Introduction: Understanding Trauma

This section's main goal is to introduce and elaborate on a diverse range of trauma-informed experiences, concepts, and processes as they relate to, and more importantly, as they impact the experiences of teaching and learning in carceral space. Cultivating trust and showing empathy supports our students' continued learning inside and outside of the classroom.

What Is Trauma? / What Can Trauma Look Like?

Trauma may be compounded in carceral environments, wherein incarcerated individuals’ expressive agency and everyday mobility are both tightly regulated. College courses offer immeasurably valuable opportunities for students to apply an authentic sense of agency in how they exercise their own voice/freedom of expression, in particular, how they apply diversely rich understanding of course content and philosophy to lived experiences including past and current trauma.

Trauma is a complex concept/experience, and therefore challenging to define. The study of trauma is often rooted in histories of war, whereas traumatic experiences may be triggered by a broader range of adversities. Current understandings of trauma within clinical/healthcare settings largely focus on ongoing recovery from past traumatic experiences (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder/PTSD). However, many of the traumas that are most intimately experienced within carceral spaces exist, rather, in perpetuity. In other words, incarcerated environments can very much perpetuate the trauma our students have experienced, and which we may observe to some degree and respond to in any number of ways.

Trauma can result from adversity (an external event, conditions, and/or circumstances), which can activate a fight, flight, or freeze response, and results in profound negative effects. For our students, trauma might have resulted from abuse, neglect, household dysfunction, acquired/adaptive adverse behavior (e.g., substance abuse), racism, sexism, poverty, homophobia and transphobia, and struggles with physical or mental health, just to name a few (Sustaining Futures). Additionally, trauma is experienced through students' relationship with the carceral system.

The process of being arrested and incarcerated is traumatic, to say the least. Being consistently limited in rights and abilities is traumatic; being oppressed or suppressed by a system whose function is to punish, deprive, and house individuals is traumatic. Our students are coming into our classrooms with past and current trauma; we need to be mindful of this as we plan for, facilitate, and engage with the students/course. Faculty (and administrators) need to be aware of the affective/emotional needs of the classroom.

Like our students, we may also carry existing trauma resulting from abuse, neglect, household dysfunction, acquired/adaptive adverse behavior (e.g., substance abuse), racism, sexism, poverty, homophobia and transphobia, and struggles with physical or mental health, to review a few. The Covid-19 Pandemic underscored incarcerated populations' particular proximity to trauma — it is important to acknowledge is the truly severe climate Covid-19 infections and restrictions created for incarcerated persons and populations.

As instructors and other educational support staff, we also might have experiences with the carceral system — many of us who do this work are system-impacted, meaning we ourselves might have been arrested or incarcerated, or our lives may have been impacted by the arrest or incarceration of close relatives or friends. Entering into the prison, we are vulnerable to reactions and feelings that are informed by our past trauma. Additionally, in this setting, we are vulnerable to compassion fatigue, burn-out, and vicarious trauma (more on this later). It is important to be mindful of this. As faculty and staff who do this work, it's important to discover or explore ways to develop resilience and strategies for self-care.

In the video below, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk provides a brief overview of the study of trauma and how trauma can manifest itself within our daily lives both mentally and physically. Trauma is studied by a wide range of professionals and this video is just one overview of ongoing research in the field of trauma. At the end of this module you will find additional resources.

