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Conceptualizing Sexual Trauma and PTSD
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Challenges of Teaching with Sexual Trauma as a Graduate Student Instructor
Integrating Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, Critical Disability Theory, and Networks of Care
Evolving Assessment Practices
While attending to Gelms et al.’s (2021) call for “deep meditations on inclusive pedagogical practices and trauma-informed teaching and learning,” I recognize that we don’t always control our curricula as graduate students. My suggestions here assume that you have at least a little flexibility. If not, the suggestions will hopefully still be useful tools to conceptualize writing instruction.
Most critically, you should avoid assigning content that could potentially retraumatize you. While that advice is superficially obvious, it requires both introspection and forward thinking. Course planning in July has a much different feel than teaching in November, and the texts and topics you selected months ago might not feel as innocuous as you listen to students dissect them. While it is our task to guide conversations, our power to control students’ statements has a limit, as well it should.
Assuming that your course content preserves your safety as much as possible, I’ve chosen to focus on assessment as a pivotal example of how we can use trauma-informed pedagogy to counteract the effects of trauma, in this case, the depression, anxiety, and freeze that make teaching laborious. I do not wish to make it sound like a miserable task, but assessing student writing is time-consuming and emotionally taxing. When instructor trauma enters the equation, assessment becomes an aggressive stressor.
My first suggestion is to reduce the amount of time you spend grading. For instance, instructors are required to assign a minimum number of pages, but often not all of them must receive written feedback. I assign my first-year writing students a weekly, one-page freewrite, which I grade solely on completion and focus. By not providing extensive feedback, I create space for my students to explore their ideas in a low-pressure environment while easing my schedule. Revisiting your syllabus to reduce grading offers the chance to enact trauma-informed pedagogy’s goal to practice compassion for yourself and your students.
In this spirit, implementing alternative assessment strategies can benefit both students and instructors with trauma. Many instructors have found success with labor-based contract grading as anti-ableist and anti-racist activism, using it to build a collaborative dynamic between them and their students (DasBender et al., 2023; Graphenreed & Poe, 2022; O’Meara, 2022; Gomes et al., 2020). Conceptualizing grades as holistic rather than compartmentalized to individual tasks may soothe some worries for the instructor who stresses that the effects of trauma will negatively impact their ability to keep pace with traditional grading protocol (Cowan, 2020). Increasing the instructor’s agency over the grading protocol will make the assessment process more accessible.
On that note, increasing student agency by offering them the chance to choose the amount of feedback they receive alleviates stress on both ends. A couple of years into online asynchronous teaching, I realized that my students weren’t reading my feedback on their essays. Since then, I’ve let them choose the option to receive solely their labor-based rubric grade or their grade in addition to detailed feedback for each essay. I found that in a class of twenty-two, typically fewer than five ask for feedback. Initially, this demoralized me as I assumed the other nineteen were uninterested in improving their writing. By conducting anonymous surveys, I found that many students are just overwhelmed with the amount of feedback they receive from their classes combined. I’ve also found that the “rubric only” students improve as writers by applying our lesson content to the areas I’ve marked for improvement on their rubrics. Now, my students are less overwhelmed with feedback, and I am less overwhelmed with providing copious amounts of it. This strategy has worked for me; my point is not that you model it, but that you give yourself the grace to develop strategies that work for you.
My final suggestion is to incorporate multimodal self-assessment into the writing process. Conversations on student-centered pedagogies sometimes forget to consider how self-assessment plays a critical role in fostering ethical grading ecologies (DasBender et al., 2023; O’Meara, 2022; Cowan, 2020). In my first-year writing course, my students each create a podcast that reflects on their written literacy narrative, assessing its strengths and discussing ways to improve it for inclusion in their portfolio. The feedback I’ve received from my students shows they enjoy the multimodal process because it’s often easier for them to engage in metacognition through speech than through writing. For me, this allows more time to provide feedback on their narratives. (The podcast is required to pass the assignment but not graded.) Time is especially valuable for this project, which is the most emotionally taxing to grade out of all I assign. I encourage you to empower yourself to make small changes such as these: I believe that by treating your own needs as thoughtfully as you do your students’, you will find that everyone benefits.