Understanding and Implementing Trauma-Informed Post-Secondary Education Through a Community of Practice

By Matty Hillman, Counsellor, Instructor, and Education Developer, Selkirk College

Trauma and its impacts on teaching and learning remain a prominent topic in post-secondary education, and for good reason: the majority of us have experienced trauma. Its effects can be extremely pronounced in learning and learning spaces, and educators can feel unsure of how to develop pedagogies that are trauma-informed.

As an educational developer who specializes in mental health, I have created a number of resources like workshops and micro-courses on trauma-informed (TI) teaching practices. However, these one-off learning opportunities may not provide the sustained immersion in the topic that is needed for educators to truly adopt a TI approach to their teaching. Moreover, micro-courses and workshops can be isolating experiences, often delivered online to large participant groups. Considering that supportive communities are a key protective factor in mental health, a collective approach to learning TI teaching practices seems wise.

The 2024-25 BCcampus Research Fellows program provided the opportunity for me to conduct a semester-long exploration into using a community of practice (COP) model for supporting educators’ understanding and implementation of TI teaching practices.

Over the winter semester at Selkirk College, a small group of diverse instructors met monthly to discuss the successes and challenges they experienced when supporting students and developing curriculum in a TI manner. The aim of this applied research project was twofold:

Support the professional development of Selkirk educators in this important topic.
Understand the benefits of learning about TI teaching practices through a COP.

A community of practice capitalizes on the learning that occurs through the regular contact of a group of like-minded professionals to facilitate the development of best-practices (Creating Communities of Practice, 2016). Members of our COP could be described as caring instructors from diverse fields of study who are seeking to grow their toolkit of teaching practices that centre and support the student experience. The pre-surveys that all COP members completed indicated a medium to high level of existing knowledge on TI teaching.

TI Teaching Principles (Carello, 2021)

Safety (physical, emotional, social, and academic)

Trustworthiness and transparency

Support and connection

Collaboration and mutuality

Empowerment, voice, and choice

Cultural, historical, and gender issues

Resilience, growth, and change

Using these TI principles as a foundation, each COP meeting had a topic of focus and welcomed a guest presenter to share knowledge on related topics such as Universal Design for Learning, accessibility, and supporting Indigenous students. Listening to and appreciating student experiences is an incredibly important aspect in TI pedagogy. As such, a student was invited to share their experiences as a learner belonging to an under-represented group during our final meeting.

Who Benefits From TI Education?

The short answer is everyone. While, as educators, we may not be able to completely eliminate the chance that learners may become triggered during their time in post-secondary, there are a number of strategies and philosophies that we can adopt in order to drastically minimize the chances that our learners will experience harm as the result of our approach to teaching.

TI Teaching Perspectives to Consider:

Students are unique in their learning, background, and identities: avoid assumptions.
Learners are doing the best with what they have available to them.
Most significant learning occurs within a relationship between learner and educator.

TI Teaching Practices to Consider:

Provide ample transparency about your approach to education and expectations for the course. Consider including a philosophy of teaching, welcome letter, or other means of communicating your expectations to learners.
Become familiar with the various student support resources at your institution. Refer learners directly to these resources and include contact information on your syllabus and learning management system (LMS).
Set, communicate, and maintain your boundaries with students. Model good self-care and humanism in the classroom.

Research Take-Aways

This project utilized a mixed method approach to data collection. Participants completed pre- and post-survey questionnaires, which contained scaling, multiple choice, and open-ended questions. I also gathered observational data during the meetings including a number of poignant quotes from participants.

As the participants’ post-surveys trickle into my inbox this week and I begin to review them, I’m struck by the nature of the developments that many of the participants noted. Certainly, there has been a quantifiable increase in their understanding and intention to implement TI teaching practices. However, what stands out more are the qualitative experiences being reported by participants. The safety, support, diversity in participants and topics, and collegiality that the community of practice provided was noted by nearly every participant. These reflections on the benefits of group solidarity feels especially poignant at a time when post-secondary employment is precarious, to say the least.

It’s no coincidence that the tenets of TI teaching apply to TI research and that we, as educators, need to engage in collective as well as individual strategies in our approach to professional development strategy. To quote the psychologist, academic, and educational developer Sarah Rose Cavanagh, “They (the learners) need us (the educators) to be well.”

“This COP really strengthened my access to trauma-informed practices. It helped me to frame some of my approaches in a new way and encouraged me to continue to explore these. It exposed me to new ideas and approaches from colleagues.”—COP participant

References

Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium. (2016). What is a Community of Practice. Creating Communities of Practice

Carello, J. (2020). TITL general principles 3.20. Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning