Recognizing the traumatized child's needs at school

There are many types of trauma and ways in which individuals and communities react to them. In the classroom, it is hardly worth giving too much meaning to these, unless the activity clearly interferes with teaching and learning. When the activity is clearly disturbing, a traumatic background can be one of the contributing factors.? For example, seemingly irrational actions and disproportionately strong reactions in relation to the situation encountered may be that kind of behaviour. On the other hand, seemingly irrational or contrary to common sense may be appropriate or even the only way for an individual to act in his or her world when trauma is triggered. This highlights the importance of teaching alternative ways of working and recognize the triggers.

One might also wonder how essential it is to identify and diagnose such a child in the first place? Of course, identification and information increase understanding, and this way it may be easier to relate to the child in the way he or she needs. Especially for an inexperienced teacher who does not encounter severely traumatized children, the right kind of attitude may otherwise be difficult. Often knowledge helps to change attitude, and a change in attitude leads to better results.

For example, Daniel Hughes has described this attitude using the abbreviation PLACE. PLACE stands for playfulness, loving, acceptance, curiosity and empathy. Loving is perhaps the hardest of these to define. Simo Skinnari ′s definition of pedagogical love is genuine humanity, truthfulness and education of the heart. As several educational philosophers (e.g. Roland Russel) have stated, fear is bred with fear, love with love. PLACE is not so much a single method, but a holistic attitude of encounter, the effective implementation of which requires familiarity, self-knowledge and practice from the teacher.

On the other hand, if you want to lower students stress level and put them in a state of mind conducive to learning, isn't it quite clear that they also need to feel accepted just as they are? Therefore, the child as a person should never be judged. You can intervene in actions, but children must be seen as good so that they learn to see themselves as good and competent.

But really, does a child need to be labelled as traumatized before being taught with the attitude described above? A safe, respectful, and loving encounter sounds like something that supports any student's learning. Could the way in which a traumatized child should be treated could be generalized to the way people should be encountered?

In any case, it is always in the child's best interest to involve even a severely traumatised child in schoolwork and to trust himself. However, it is not so much a question of individual methods or ready-made models that make teaching to be easy as child's play. Since the key to everything lies precisely in interaction and understanding it, the development of intuitive competence requires conscious practice, deepening one's own self-knowledge and developing theoretical skills in order to increase understanding of phenomena’s such as emotional transference. Of course, methods can help you act and get started, but really productive work would require understanding phenomena and internalizing a corrective attitude rather than learning ready-made models.

Models are simple, disassembled ways of working. An example would be a social skills training program, where you simply break down the skill to be practiced, think about in which situations it will be practiced, with whom, what to avoid and what to prefer. Another example of the same for younger children can be drawing to practice self-communication, i.e. what I did, what happened next, how I felt, and how the other person felt. Then a reconstruction is made by drawing how could have gone. However, such methods remain curiosities glued on top if there is no correct attitude of encounter and understanding of the phenomena with which we are working in the background.

In practice, the most important tool for teachers is to regulate the child's alertness. This is what the teacher must do constantly with his own appearance, gaze, tone of voice and touches. Allan Schore, for example, talks about the tolerance window, the state of alertness in which the child is able to function and learn, where connections to the cortex work. If the child is in a state of low alertness, he will not learn, because this is a response to stressful situations, which are characterized by helplessness and hopelessness. Thus, the parasympathetic nervous system tends to conserve resources. If the child is hyperactive, he will not learn, because the survival instinct and struggle will surface. The essential thing is that in these spaces no parenting discussions or rationalizations work, the child must be brought back to the tolerance window before the matter can be discussed. Just like with a small child, when the parent either reassures or comforts.

Prevention is easier to regulate alertness than helping to get out of alertness, which is why teachers should focus on this. This requires constant observation and acting accordingly. Non-verbal communication, tone of voice and gaze are of great importance. A strong, safe touch of the shoulder, for example, can communicate much more than any words. It can signal that you are safe, I will take care of you, it can also lower your alertness when it is rising and raise it when it is going down. However, the importance of knowing the student is indicated by the fact that for some, touch can even act as a trigger. The importance of the gaze is emphasized even more relevant. The child is held in the tolerance window by the safe, warm, accepting gaze of an adult.

If the child sinks into trauma, i.e. A situation triggers a dissociated bodily memory from a traumatic memory, for example, the most important task of the teacher is to return the child to the present. At its simplest, this is done by putting words into words, telling the child where they are, what is happening, etc., but even here we should not forget the role of tone of voice and other non-verbal communication.

The way to prevent falling into traumatic memory is to strengthen the healthy and functional side of the child. The teacher must avoid dialogue with the traumatized side and strive for dialogue with the healthy side. An important way to do this is adult leading. Here, however, adult leadership should not be understood in a limited way, and certainly not as an adult dictatorship. In the teaching of a child suffering from trauma disorders, the adult leadership of interaction is essential. The child tries to bring their own interaction models to the interaction, which can be very chaotic, but the teacher's task is to keep the interaction constructive, to keep the interaction teacher led. In other words, if the child starts shouting, the teacher should not shout back, but use his or her own voice to both regulate the child's alertness and make it clear to the child that the child is not able to draw the adult into his or her own interaction model, but the adult acts on his own and gradually draws the child into it.

As written, it seems pretty simple. In practice, however, it must be remembered that working in an environment where traumatisation is often present requires not only self-knowledge and competence, but also the means as an employee to process their emotions, distinguish their own emotions from those who have been breastfed around them, and be able to calculate their own stress levels by recovering. The important thing is to know how to do your best, but still be merciful to yourself if things don't always go as they did in a textbook.