So began a “Pedagogy of Care” presentation I recently gave with Teaching and Learning Strategist Samuel Kirk at a brown-bag session of the Professional Development and Orientation Committee in the English Department at KPU. The statement above, from someone who had completed an undergrad degree, a master’s, and a doctorate, brought home the truth that students often feel they are not seen or heard in the totality of their lives and identities which may include trauma. The American Psychological Association’s APA Dictionary of Psychology defines psychological trauma as “any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning. Traumatic events include those caused by human behavior as well as by nature and often challenge an individual’s view of the world as a just, safe, and predictable place.”

The consequences of proceeding without awareness of trauma have been chronicled in research such as Lisa D. Butler’s work, in which she points out, “The potential for reactivation […] is one of the lasting effects of […] trauma.” Though Butler addresses a medical context of hospital care in this work (Trauma-informed care and mental health), her observations are no less relevant to the educational field–and indeed she has authored research there as well. Coincidentally, we evoked a medical context in one of the slides for our “Pedagogy of Care” presentation, displaying an image of a lesson featuring a human model with its intestines displayed. The metaphor is an apt one for the potential vulnerability inherent in a literature class: when we read and analyze stories, some students may feel their guts are on display for all to see, as the literary work, in Butler’s words, “[reactivates the lasting effects of trauma].”

Understanding definitions of trauma

Trauma may be acute, resulting from a particular event; it may be chronic, resulting from prolonged or repeated danger or abuse; it may be complex, resulting from multiple causes. Its impacts may include changes in cognitive processing of memory and of perception of threats. Some people who experience traumatic events will develop disorders such as PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Recovery is possible with support and with therapy; one of the important aspects of this to keep in mind for us as educators is that we are not therapists–and yet we have considerable power for good, or optimally at least to avoid reinforcing the effects of trauma in our classes.

It goes without saying that at least we hope that not every student, and not even the typical student, will have undergone trauma (as distinct from stress) in their life up to the point when they appear in our classroom. We could nonetheless speculate that all or indeed most students have a connection to trauma through family, friends, and of course their fellow students. We could say something analogous about ourselves as instructors: we all have a connection to trauma in some way, which we bring to our work and our daily interactions with our colleagues and our students.

A note on terminology

While Trauma Informed Practice takes trauma into account in the full range of human interactions (including therapy, employment, and social settings), Trauma Informed Pedagogy addresses the specific concerns we have as educators. Both Trauma Informed Practice and Trauma Informed Pedagogy are associated with the acronym TIP; here at Kwantlen, along with many other institutions, we have adopted the alternative phrasing of Pedagogy of Care to acknowledge our distance from the field of therapeutic interventions and to focus on our teaching–and our caring, of course. Some current researchers may make a distinction between the terms pedagogy (as pertaining to youth) and androgogy (as pertaining to adults), while others resist the latter label as gender-specific and/or excessively pedantic language and prefer to refer to the teaching of adult learners. In short, terminologies are evolving to best describe a given context.

Some guiding lights

At all levels of education, Alex Shervin Venet’s Unconditional Learning site (https://www.unconditionallearning.org/) focuses on “[s]upporting teachers to transform education with equity, justice, and healing”; Venet points to psychotherapist Carl Rogers’ concept of “unconditional positive regard” as a guiding principle.

A useful resource is Janice Carello’s Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning blog, which draws upon her experience of over twenty years as a college educator, is subtitled Bringing a Trauma-Informed Approach to Higher Education. Carello’s project stems from her career-long observation that “students who were most likely to drop out, get bad grades, and have trouble adapting to college were those who had a trauma history or who experienced a traumatic event during their time in school,” and she tackles topics ranging from procrastination to existential crises, insisting that “by becoming trauma-informed, individual educators can develop knowledge and skills to transform not only their own physical and virtual classroom environments but also the systems in which they teach.” The blog format that Carello has created (https://traumainformedteaching.blog) allows for a free exchange of ideas among participants.

Trauma-Informed Pedagogies: A Guide for Responding to Crisis and Inequality in Higher Education was co-authored by Carello and Phyllis Thompson. In progress, with Carello’s colleague at Pennsylvania Western University, Kimberly Hardner, is an edited collection entitled Trauma-Informed Transformations in Higher Education: Integrating Principles Beyond the Classroom. As Carello and her colleagues acknowledge, this is a rapidly-evolving field; the experiences of today’s teachers and learners will be part of a body of work still in the developmental stages.