Key Terms for Understanding Trauma

Trauma: Trauma can result from adversity (an external event, conditions, and/or circumstances); activates a fight, flight, or freeze response; and results in profound negative effects. As noted above, trauma can impact both students and instructors. As instructors, we need to be aware of what trauma is and how it might be affecting the classroom. Additionally, we need to be aware of how we can develop avenues for cognitive and non-cognitive (affective/embodied/emotional) resilience.
Adverse Experiences: Adverse experiences are sudden, unexpected, and extreme. These experiences usually involve harm, a threat to one’s survival, overwhelming loss, or witnessing horrific events. Adverse experiences are often outside the scope of one’s control and exceed one's capacity to cope effectively. Certain stages of life make people more vulnerable to the effects of trauma. Both students and instructors may be coming into the classroom with experienced adversity. Adverse childhood experiences may have be the least explicitly perceptible, but can produce some of our strongest impressions of other subjects, and should be particularly considered with respect to the learning of students who have been incarcerated.
Amygdala Hijack: The process when the amygdala is in an active state of stress, fear, or anxiety. It signals the body to release the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol blocks/restricts rational thinking and temporarily reduces the capacity of the working memory, making learning, information acquisition and processing difficult. (Hammond)
Compassion Fatigue: Deep physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion that results in a shift in hope and optimism about the value of the work. Compassion fatigue is often a response to work overload. Work overload could include an overload of TLUs (teaching more courses/units than contractually required), taking on additional office hours inside the prison to assist students with "just in time"/direct support, involving yourself in more committees than contractually required, involving yourself in too many student clubs or initiatives, etc. This is not to say that going above and beyond is ultimately negative. This is to say, however, that consistently wearing yourself thin, while also trying to meaningfully serve our students who often require further support in accessing materials, can lend itself to greater burnout.
Burnout: When prolonged stress or frustration with organizational practices, work conditions, lack of resources, and demands results in emotional exhaustion, lack of meaning and accomplishment, and depersonalization. If we are consistently experiencing compassion fatigue and are overloaded in our work, there is a greater likelihood of burnout. We need to be willing to advocate for resources (for students and faculty at large), set healthy boundaries (for students and faculty at large), and develop effective coping strategies, including the willingness to withdraw, even if only momentarily, from teaching too many classes in the prison when we may no longer feel capable of doing so in a way that is healthy, equitable, and respectful for everyone).
Vicarious Trauma: Individuals working with people who have experienced serious trauma can run the risk of experiencing trauma-related responses that parallel those of the people being served. As we serve our students who have experienced and are currently experiencing trauma, we ourselves become vulnerable to experiencing trauma related to carceral spaces. Being in that space, we have the potential to witness the oppression and dehumanization of our students; we have the potential to witness physical or emotional harm. It is important that we're aware of this and that we begin to develop strategies to process and respond to trauma.
Resilience: It is recommended that instructors develop avenues to build resilience for both students and themselves. The Sustaining Futures Community of Practice shares that resilience is, “Adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or even significant sources of stress” (The American Psychological Association). "Adapting well" in the case of carceral teaching means, in part: acknowledging rather than resisting the presence of trauma; then, allowing one's body and mind to carefully cope and sit with some of the discomforts that come with acknowledging others' traumatic experiences and outcomes in adverse detail; and finally, by incorporating this knowledge into our delivery and development of course content, as well as our methods of communicating and building rapport with students/classes.

Additional Perspectives from Sustaining Futures

Foundational Knowledge and Skills: Faculty and staff [should] have an understanding of and ability to address the impact of trauma and resilience on a student's academic performance.
Workforce, Wellness, Success and Satisfaction: Address sources of work related stressors that raises the risk for experiences with compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and/or burnout.
Trauma-Informed and Resiliency-Supporting Educational Practices: Faculty and staff have [course] design and teaching approaches that are unlikely to exacerbate trauma-related reactions. [Note that efforts for equitable teaching applied back-and-forth between carceral and non-carceral college settings often directly inform/change one's teaching particularly in the non-carceral setting, so as to match our instructional approaches in the carceral setting, rather than vice versa as at times presumed. That is, by rigorously determining and assessing the importance of equity in the carceral classroom, we have the greater opportunity to identify substantive equity gaps across our instructional philosophies and methods.]
Physically and Emotionally Safe and Trusting Educational Environments: Ability to design the physical environment and to support academic success. [Recognizing instructors' and colleges' extremely limit purview within CDCR, the capability to adapt (to) the physical space to meet educational and individual needs is a necessarily collaborative process.]
Student Involvement: Faculty and staff have the knowledge and strategies to offer students an opportunity to provide feedback related to their experience with the educational program, including suggestions for improvements that are practical, meaningful, and aligned with institutional policies.
Human Resources: The college has a set of procedures designed to inform, recruit, and select faculty and staff who are suited to work with incarcerated students.

Throughout this module and others you will notice several references to Sustaining Futures Links to an external site.. The materials created by Sustaining Futures are widely used for educators working inside prisons and jails.

Trauma-Informed Communication

While widely appreciated for its importance in educational and other institutional settings, competent communication may often be minimized as a simple exchange of carefully-clarified messages tailored to the needs or perspectives of any given audience. Though this description at least partially captures an important, general approach to designing and engaging effectively with instructional communication practices, working as college educators in incarcerated environments compels both a broader, and more concrete breakdown of the process of human communication.

Without going into exhaustive detail, you can read below a relatively brief overview of some foundational frameworks for understanding human communication. Evaluating even this brief “snapshot” of the communication spectrum/process requires assessing how a message may change in meaning, often in very significant ways, according to a great many variables. Carceral spaces may be limiting in their ability to facilitate an open exchange of understanding, yet they may also be significantly important spaces for channeling such kinds of exchange; for facilitating dialogue and understanding.

