Enhancing safety, minimising harm
It is a major health problem: in Australia, 5 million adults have been affected by childhood trauma, and it is frequently “unrecognised, unacknowledged, and unaddressed”.
Little wonder that a recent Monash University study found more than 80 per cent of teachers had supported at least one student during their career who had been exposed to trauma.
The academics who carried out the survey recommended trauma-informed teacher training for Australian educators.
Trauma-informed training is about “enhancing safety, prioritising relationships, working towards healing, and minimising harm”, says Megan Corcoran, a former special needs teacher and IEU member who is now a university lecturer and founder of the Wagtail Institute.
She uses ‘wellbeing science’ to prevent burnout and improve outcomes for students and teachers.
“It’s not just there for extreme situations, but it is a way of being with each other. When we embrace trauma-informed approaches, we are more compassionate, supportive, and responsive to the needs of those in our communities,” Corcoran told IE.
Using a trauma-informed approach, teachers can understand why students may be behaving in certain ways and what they might need.
“This not only supports the student in these moments, but it improves our wellbeing too.
“We must acknowledge that this is not easy work and that it takes conscious effort to look after ourselves while we are doing it. The first step is to recognise and understand our own stress responses and explore ways we can effectively regulate ourselves.”
That self-regulation is different for each of us, but Corcoran says it often involves using both proactive strategies (what helps us bring our best selves to work each day) and responsive strategies (what can I do for myself in those really high-stress moments).
Take a breath
Her own proactive strategies include exercise, meditation and swimming and her responsive strategies include patterned breathing, taking a physiological sigh (a deep breath consisting of two inhales and one long exhale), and walking slowly around the classroom.
“There is a lot of talk about compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and burnout. So, educators must be aware of the risks, stay engaged in activities they enjoy outside of work, and prioritise their important relationships and connections.
“That takes care of the initial physiological responses to trauma, but we must have ways to emotionally process trauma exposure as well. Schools must consider ways to effectively debrief, and provide access to things like counselling or supervision too.”
When ex-teacher and education writer Emily Kaplan sought similar tips from Professor Hochschild, she was surprised by the response.
“She explained that teachers who, apart from students and parents, tend to be the furthest from the centre of school power, are the ‘shock absorbers’ of an overwhelmed system.
Picking up the slack
Teachers are expected to pick up the slack when students “fail to get what they need from their families, from schools, from society as a whole”, Professor Hochschild says. She was speaking about the US education system, but Australian teachers will be familiar with the sentiment.
When teachers inevitably fail to solve the problems of the world for a student, they feel “personal and professional guilt”, which they suppress.
“Emotional labour begets more emotional labour.”
Professor Hochschild says because emotional labour is systemic, the answers also need to be systemic.
We need to stop lumping teachers with “disproportionate ownership over their students’ emotional lives” and create “an atmosphere in which teachers have a voice and feel respected”, she says.
A functioning care system makes emotional labour “gratifying rather than burdensome”.
Teachers must feel like they’re part of a larger team with proper emotional and psychological support structures available.
When teachers’ expertise is respected, they can “assess their strengths and weaknesses, manage their wellbeing more proactively, and pursue their professional growth”.
Number one priority
Corcoran agrees the priorities of the education system are most important.
“There is so much research to show that strong wellbeing results in academic performance, while low wellbeing results in a reduced capacity to learn,” Corcoran says. “So, why isn’t wellbeing the number one priority for students, for staff, and entire school communities?
“If it was the priority, then teachers would be supported to learn wellbeing science and trauma-informed practice at university, school policies and procedures would be appropriately informed, and the curriculum would also look different to how it is now.
“We know there are so many compassionate teachers making positive change in their classrooms and wider school communities, but we need the system to work with them, not against them.”
Unique education solutions
Some schools offer token ‘off-the-shelf’ wellbeing advice, imported from the corporate sector, which lacks understanding of education’s unique stresses. Teachers have criticised some of these as ‘toxic positivity’ and ‘cruel wellbeing’ (see When wellness becomes toxic, p14).
To avoid such negative outcomes, staff need to be consulted when wellbeing measures are proposed.
Rose Hackman, author of Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power, says to create an environment that accurately rewards emotional labour, we also need practical reforms: paid parental leave, universal child care and laws to address gendered poverty and pay inequality.
“In white-collar settings, visibility and reward for emotional labour at all levels of the hierarchy through pay, status and promotion would foster high performance and workplace stability, and confront double standards faced by marginalised workers.”
Hackman says such policies are vital as workplaces evolve and emotional labour proves the essential human skill in “otherwise digitised, AI-dominant, impersonal environments”.
“Rewarding such labour is not only just — it is, quite simply, common sense,” Hackman says.
Corcoran says positive psychology concentrates on “strengths and enhancing wellbeing rather than on deficits and responding to challenges”.
“Schools adopting wellbeing science see improvements in staff and student wellbeing, which then results in increased academic achievements, too,” she says.
Emotional labour is at the centre of education. Corcoran wants that to be where staff wellbeing is situated.
“We need to stop lying to teachers about what the profession is all about, acknowledge that young people are complex beings who aren’t meant to sit in classrooms quietly for hours each day,” she says.
“We need to move away from compliance and control and get a little more human-centred in the design of the system. I’d like to ask us all to consider what we want the next generation to be and then map out what it would take to get them there.”
References
Understood.org, Trynia Kaufman: https://u.org/3UDyolQ
Mental Health Australia: ieu.news/yhg
The Educator Online 19 March 2024: ieu.news/em5
Wagtail Institute, Megan Corcoran: ieu.news/rld
Washington Post, 5 September 2023: ieu.news/nu8
The Educator Online 12 July 2023:ieu.news/443
Edutopia 19 July 2019:ieu.news/yf9
Education Matters 4 December 2023: ieu.news/dq3
The Conversation 1 March 2021: ieu.news/slm
Monash University Education:ieu.news/te2