Sandra VanderKaay, assistant professor in the School of Rehabilitation Science at McMaster University, is also working on research and development of trauma-informed approaches to teaching and learning. McMaster’s Do It Anyway! site (https://doitanyway.ca/) presents TIP as follows: “Trauma-informed pedagogy is a way to approach teaching and learning that considers how trauma impacts learners and seeks to mitigate the effects of trauma on learning by creating safe, supportive, and empowering learning spaces that minimize re-traumatization and promote success and resilience. As educators, we can help support learners with the tools and supports they need to be successful.”

Indeed, VanderKaay’s work in the Health Sciences has some points of intersection with Humanities and other disciplines. Patricia A. Jennings’ “Teaching in a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom” (focusing on the education of children and teens) notes: “We evolved to be part of families and communities composed of individuals who care for one another. Without these bonds, human beings would not have survived or flourished as we have. However, today we are losing touch with these bonds” (https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2019/jennings).

KPU has its own resources as well: Christina Page’s Trauma-Informed Teaching (TL Commons)​; KPU’s Teaching & Learning Resources Portal Resource Sites | KPU.ca – Kwantlen Polytechnic University​; and the Trauma-Informed Practices (TIP) in Teaching & Learning (Moodle) Course: Trauma-Informed Practices (TIP) in Teaching & Learning | community​.

Some issues and questions to consider

In our Pedagogy of Care presentation, Samuel Kirk and I posed some questions for post-secondary educators (in English and other subjects, as we had faculty representation at our session from outside the English department as well) to explore as we contemplate a toolkit of practical strategies and a community of (trauma-informed) practice:

• Given that we are not therapists, can we nonetheless create learning experiences which take learners’ lived experience of trauma (directly or indirectly) into account?
• Can we use the learning experience itself to mitigate (directly or indirectly) the effects of trauma in any way, without compromising our academic standards?
• Can we avoid exacerbating trauma while reducing barriers to learning?
• Can we use our own lived experience of trauma (directly or indirectly) to inform our teaching practice, given that the holistic approach of TIP encourages self-care for educators?

To address these questions, we can consider the learning environment we create in our post-secondary classes. Several of the participants in our Pedagogy of Care session had practical suggestions based on their teaching experience here at KPU.

A traditional lecture mode with socratic elements may be a comfortable and non-threatening context for some learners (perhaps until the instructor calls upon them individually to respond to a conversational prompt for an audience of the class as a whole). A classroom dynamic that relies on group work may reinforce aspects of trauma for some students, who may avoid classes that compel them to interact with relative strangers (such students may gravitate to online courses, although such courses may also feature group work with different yet equal challenges). Of course, these two alternatives are not mutually exclusive, nor do they represent the full range of possibilities; however, they do comprise the principal modes of teaching practice in courses such as introductory level post-secondary English, which is a compulsory element of many degree programs at Kwantlen and other Canadian colleges and universities.

KPU’s Jennifer Hardwick (ENGL) takes an approach directly incorporating Pedagogy of Care values as she creates her syllabus documents, including an explicit acknowledgement that we all bring our lived experience to our learning experience, and that some of the materials we engage with in class may prove challenging as a direct result. Students are encouraged to reach out to the instructor with any concerns accordingly. As Jennifer Hardwick and others have pointed out, for instructors whose course materials engage with narratives of colonialism and indigenous history, culturally-based trauma is inherently part of the curriculum.

Jennifer Williams, also a faculty member in English, is one of several instructors at KPU and elsewhere making use of a talking circle as an alternative to a front-of-class authoritarian models. In Cara Headley’s English class, students have the opportunity to leave the building and interact outside, breaking down some of the barriers that exist within the classroom environment; she uses an icebreaker bingo (referencing commonalities of life experience) as one means of establishing a climate of empathy.

In any learning situation, evaluation is a key component to gauge engagement with and processing of the subject matter, such as literary texts in an ENGL 1202 class–texts which may, themselves, depict trauma. Ernest Stromberg is one scholar at the forefront of considering “the question of how instructors might teach subject matter, some of which by necessity deals with traumatic events and experiences, while supporting the psychological wellness of students” (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-94946-006). It is noteworthy that evaluation itself may reinforce aspects of trauma in several ways: by creating a pressure-cooker atmosphere in which proof of learning must be produced within a time limit and in an environment filled with other stressed individuals; by requiring the physical act of handwriting, requiring cognitive processing translated into exam-booklet output, again with time constraints; by creating a sense of being overwhelmed by the task. English instructors in particular, as they turn to handwritten, timed assignments in an attempt to safeguard against the unauthorized use of Artificial Intelligence tools, face the challenge of creating authetic evaluation methods that do not reinforce performance-anxiety-related trauma. In KPU’s English department, faculty members are opening up their evaluation protocols to include individual and group presentations in modes ranging from in-class to in-office to video recordings.