We can be mindful of past and current trauma associated with carceral spaces, and should keep at the forefront careful consideration for the impact trauma has on learning. Without reducing or overlooking the vast impacts of trauma as related to incarceration, we can likewise be mindful that the lived and ongoing experiences of incarcerated individuals may at times serve as sources of strength, or as the foundations for building strategies of resilience. In doing so, we can make more carefully, contextually informed choices with our communication and with our approaches to instruction.

Contextualizing Communication: Analyzing Exchange

Communication may be verbal, textual, graphic, photorealistic, aural, kinesic, spatial, linguistic, et cetera ad infinitum. Human beings are richly complex and capable in our ability to assign and consolidate (often significant) meaning to any range of specific images, sounds, words, artifacts, patterns, utterances, or other unique symbolic codes and constructs used to reference assigned meaning. Our understanding of any given symbol is constructed through our social and personal experiences; we subsequently act, interact, and react according to the ways we understand, misunderstand, or sometimes challenge symbols’ varying and competing meanings.

We assign, negotiate, and respond to meaning through intrapersonal communication (internal dialogue), interpersonal communication (between two parties), group communication (circumstances wherein all parties can communicate with and respond to each other with the equitable or defined capacity), organizational communication (interaction and exchange between distinct but systematically interrelated groups), public communication (delivering messages directly to an open or invited public audience while accounting for and responding in real-time to audience feedback), and mass communication (any distribution of a message designed to be accessed by as many people as possible through different forms of mass media such as radio and the internet).

All scales and forms of communication are present within the prison, but not equally applied for all populations present within the prison. That is, as each medium and form of communication distinctly defines the impact of the message and the applicable value of the information being exchanged, those who are incarcerated do not have nearly the same kinds of access to the different forms of communication available to staff, and especially to the non-incarcerated at large; therefore, the incarcerated are denied the same depth and breadth of real-time, interpersonal, and communal learning experiences.

The actual process of communication can be broken down into a series of distinct elements, which include:

The message itself in any given form; the source/sender of the message (e.g., teacher delivering a lecture);
The sender’s encoding of the message (determining the distinct form a message should take by selecting from available experiences and knowledge, and then strategically framing the message through word choice, etc., such as making sure to explain relevant information about an individual and not simply mention their name or role);
Delivering the message through a channel/medium (such as the instructor’s voice and written comments);
Frequently adapting the message to suit the physical environment (such as a classroom space in which students are strictly limited in assigned authority to do enter and leave the space);
Further adapting to the social environment (the message being received by an audience will be evaluated in part according to the social bonds and tensions present among the group or across society at large, as in, the presence and salience of socially contentious subjects impacts our communication choices);
The receiver/audience (e.g., students following your lecture) work on decoding the message (making sense of [the parts of] the message according to individually-learned and -experienced interpretations of different kinds of messages);
Both physical noise (literal sounds such as loud fans or the commotion of construction) and psychological noise (personally distracting and competing priorities such as hunger or heartbreak) can and often disrupt or impede both the sender’s ability to coherently deliver the message, as well as the receiver/audience’s ability to make coherent sense of the message; and
Communication is “confirmed” or perceptible once the sender receives feedback from the audience, which in a live class setting is always understood as transactional (simultaneous) feedback (meaning the sender and audience mutually exchange messages and meaning, such as when the instructor changes the tone or rhythm of their speech in response to perceived lackluster facial expressions).

Visual model of the transactional communication process.

(Access Media Description: Communication Model)

Trauma-Informed Communication and Transactional Analysis

(From Sustaining Futures) The Transactional Model of Communication recognizes a live exchange of information between individuals. While a speaker may be the primary communicator within a classroom setting, the speaker is also the “audience for their audience” — that is, the sender of the message at any given point is also paying attention and responding to their audience's nonverbal and verbal feedback in real-time. This model reminds us that:

Our communication styles are embedded in our memory systems, experiences, traumas, etc.;
Our memories, and our understanding of our memories, are formed in relation to our social experiences;
We can often be unaware of our own learned communication styles; and
We can learn to monitor our communication styles, model intentional and self-reflexive improvement to our communication practices, and in doing so better understand how we relate to the communication of others.

Modeling healthy and productive communication without breaching our role as educators and advisors remains at once a challenging, as well as manageable and ongoing practice.