S4 E23 BONUS: Coaching, Teaching, & Classroom Management Strategies Sparked From My Conversation with Arlène Elizabeth Casimir (❤️Olivia Wahl)

How Trauma-Responsive Teaching Transforms Classrooms

In this S4E23 bonus episode, I break down key insights from Arlène Elizabeth Casimir's book Trauma-Responsive Pedagogy: Teaching for Healing and Transformation (co-authored with Courtney Baker). The episode focuses on Casimir's seven-stage framework for weaving trauma-responsive practices into instruction. This episode accompanies Season 4, Episode 23, featuring the full interview with Arlène Elizabeth Casimir.

KEY CONCEPTS:

➡️Distinction between bearing witness and empathy

➡️Healing as a parallel process

➡️Creating restorative and transformative practices in schools

Arlène’s Seven-Stage Framework:

1. Know Thyself

2. Know Thy Content

3. Bearing Witness

4. Feel

5. Grieve

6. Initiate the Archetypes

7. Heal and Transform

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When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

Transcript

Olivia: [00:00:00] Hi there. I'm so happy you're here. Your time is precious. And because of that, I want to let you know right away what you'll gain by listening to the very last second of this episode. My conversation with Arlène Elizabeth Casimir, focused on how school can be the perfect place for restorative and transformative practices that help our children and faculty regain wholeness.

Olivia: In this bonus episode, I offer my insights about the power of Arlène's book and body of work. You'll learn about her seven-stage framework that will help you weave trauma responsive pedagogy into the fabric of your instruction, how bearing witness is distinct from empathy, and why healing is a parallel process.

Olivia: Stay with me. I'm so happy to have you as a listener today. This is Schoolutions: Coaching and Teaching Strategies, the podcast that extends education beyond the classroom. [00:01:00] A show that offers educators and caregivers strategies to try right away and ensure every student receives the inspiration and support they need to.

Olivia: I am Olivia Wahl, and this is a bonus episode. It's an accompaniment to my conversation with Arlène Elizabeth Casimir, Season 4, episode 23. And we discussed Arlène in Courtney Baker's book, Trauma Responsive Pedagogy: Teaching for Healing and Transformation. My conversation with Arlène was so moving and inspiring, and yet we didn't get to speak to everything that I had hoped to.

Olivia: We paused the conversation at close to an hour, and I could have continued talking to Arlène for, I think, another, another week. So with that said, I wanted to have this bonus episode focus on Arlène’s [00:02:00] strategies that will help us weave trauma responsive pedagogy into the fabric of our instruction. Arlène maps out seven different stages to do this work, and I am going to go through each of the stages.

Olivia: Not giving away everything because of course you need to have the book in hand to highlight and pour over the pages but I will just offer an overview to get you thinking and started and then you can do a deeper dive when you have Your own book in hand the section begins on page 68 of the book and it reads like a call to action Arlène says as educators, many of us need to disrupt the notion that only the teacher and school choose the curriculum and culture, that it is solely in our hands to determine what students would learn and how.

Olivia: She goes on to say a bit later, we can offer an expanded or enlightened view of the world and the opportunities within it. However, [00:03:00] our perception of success should never take precedence over caregivers, families, and students. The first stage she speaks to is called know thyself. And this stage is all about developing self-awareness and the inner work involved.

Olivia: Arlène describes concrete ways that we can get to know ourselves, like going to therapy, journaling, engaging in embodiment practice that invites us to be present in our body, like yoga, breathwork, dance, or any kind of movement where we're fully present. We can engage in spiritual practice like meditation, prayer.

Olivia: A nature walk. And Arlène encourages us that if we want to know ourselves better, we have to pay very close attention to our self talk. She asks us, how does your inner voice perceive your life experiences? Is your inner critic louder than your inner child? Are you [00:04:00] kind to yourself? Do you engage with yourself like a loving friend?

Olivia: What do you notice about how you feel in your body? How much time do you have to spend alone? Do you feel like you can take time for yourself? Is the way you perceive yourself the same way others perceive you? Arlène even offers questions and encourages you to call a friend or a trusted family member and ask questions that can help you know how others perceive you.

Olivia: I will say that going to therapy and doing this deep work to peel back the layers, it's not easy. And I do believe that it is the only way we can truly be present with our children. Whether it be our own children, whether it be our students, we cannot cultivate classrooms that are self-aware if we don't understand what makes us tick, what makes us react and [00:05:00] respond in the ways that we do, what our strengths are and how we could develop ourselves in the future.