One of the central tenets of what we may aspire to is that in implementing trauma informed practice, we improve the teaching of our courses for all learners. These ideas dovetail with the reframing of Trauma Informed Pedagogy as Pedagogy of Care. As instructors, we exhibit care for our students regardless of (and indeed we may not be aware of) their experience of coping with trauma per se. Indeed, if we ask ourselves why we chose teaching as a vocation, this sense of care for other human beings and their learning is no doubt a core value. Add to this a sense that our world as we progress through the twenty-first century imposes particular constraints on all citizens. Some of our students (though numbers are reduced recently) come from war-torn countries, from developing economies, from social contexts far removed from our world of privilege. Even students who have come of age in a relatively stable and secure environment may harbour fears of global conflict, regime change, eroding rights for equity-deserving people, not to mention a host of issues connected to their own personal circumstances.

Two major impacts on post-secondary learning (as well as in other contexts, of course) in recent years have been the Covid-19 pandemic and the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Students entering post-secondary classes bring with them significant learning gaps that may have to do with missing school during the pandemic (itself a source of trauma on a global scale) in 2020-2022 and/or excessive reliance on tools such as ChatGPT since 2023. Some researchers, such as Mays Imad and Karen Gross, date the emergence of their work in Trauma Informed Practice from the outbreak of the pandemic. Maha Bali’s blog on education, Reflecting Aloud, inspired by Mays Imad and others, explores “how a trauma-informed educator might respond to generative AI in their classroom” (https://blog.mahabali.me/pedagogy/a-possible-trauma-informed-approach-to-ai-in-the-classroom/).

As for instructors in post-secondary classes, they may be directly or indirectly impacted by global issues as well. The current institutional climate compounds these impacts by including an element of fear that teaching jobs and the institution itself are in jeopardy due to straitened budgets and declining enrollment. Beyond day-to-day stress or anxiety (as KPU’s Alana Abramson and others have noted, trauma and stress require distinct definitions), this looming threat to our very livelihood cannot help but have an impact on our teaching. An unspoken but well-worn tradition dictates that we keep these feelings to ourselves, role modelling stoicism for our colleagues and our students; yet this repressive habit compounds the problem as we misrepresent the reality of our lives and who we are.

So, what can we do about it? How can we practice a Pedagogy of Care, as we work to acknowledge and take into acount our own and others’ trauma? A radical restructuring could in itself be a source of trauma; however, ideas for incremental changes that can be implemented through a few key strategies could support a Pedagogy of Care toolkit for faculty. Many if not all of these ideas, while specifically relevant to the teaching of post-secondary English classes, could work in other teaching and learning contexts as well.

Roger Fallot and Maxine Harris, in “Creating Cultures of Trauma-Informed Care” (CCTIC), set out five core principles, based on the assumption that all of us may be survivors of trauma, to mitigate re-traumatization and facilitate healing. Considering the concepts that form the definition of Trauma Informed Pedagogy (identified below as safety, trust, empowerment, collaboration, and flexibility), we can move towards a Pedagogy of Care, always keeping in mind that we are maintaining academic standards while creating an atmosphere for optimal learning. (In each instance, we may assume that brushing over or putting aside these issues will do little if anything to mitigate trauma, and may even reinforce it.)

Safety

Safe and secure spaces for learning should be a given, although the increasing number of incidents of school-based violence must call this basic requirement into question at a physical (not just symbolic) level. At KPU, our classrooms and faculty offices have blinds which can be quickly deployed to obscure the windows into the hallways in an emergency situation such as a lockdown. Ironically, the very presence of these preventive measures can evoke a trauma response, just as a lockdown drill or natural disaster drill can spark anxiety.

