Today’s blog post comes from Elizabeth Dutro. Elizabeth is professor and chair of literacy studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she teaches courses in writing, approaches to inquiry, education in film, and literacy theory and practice. In her research, she collaborates closely with teacher colleagues to better understand teachers’ collaborative learning, the intersections of children’s lives and knowledge and their opportunities to thrive in literacy classrooms, and the pursuit of justice in and through schooling. She is the author of The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy (Teachers College Press). She welcomes connection and hopes you’ll contact her at: Elizabeth.dutro@colorado.edu; elizabethdutro.com; @lifeasstory on Twitter; and Elizabeth Dutro on Facebook.
When I get asked how I came to write the book, The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy, I experience a tilt-awhirl of memories, voices, and sensations. But, here, I’ll turn to one of the stories that is always in that mix, and maybe that’s because it was kind of in the middle of the experiences that inform the book and allows me to reach to the past and unspool what was, then, still to come.
Almost twenty years ago, I was sitting at a kidney-shaped table with five African American 5th grade girls, having a literature circle discussion about books in the American Girl series. One protagonist, Samantha, a white girl living in the early 1900s had lost both of her parents. The girls talked about plot and compared the book to others they’d read in the series. Then, Chrissie shared “I was crying over this book” because her father had died the year before. Tara quickly shared that her mother had passed away four years before. Immediately, stories of loss—those parents and other family members—took over the discussion. Over the next several minutes, the girls shared their stories of loss, one phrase at a time, taking turns or talking over one another: ‘In the hospital, my grandpa’s room, when he was dead. They put a towel under his chin’. I’ve got to tell you all about this.’ ‘I was holding my daddy’s hand.’ ‘He was like another grandfather to me and he was so skinny and I was so scared.’ ‘I knew something was wrong when my step daddy came to get me from the talent show…’ Feeling the connections at the table, I shared snippets of my own loss across that book conversation. “‘I lost my little brother,” I heard myself say. “It’s just so hard to lose people who you love. My brother. My little brother.”
Fifteen years before, when I was in high school, my younger brother, my only sibling at the time and my closest companion, was crushed by a falling boulder while playing with his best friend near a mountain stream. I was propelled, compelled to bring my own story, the pillar story of my life, to that conversation in response to the children’s connections to that book about Samantha. The children at that table heard my small snippet of my story with just the immense compassion and connection we know so well as teachers. Children lead the way in how to serve as witnesses to others’ hard stories.
Children lead the way in how to serve as witnesses to others’ hard stories.
That experience spun me back to several years earlier when I was teaching in a California elementary school, straight out of college, and realized how seldom I shared with students that I was deep in a grieving process that continued and would continue, still continues. But, at that point, just a handful of years from my brother’s death, it so often felt so raw. I mean, I was still having those moments of closed-car-window screams, my clenched-fist fingernails cutting into my palms. I realized in retrospect that although I felt a connection with children’s losses, fears, longings, confusions—those big themes of life’s hard stuff—it was rare that I shared my connections.
Those realizations just kept accumulating in all the other days I spent with children and their literacies, as I moved from classroom teacher to literacy educator-researcher spending as much time as possible with children and youth. Even as I was pursuing other research questions, about gender, race, and class in ELA classrooms, the hard stories, trauma stories, were always present. The difficult life experiences—for teachers and children—were living in classrooms, whether or not they were acknowledged in the official spaces of curriculum and instruction. And, they clearly had very different consequences for different members of classroom communities. I knew that children’s hard times were too often used against them, too often became the fuel for false assumptions of deficit in the lives of students of color and students facing economic struggle, including those with the intersecting identities of being bilingual, LGBTQ, or (dis)abled. However, it became viscerally present for me when, a few years after that literature circle discussion, a close family member faced a prison sentence and I got to see surprise in people’s eyes when they learned I had an incarcerated loved one; for the children I spent time with who had incarcerated parents, their experience was most often met by adults in schools with whatever is the opposite of surprise. All of those experiences swirled in my thinking, building over time, changing my teaching and, a few years later, moved to the center of my research. Those were stories that required new and different questions and frameworks to better understand them. Those stories held high stakes for how to enact relational, humanizing, justice-centered pedagogy. A group of K-12 teacher colleagues and I began to pursue inquiries in classrooms that helped us think about what difficult experiences required in ELA classrooms centered on.
Although students’ challenging life experiences have always been present, have mattered, and been used by many privileged adults and by the media to label and pathologize students, we are currently experiencing an explosion of attention to trauma in schools. I have no doubt that the idea of “trauma” in schools and ELA classrooms is both important and dangerous. What counts as traumatic? Who is labeled traumatized? How can attention to difficult experiences be folded into the curriculum and instruction of ELA in ways that allow students to draw on the whole of their knowledge and experiences from life as resources for school literacies?
I believe that reframing trauma for positive potential has everything to do with literacy and the day to day teaching and learning in ELA classrooms. And that means, ELA educators, all of us reading this post, engaged in Ethical ELA, are the leaders in this crucial work.