educators looking to be more “trauma-informed” to join us in the critically important work of illuminating and interrupting systemic injustice. Together, may we ignite a path towards justice for students in classrooms around the country.
By Addison Duane, Simona Goldin, and Debi Khasnabis
The authors contributed the article “Interrupting the Weaponization of Trauma-Informed Practice: ‘…who were you really doing the “saving” for?’” to the Jan-Mar 2022 edition of KDP’s Educational Forum, which you can access free for the month of January 2022.
Addison Duane, MA, is an elementary teacher turned Educational Psychology doctoral candidate at Wayne State University studying middle childhood development and school-based trauma. Her research centers children and communities and investigates education as liberation.
Simona Goldin is a Research Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina. Her research is on training beginning teachers to teach in more racially just and equitable ways, looking at how innovations are weaponized against communities they are meant to support.
Debi Khasnabis is a Clinical Associate Professor of Education and the Chair of Elementary Teacher Education at the University of Michigan. She teaches multicultural and multilingual education and her research supports culturally responsive teaching and understanding inequality in schools.
References
Goldin, S., & Khasnabis, D. (2020). Trauma-informed practice is a powerful tool. But it’s also incomplete. Education Week.
Goldin, S., Khasnabis, D. & Duane, A.. (2022). Interrupting White Saviorism in Trauma-Informed Practice: “… who were you really doing the ‘saving’ for?” The Educational Forum.
Khasnabis, D., & Goldin, S. (2020). Don’t Be Fooled, Trauma Is a Systemic Problem: Trauma as a Case of Weaponized Educational Innovation. Occasional Paper Series, 2020(43), 5.
National Institutes of Health. (2021, October 7). More than 140,000 U.S. children lost a primary or secondary caregiver. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Simmons, D. (2020, June 5). If We Aren’t Addressing Racism, We Aren’t Addressing Trauma. ASCD.