However, ignoring or minimizing fears around safety arguably does little or nothing to allay them. Talking about them might have a better chance of success (which we define here as meaningful learning). Reading accounts such as first-person narratives of experiencing threats to safety could supplement a discussion of safety drills; small-group or think-pair-share discussions could encourage individuals to talk with peers about their safety-related experiences and to learn about others’. Follow-up writing assignments could engage with the reading and/or the conversations around safety; rather than evaluation of student performance on such a task, the outcome could include brief yet sincere feedback from the instructor (and possibly peer learners). Needless to say, we can define safety in many ways beyond the consideration of external threats of physical harm. No matter how we (or they) define safety, finding out from students what makes them feel safe seems a desirable prerequisite to learning.

For many, knowing what to expect is a key component of feeling safe, as fear of the unknown compromises one’s feeling of safety. The process of testing itself inculcates this fear: students may ask about test format and content in advance, not for any motive of cheating, but to promote a sense of safety, mitigating fear aroud the testing process. Knowing what materials (notes, printouts, textbooks, dictionaries, etc.) are available for access during any given task adds to a feeling of safety, as does a sense of whether the exercise is similar to or divergent from other opportunities (e.g. an in-class versus an at-home essay). We know that for those who have experienced trauma, a feeling of safety can emerge from consistency and predictability–and we can have that in our classes in a way that benefits all participants.

Fear of judgment can compromise the sense of security, so establishing that what happens in the classroom goes beyond evaluation could provide reassurance and lead to deeper learning. Routines such as a regular check-in (which could be a 5-minute freewriting exercise or other activity) at the beginning of each class can provide a sense of safety that is conducive to a productive learning session, even if we simply ask students to share (if they feel comfortable doing so), whether they are above or below the line.

Trust

Trust is an inherent part of the educational process. Students should be able to trust their instructors; instructors should be able to trust their students. Students’ experience of trauma may or may not specifically involve violations of trust; at the same time, they may be striving to present themselves as trustworthy in both academic and non-academic contexts.

For today’s instructors, a sense of violation of trust exists in the context of academic integrity issues: for instance, students who make unauthorized use of artificial intelligence tools may not realize the extent to which they have compromised trust, or how difficult it may be to reinstate trust once it has been lost.

In any case, we can see the value of building trust with all learners. Transparency is an important component of this; for instance, the student who has misrepresented their work as their own (when in fact it comes from somewhere else, someone else or something else) has missed the opportunity for transparency that comes from acknowledging one’s sources (and/or not using anything unauthorized). For today’s students, AI is a constant companion; using tools that are readily available can be virtually an instinctive and unconscious act. In the absence of a syllabus that articulates clear policies relating to AI, especially in relation to the grading process, instructors are almost certain to find themselves in trust-compromising situations.

Empowerment

Many students thrive on routine (a key element of safety as discussed above), and may work best within clearly articulated guidelines; within these parameters, empowerment and agency are still not only possible but important. Few situations in the non-academic world are without rules; all are at risk of imposing a sense of powerlessness if individuals cannot find a sense of agency in their actions. Freedom, autonomy, independence: to some measure–arguably to a large measure–these are the watchwords of the very academic scholarship to which we would love our students to aspire. How to achieve these within the framework of an undergraduate class, especially at the first-year level, is a challenge to be faced.

Lack of agency, which can reinforce the effects of trauma for anyone who has struggled with a sense of being disempowered, can compromise the learning process; however, by building in a choice of options when designing class activities and assignments, instructors can build a sense of empowerment that can enrich and enhance the learning process. Many instructors achieve this already by offering a choice of topics for essay questions, by allowing students to form their own partnerships or peer groups for in-class activities, and by having flexible deadlines (within reasonable parameters).

Collaboration

One way to foster a sense of agency for students is to involve them as collaborators in the roll-out of the course in which they are enrolled. Brainstorming, preparing for group presentations, peer editing: these are standard examples of collaboration in English (and other) post-secondary classes. All of these activities can and do form an important part of Trauma Informed Pedagogy.

Instructors who are committed to the idea of collaboration at the student-teacher level may go the extra mile of having students contribute to course planning within the bounds of the syllabus: expectations around class participation, timing of scaffolding steps for assignments, formulating of writing prompts, and other aspects of week-to-week activities.

Flexibility

Students and instructors alike can benefit from flexibility where possible within the confines of a course outline. In many respects, having the flexibility to work with a variety of learners is the most challenging part of being a teacher. Nonetheless, knowing that students themselves have to work with a range of people in both academic and non-academic situations, instructors have the opportunity to role-model being flexible effectively.

