Jennifer Case, "Carework in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom: Toward a Trauma-Informed Pedagogy" (Assay 9.2)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
9.2

Jennifer Case

Carework in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom:
Toward a Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

Introduction

Not too long ago, I attended a panel presentation on writing personal essays about illness and healing. The panelists were all instructors in a graduate-level program on narrative medicine, and so I hoped it would give me ideas on how to best respond to students and student work about trauma. In particular, I was thinking of an MFA student I’d mentored a few years before, whose entire thesis built up to a traumatic moment, but when it came time to actually write that scene, she froze, unable to even write around it. More recently, I was thinking about two students—a graduate student and an undergraduate—who had chosen to write about suicide attempts (in one case, an attempt made just two months before the class started), and whose essays were similarly stilted, with large gaps.

I recognized these student’s behaviors as trauma responses, but I found myself at a loss on what to do in the classroom. How should I respond to an essay when I’m not sure the writer is capable, emotionally or psychologically, of filling in the holes the essay reveals? How much do I push the student? Is it ever damaging or detrimental to ask a question about their essay that might trigger them? How do I balance the needs of the essay with the needs of the individual sitting in front of me?

It was with these questions in mind that I signed into the Zoom panel, and with these questions in mind that I balked when the faculty member of a prominent MFA program in narrative medicine began his talk by proudly describing a moment when he kicked a student out of his graduate workshop. The student was writing about her experience with cancer, but in a deadened, emotionless tone. Each week, the professor urged her to add more detail and emotion, but each week, she brought in another detached chronology of her medical treatment. Eventually, the professor lost patience. As he stated: she wasn’t going to be receptive to his or others’ comments about her writing. She was there for art therapy, not for art, and thus she needed a therapist, not a writing instructor.

I’m not here to judge that instructor’s decision—who knows, asking the student to leave when he knew he wasn’t equipped to work with her might, indeed, have been the best decision for all—but it made me realize how ill-prepared we are to guide students writing about trauma—even in programs devoted to writing about healing and grief, or, as in my case, in the creative nonfiction classroom, where students routinely elect to write about trauma and challenges they’ve faced or are facing. With that in mind, I began to do my own research into the clinical practice of expressive writing, trauma-informed pedagogy, and best practices in social work and counseling in order to understand how we might better navigate our roles as instructors and the relationship between trauma, creative writing, and a pedagogy of care. I offer the highlights from that research and practical applications here.

Trauma and the Need for Trauma-Informed Teaching

Today, the word “trauma” appears often in cultural conversations, yet not everyone knows what it actually means. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA): “Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” These events can be acute, such as war, physical and sexual assault, natural disasters, or auto accidents, or they can be chronic, resulting from ongoing stressors experienced during childhood or as a result of systemic racism or misogyny. Regardless of the cause, what is crucial is that individuals experiencing trauma feel powerless during the event and are left with lingering feelings of “humiliation, guilt, shame, betrayal, or silencing” (7).

I like the following diagram, based on the work by psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, which shows how a traumatic event (or series of traumatic events) can cause someone’s nervous system to shift out of its “window of tolerance” into what is called either hyperarousal, where the individual experiences anxiety and panic, or hypoarousal, where they become numb, depressed, and might dissociate. Although everyone’s nervous systems move in and out of various states of arousal, a regulated nervous system will be able to maintain a general sense of equilibrium—pulling that individual back into their window of tolerance when they experience stress or distress. A dysregulated nervous system, on the other hand, will struggle to do so. Such an individual might oscillate between hyper- and hypoarousal, or get “stuck” in one of the two. Individuals who experienced forms of childhood abuse and/or neglect are especially pre-disposed to nervous system dysregulation as adults.

In the context of education, what is important to note is that learning best happens in that regulated middle state, when individuals can access their social engagement system and feel curiosity, joy, and safety. When individuals or students are pushed out of regulation due to traumatic stress, they are—quite simply and quite physiologically—not going to be able to learn as well.

What’s also important to note: trauma exists in our classrooms whether we realize it or not. Studies have shown that anywhere between 50% and 94% of college students have experienced at least one traumatic event (Day 203; Carello and Butler 263). One study has shown that 9-12% of college freshmen meet the criteria for PTSD as a result of those experiences (Carello and Butler 263). In addition, a significant percentage of college students will experience trauma while enrolled at their university. 28% of women, 12.5% of men, and 38% of gender nonconforming students are sexually assaulted while in college (Day 203).

The numbers of students experiencing traumatic stress will likely increase as a result of climate change and worsening natural disasters, and we’ve already seen higher numbers of student distress in the past few years due to social unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, mental health experts are increasingly observing that the intensification in mental distress that occurred during the pandemic has not abated and will likely remain for a while. In my own institution, professors across the disciplines are reporting an alarming surge in “challenging” student behaviors—enough to where our university’s center for teaching held an emergency workshop on coaching executive functioning skills. What most professors don’t realize, however, is that many of these challenging behaviors can be linked back to trauma.

As Michelle Day carefully points out in Wounds and Writing, traumatic and post-traumatic stress often manifests in the classroom in the following ways:

In other words, some of the students we might write off as unfocused or unprepared are, in reality, displaying clear signs of nervous system dysregulation. Although those who teach through a trauma-informed lens don’t advocate for ignoring or turning a blind eye to such behaviors (excessive absences are excessive absences), recognizing the link between trauma and such behavior can at least help us approach students from a place of empathy and understanding rather than judgement or frustration. It can also inform outreach efforts. Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, the students most likely to drop out of a class, or of college, are those who have recently experienced a personal crisis or those who have experienced adverse events in childhood. Being able to better support such students, as a result, can often directly feed into university inclusion and retention initiatives.

The Unique Place of the Creative Writing Classroom

Writing is often inherently therapeutic. Many of us know this intuitively. Writing can help us process difficult events, reflect, and discover new things about ourselves. In the critically acclaimed collection Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay says she wrote essays in part because writing was cheaper than therapy. In psychology, this phenomenon has been studied under the label expressive writing. In a series of experiments, James Pennebaker has shown how writing about deeply personal issues and transforming feelings and thoughts about those experiences into language correlates with improved physical health, reductions in physician visits, reduced use of aspirin, lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure, decreases in cortisol levels, decreases in negative mood states, improved sleep, enhanced immune function, reduced alcohol consumption, and increases in post-traumatic growth.

The reasons, according to Pennebaker: writing serves as exposure therapy, helps build a narrative around the event, which “may be critical in reaching understanding and knowledge,” and decreases stigma and silencing. Writing helps the individual begin to speak more openly, and has often led participants to disclose verbally to others, thus repairing their social network (Pennebaker and Chung 3-6). Pennebaker’s data, which helped propel the expressive writing movement in composition theory in the 90s, has raised—and continues to raise—important questions about the role of the writing instructor and whether or not writing instructors act in a therapeutic capacity.

The narrative medicine MFA instructor I mentioned in the introduction would likely argue that they do not. That we can focus on art, not therapy, as if the two are mutually exclusive. His comment echoes many others, who, whether because they feel overwhelmed with student emotional needs and/or undertrained, point out that writing instructors are not licensed clinicians and should not pretend to be therapists. That writing for art or publication is different from writing to process or heal, and that if expressing emotions is the students' primary purpose, they are not going to succeed in the creative writing classroom. Others, however, have made more nuanced cases. In “Writing Is/And Therapy?” compositionist Wendy Bishop recalls, “When my current administrative office was turned over to me with its student-journal suicide file and the out-going director’s listing of hot-lines and crisis support numbers, I felt then, as I feel today, that saying what we’re not (not therapists, not counselors, not specialists in affect or dysfunction) is not helping us to understand and prepare to be what we are” (512).

In “Potentially Perilous Pedagogies: Teaching Trauma is Not the Same as Trauma-Informed Teaching,” social work professors Janice Carello and Lisa Butler discuss the risk of coercing students to write about trauma and leading them to experience retraumatization—very real consequences that could impede the students’ healing. However, Carello and Butler also add that “not engaging the topic of trauma in and out of the classroom” carries the risk of “perpetuating shame, secrecy, or stigma.” Their conclusion: “in addition to integrating information about and discussion of trauma where appropriate, educators should aim to reduce rather than increase the risk of retraumatization and secondary traumatization for students exposed to the material” (155).

In “The Tale of Two Bethanies: Trauma in the Creative Writing Class,” creative writing professor Vicki Lindner acknowledges moments when she perhaps pushed two students too far, while demonstrating how the artistic creation of memoir can mirror psychologist Judith Lewis Herman’s conception of the trauma narrative. Although Lindner doesn’t offer specific practical suggestions, she ends her essay by affirming the value of the trauma narrative in creative nonfiction classrooms—a message nonfiction professor John Price also professes when he observes, “medicine is not the only healing art” (112).

Last, in “Wounds and Writing,” compositionist Michelle Day writes: “It’s important to remember that instructors are primarily educators, and resilience and recovery are therefore not their role in the same way it would be for a therapist or counselor. […] Nevertheless, there is also power in knowing that instructors do contribute in meaningful ways to their students’ resilience/recovery,

In other words, we need a trauma-informed pedagogy.

Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

According to SAMHSA: “A program, organization, or system that is trauma-informed realizes the widespread impact of trauma and understands potential paths for recovery; recognizes the signs and symptoms of trauma in clients, families, staff, and others involved with the system; responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices, and seeks to actively resist retraumatization” (9). By “retraumatization,” SAMHSA and other mental health experts mean avoiding triggers or experiences that will cause the individual to re-live the physical sensation of trauma and the nervous system dysregulation that occurred during and after the event. Trauma-informed organizations purposefully and thoughtfully work to avoid pushing traumatized individuals back into intense hyper- or hypoarousal—something that might happen in a creative writing classroom, for instance, if a student feels pressured to share explicit details about a trauma before they are ready, and/or in an environment where their peers and instructor aren’t able to offer empathic support.

To meet these goals and resist retraumatization, SAMHSA proposes the “Six Key Principles of a Trauma-Informed Approach”:

Safety
Trustworthiness and Transparency
Peer Support
Collaboration and Mutuality
Empowerment, Voice, and Choice
Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues

Brief definitions of each are offered in the diagram below.

To carry these concepts over into creative nonfiction pedagogy: in a trauma-informed classroom, the instructor would be familiar with the physiological impacts of trauma and able to recognize those impacts in students. In addition, a trauma-informed classroom would make conscientious choices to minimize the risk of retraumatization and would prioritize the six principles defined by SAMHSA. Thankfully, many creative writing classrooms are already designed to promote safety, trust, voice, and choice, and creative writing studies as a whole is increasingly implementing practices to address cultural issues related to race, gender, and sexuality. Most student-centered pedagogies and process-based pedagogies already center student agency and autonomy.

To help develop a trauma-informed pedagogy, however, I have compiled practical suggestions that I’ve pulled from research and revised to fit creative writing. Many of these ideas are intuitive, and the list is by no means all-inclusive. Yet it demonstrates specific pedagogical approaches that can facilitate student learning and ensure that our classrooms serve students who choose to write about trauma or whose academic performance is impacted by trauma histories.

Although my classroom practices have not changed dramatically since integrating a deliberately trauma-informed approach, these suggestions have prompted me to more overtly discuss trauma with my creative nonfiction students. When my students are brainstorming topics for memoirs and personal essays, I make sure to stress that they do not need to write about the “worst thing that happened to them”—and I make sure that not all of my course readings early in the term touch on trauma or emotionally difficult subjects. Instead, I intentionally offer a variety of models so that students know that strong, moving essays can be about childhood trauma as well as less vulnerable and even seemingly mundane topics. In addition, we spend time together as a class discussing what makes a good writing topic and when to know if you are ready to write about challenging material. We address what to watch for when we do choose to write about something emotionally challenging, and I offer a list of campus resources in case the writing process brings up emotions that students cannot process alone.

I also have leaned even more into a student-led workshop approach, making sure students are able to frame the kind of workshop feedback they are looking for and would benefit from. Here, I’ve drawn on the one-paragraph author’s notes that I routinely had my composition students write at the top of their drafts, simply stating where they were at in the writing process, what they were struggling with, and what kind of feedback they’d find helpful. Oddly, it took me a number of years to transfer this practice to my creative nonfiction workshops, but I have found it to be exceedingly helpful. When a student tells us in their author’s note that it was difficult to revisit the memories in the essay, we are able, as a class, to approach the essay from a gentler perspective than if we hadn’t known the material still felt very raw. I can then emphasize to the student (and the class) what they might consider expanding, if and when they feel ready, but that they should go slowly.

Again, although these aren’t huge changes to my classroom approach, I do think they have helped offer my students more agency. My students are now able to more intentionally speak about their topic decisions through a trauma-informed lens—even going so far as to verbally identify whether or not they think retraumatization is a risk. Perhaps even more noteworthy, these practices have increased my own confidence. In the past, I have sometimes hesitated when responding to student drafts about trauma, worried that I might mishandle them and harm the student in the process. With these skills and protocols, I feel more equipped to navigate such essays, which in turn allows me to be more present for my students.

What It Takes to Be a Trauma-Informed Instructor

Not too long ago, I presented a version of this article at a conference to creative writing professors, all of whom genuinely cared about their students and their teaching. During the Q&A, one professor mentioned in a shaky voice how wary she is of student work about trauma because the burden of hearing student stories often feels like too much. There are certain kinds of stories, she said, that she doesn’t have the capacity to respond to. Another professor voiced concern that focusing on trauma might take away from the academic nature of the course—the time available to delve into syntax and more finely tuned issues of craft. While speaking, the professor held herself defensively, arguing that acute student distress was a distraction from the real work of the classroom.

