Why Our Trauma-Informed Teaching Must Be More Culturally Responsive
EdSurge
Years ago, before I became an educator, I took a contemporary Native American studies course as one of my first college classes. For the final research assignment, I choose to explore the disproportionate rates of suicide among Native American youth—an issue that impacts nearly all tribal communities, including my own, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. From that assignment I learned that understanding trauma can help us better address complex behavioral issues in the communities we care about, whether those communities are our tribal nations or classrooms. That research paper was the beginning of my relationship with what most educators know as “trauma-informed practices,” a term used for acknowledging the widespread effects of trauma, and started me on my journey of advocating for Native youth through education. I realized that in many cases, our understanding of trauma—where it comes from and how to address it—is limited. In order to truly address trauma, we must also consider both the cultural experiences and socioeconomic inequities that impact our students. Many years later, I find myself drawing on my early understanding of trauma from an Indigenous context quite often in my current position working for an urban school district in Arizona. As a Native American student achievement teacher for a federally funded grant program, I work directly with teachers of Native American students to develop their capacity for culturally responsive practices. On any given day, you might find me performing the duties of an instructional coach, professional development facilitator or classroom teacher for the 1,300 Native American students in our district. The Native American students I work with, like so many other Indigenous youth, experience high rates of poverty and health disparities, especially in regard to COVID-19, which has hit Native populations particularly hard. All these things contribute to a higher chance of trauma-exposure, but more importantly the Native students in my district are citizens of tribal nations with longstanding cultural traditions of valuing reciprocal relationships with all living things, including their communities, lands and waters. In my experience, teachers who have the most success with their Native students take into consideration these cultural strengths during their planning and instruction.