Outcomes

The outcomes we are aiming for, by using a flexible approach to learning, include improved attendance, performance, and engagement for students (the focus of work by Susan Cole and Susan Craig, among others)–as well as addressing and mitigating systemic inequities. While an exhaustive toolkit would be a book length project (as are Health Canada’s Trauma Informed Toolkit, accessible at https://trauma-informed.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/trauma-informed_toolkit_v07-1.pdf, and the Province of British Columbia’s Substance Use and Mental Health Planning Council’s Trauma Informed Practice Guide, available at https://cewh.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/2013_TIP-Guide.pdf, it seems a worthwhile goal to put together some specific suggestions for creating a Pedagogy of Care in a first-year class (in English–or other disciplines, with minor modifications) as KPU continues to support faculty across the disciplines in developing Pedagogy of Care strategies.

Works Cited

Abramson, Alana. “Where Hummingbirds Take Flight: Restorative Justice & the Post-Secondary Classroom.” Abramson, Alana. Teaching Learning Commons, 21 Oct. 2021,wordpress.kpu.ca/tlcommons/where-hummingbirds-take-flight-restorative-justice-the-post-secondary-classroom/.

Bali, Maha. “A Possible Trauma-Informed Approach to AI in the Classroom?” Reflecting Allowed, 23 Dec. 2024, blog.mahabali.me/pedagogy/a-possible-trauma-informed-approach-to-ai-in-the-classroom/.

Butler, Lisa D. (PDF) Trauma-Informed Care and Mental Health, www.researchgate.net/publication/234155324. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Carello, Janice. “Informed Teaching & Learning.” Trauma, 24 Oct. 2025, traumainformedteaching.blog/.

Cole, Susan. “Understanding Trauma’s Impact on Learning.” Trauma Sensitive Schools, 17 Mar. 2019, traumasensitiveschools.org/new-artcle-understanding-traumas-impact-on-learning/.

Craig, Susan E. “Trauma-Sensitive Tips for Helping Students Sustain Attention.” Brookes Blog, 16 May 2023, blog.brookespublishing.com/trauma-sensitive-tips-for-helping-students-sustain-attention/.

Fallot, Roger D., and Maxine Harris. (PDF) Creating Cultures of Trauma-Informed Care: A Self-Assessment and Planning Protocol, www.researchgate.net/publication/272167009. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Gross, Karen. (PDF) Creating Trauma-Informed Higher Education Classrooms: Exploring Undergraduate and Graduate Student Perceptions, www.researchgate.net/publication/371807808. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Health Canada. The Trauma Toolkit, trauma-informed.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/trauma-informed_toolkit_v07-1.pdf. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Imad, Mays. “Bringing Trauma-Informed Teaching into the Online College Classroom,” 2 Mar. 2021, www.everylearnereverywhere.org/blog/.

Jennings, Patricia A. “Teaching in a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom.” American Federation of Teachers, 13 July 2023, www.aft.org/ae/summer2019/jennings.

“KPU Resource Sites.” KPU.ca – Kwantlen Polytechnic University, www.kpu.ca/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources/resources. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Page, Christina. “Trauma Informed Teaching.” Teaching Learning Commons, 29 Apr. 2022, wordpress.kpu.ca/tlcommons/trauma-informed-teaching/.

Province of British Columbia’s Substance Use and Mental Health Planning Council.

Trauma-Informed Practice Guide, cewh.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/2013_TIP-Guide.pdf. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Stromberg, Ernest. “Trauma-Informed Mindfulness Meditation in the College Classroom.”

American Psychological Association, psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-94946-006.

Thompson, Phyllis, and Janice Carello. Trauma-Informed Pedagogies: A Guide for Responding to Crisis and Inequality in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

“Trauma.” APA Dictionary of Psychology, American Psychological Association, https://dictionary.apa.org/.

Trauma-Informed Practices (TIP) in Teaching & Learning. community.moodle.kpu.ca/course/view.php?id=634. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

VanderKaay, Sandra. “Doitanyway – Trauma Informed Pedagogy.” Doitanyway, 23 Nov. 2025, doitanyway.ca/.

Venet, Alex Shervin. Unconditional Learning. www.unconditionallearning.org/. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Appendix

Blenkhorn, Deborah, and Samuel Kirk. “The Pedagogy of Care.” KPU, March 27, 2026. Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Trauma_Informed_Pedagogy_Workshop.pptx.

Trauma_Informed_Pedagogy_Workshop