As I listened with empathy to both instructors, I thought back to Siegel’s concept of the window of tolerance and began to see the ways in which we, as creative writing instructors, are implicated. Student trauma can affect our own stress levels. What happens when student distress dysregulates and activates our own nervous systems? Perhaps to the point where we feel anxious and hyperaroused—like the first professor—or disconnected and hypoaroused—perhaps like the second?

One of the key points in trauma research is this: a dysregulated individual cannot pull another dysregulated individual back in their window of tolerance. A parent who becomes angry and hyperaroused when their child has a temper tantrum cannot bring that child back into a state of calm. Instead, they will dysregulate their child further. Only a calm, regulated parent can calm down a dysregulated child. The same goes for therapists—and, I’d say, instructors.

If we are responding to student essays about trauma, and those essays dysregulate us, we will have a hard time offering a safe, calm presence in the classroom for our students. This is simply a fact. Instead, we might contribute to the classroom environment in a manner that could demean, diminish, or dysregulate the student even further. To embody trauma-informed pedagogy, we need to be able to assess ourselves and remain (to our best ability) within our own windows of tolerance.

This isn’t to criticize professors who feel uncomfortable, activated, or overwhelmed by student trauma, but rather to remind us to be aware. Therapists are trained to notice the states of their own nervous systems and to practice grounding practices and self-care when they feel themselves becoming activated in and after sessions. Creative writing professors, I’d argue, need to do the same—especially if and when we find ourselves working with student stories about trauma. We need to know ourselves and to be able to lean into self-care (meditation, walks outside, connections with others, exercise, healthy eating, etc.) when student work or student distress dysregulates us. In other words, we need to prioritize maintaining our own windows of tolerance so that we can remain as regulated as possible. In eras of trauma and stress, the ability to offer that calm presence to students is perhaps the more meaningful thing we can do.

Final Notes on Healing

In What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, psychologist Bruce Perry identifies four traditional pillars of healing that cultures have historically relied on: “1) connection to clan and the natural world; 2) regulating rhythm through dance, drumming, and song; 3) a set of beliefs, values, and stories that brought meaning to trauma; and 4) on occasion, natural hallucinogens or other plant-derived substances” (200).

When I first read this section of Perry’s book, it immediately struck me that creative nonfiction classrooms already and often address two of those pillars. We offer students a space in which to find meaning and purpose in their experiences through stories, and when done right, we create a community (connection to clan) in which students feel seen and heard. As Melissa Febos acknowledges in her own account of writing about trauma, “whatever the contemporary associations with memoir or personal narrative or confession or the therapeutic elements of making art, when we write this way we are performing a process that predates those biases by centuries” (152). This potential to create healing communities and spaces shouldn’t be underestimated. As SAMHSA states: “Individual trauma occurs in a context of community […] Communities that provide a context of understanding and self-determination may facilitate the healing and recovery process for the individual. Alternatively, communities that avoid, overlook, or misunderstand the impact of trauma may often be re-traumatizing and interfere with the healing process.” (17).

As a creative writing instructor, I have seen how powerful a writing community can be. We all have wounds, and it helps to tell our stories in our own voices and to hear people respond in a manner that takes us seriously—as writers and as humans. In the classroom, every semester I have students who find a community they don’t have elsewhere, come to new insights about themselves, and feel that their personal stories—some of which they’ve held close—are validated. That is a profound experience—for students, but also for instructors.

It is true: we are not therapists, and so there are boundaries and limits to what we can do, just as there are boundaries and limits to what therapists can do. (In a session on compassion fatigue, one of the staff counselors at my university reminded us that “You can’t save them all.”) However, it is important to recognize that students trust us with their stories—that they have gifted their stories to us—and as writing instructors who have signed up for this work, it is our responsibility to make space for those stories and to train ourselves to approach both the writer and the student with care.

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

Jennifer Case is the author of Sawbill: A Search for Place (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared in journals such as the Rumpus, Orion, Ecotone, Literary Mama, and North American Review, while her scholarship can be found in the Journal of Creative Writing Studies and Assay. She teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org. You can find her at www.jenniferlcase.com.

Aggie Stewart
Bringing Dark Events to Light:
Emotional Pacing in the Trauma Narrative
Assay 9.1 (Fall 2022)

Douglas Carlson
Paul Gruchow and Brian Turner:
Two Memoirs Go Cubistic
Assay 1.2 (Spring 2015)

Return to 9.2

Return to Pedagogy