Page 138 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
is a transformational claim, and cannot be divorced from conversations on racial inequality, lack of transformation and social inequality and inequity. Based on his ethnographic research with University of the Witwatersrand students, Nko (2021) explores ‘the suspended moment of #FeesMustFall’ to explore the physical and mental violence and trauma experienced by students. Himself an active participant in the 2015 and 2016 #FeesMustFall protests, Nko (2021) observes the use of trauma-informed language by students to make sense of their experiences of blackness and related structural and social suffering. This language includes students sharing how they have been ‘triggered’, are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder and increasing suicides and suicidal ideation among students.
While the word ‘trauma’ has gained popular usage in everyday lexicon, it is not always clear what people are referring to specifically when they mention the term. As such, what the idea of trauma means to one person is often different to what the term means to another person. This is because every human being in their lifetime experience, in one form or another, encounters some form of stressors such as getting sick, heartbreak or loss, among others. The spectrum of trauma one experiences, however, depends largely on how one is able to control, moderate and regulate one’s stress responses. As a result, neuroscientists ask that we focus on ‘The Three E’s’: the event, the experience of the event, and the effect(s) of
the experience. In the event, we look at what happened that caused stress responses to be activated. The experience looks at how one experienced the event. Lastly, we look at if there have been any lingering effects as a result of this experience.
Importantly, as Dr Bruce D. Perry shares, we should not only focus on the ‘Big T traumas’ such as natural disasters, but also the ‘Small T traumas’ as everyday microagressions. He says,
... you can be someone in an outgroup and have no big capital letter T trauma ... no natural disaster, never been shot, or raped, or a victim of sexual abuse ... but if you’re continually in a school where you’re feeling like you don’t belong, you’re not the right colour, you’re not the right gender, you’re not the right religious belief ... if you are continuously in the outgroup, it leads to the same emotional, physical and social consequences of capital T trauma (Perry & Winfrey 2021a).
What Perry refers to is what is often called ‘non-event trauma’. Although not as physically evident as the Big T trauma of natural disasters, Perry argues that it leads to the same effects as major trauma such as that produced by natural disasters. Through Nko (2021)
we see that although schooling produces joy and learning, the traumas produced by the schooling sector may further perpetuate elongated traumas in the classroom. The question then is how to educate in ways that are trauma sensitive and informed. hooks (2003) correctly notes that many of us, as a result of normalisation of violence in our lives, carry lasting traumas resulting from abandonment and abuse. She tasks us to seriously consider issues of emotional wellbeing as fundamental to our liberation (hooks 2003). According to her, ‘learning in an environment of anxiety and stress has caused many black folks to lose their faith in the transformational power of education’ (hooks, 2003: 92). With education systems mired and saturated by ‘narrow-minded educators’, hooks powerfully argues for educators to agitate for educational forms that refuse ‘plantation culture’ (hooks 2003: 92, 93) through a humanising education that values freedom and the weaving of humanity into education expertise.