Olivia: The second stage that Arlène describes is know thy content, both in the context of culturally relevant and trauma responsive pedagogy. And she says, if we are not solid in our instructional knowledge and skills, it doesn't matter how self aware or socially aware we are. We will not be able to respond to our students’ trauma in an academic, social, and emotional context.

Olivia: Arlène offers beautiful questions to help us know our content deeply. Like, what is your instructional content? What's the subject? What are the standards and what are the skills our children need to know? What is the research behind it, the pedagogy, the methodology, the theory and practices? Which demographic has the research been studied with?

Olivia: What are the educational frameworks to inform our curriculum and school culture? [00:06:00] And how inclusive are those frameworks and how do we implement them? We also have to consider how we see trauma responsive manifesting for ourselves. and for our students when teaching this content area? And what kind of institutional oppression or trauma do we need to deconstruct and or disrupt to give our students full access to themselves in our classroom or our school community?

Olivia: Throughout this stage two, Arlène is so self-reflective. And she offers the questions that she asked herself throughout getting to know her content through these lenses. Something she says in this stage really hit my heart. Even beautiful stories can bring up wounds for children if they feel the absence of the beauty of the story in their own lives.

Olivia: It was something I hadn't even thought about. And that's what Arlène does in this book. She [00:07:00] plants seeds that help you reconsider and reframe the way you see the world around you, not only through your eyes and how you perceive the world, but also through your children's eyes. Stage three focuses on bearing witness, entering our classroom and schools with a trauma responsive lens.

Olivia: Arlène shares stories from her own life to frame the concept of bearing witness. And then she describes. To me, bearing witness is the ability to look, listen, and learn from another person's experience with compassion, not empathy. I see empathy as the projection of an emotion onto an object, where compassion is an invitation to look at someone's humanity and to listen to their story with attention, care, and love. Within this stage, she also offers three different ways that the negative effects of prolonged stress responses turn into sustained trauma [00:08:00] responses that negatively impact the community. She explains how trauma is solidified when your community fails to witness the suffering. How trauma is solidified when trauma exposure responses, and how they manifest for adults and children alike in classrooms and schools, are dismissed, ignored, or ridiculed.

Olivia: And that trauma is when something happens in your life that is against your will. And you're left to deal with the stress and residue of the experience without the proper community support to cope effectively. Figure 3-5 breaks down all the different types of trauma. I found this incredibly helpful.

Olivia: That helped me with the first stage of getting to know thyself. She breaks down types of trauma like generational, individual, familial, communal, relational, societal, collective, cultural, historical, and [00:09:00] racial, economic, institutional. And she reminds us to witness. We don't guide, we don't teach. We have to be present.

Olivia: And we have to watch. And then Arlène encourages us to pause and to better understand what happens when we don't bear witness. In her words, when we don't bear witness, we disassociate and our body, mind, and spirits become disconnected. We find ourselves unaware of what we are experiencing or feeling. When we don't bear witness, we neglect our humanity, our students humanity, and that of the world.

Olivia: When we don't bear witness, the negative effects of trauma are solidified. When we don't bear witness, crisis consumes us. When we don't bear witness, we get swept into the next catch all phrases and movements in education. Soon, we will all see [00:10:00] trauma informed, trauma sensitive, trauma focused educational movements.

Olivia: But the question is, what do we see right in front of us? Right on our screens, right in our lives, what has heart and meaning for us and how is this new reality shaping our pedagogy? During this stage, Arlène also illuminates her holding space protocol. We spoke in depth to that during our Season 4, Episode 23 conversation.

Olivia: Make sure to go back and listen so you can better understand the power of that protocol. Stage 4. Feel. Tending to the wounds within ourselves and within our classrooms. Arlène tells us, a healing crisis calls for compassion. Sitting in the darkness with the other, feeling the suffering in yourself as well as in them, and creating a learning space that can alleviate that suffering.

Olivia: Before taking us through the process in this [00:11:00] stage, Arlène reminds us that there's this saying, you can't heal it unless you feel it. There's a call to action in a way, because she tells us it's not the time to disassociate. I feel this. We're often lured into the traps of productivity, quantity over quality, and workaholism is a way to numb the pain and blind ourselves to the emotions that are surfacing within us.

Olivia: Disassociation tears us apart from healthy human relationships, tears us from connections to our emotions. Our body, the more you acknowledge your feelings and do self care to emotionally regulate and cultivate healthy coping mechanisms, the more you are able to heal.

Olivia: Stage five, grief. It's an ongoing process. In our lens words, there are so many emotions that come with loss. [00:12:00] And every day we're invited to experience the fullness of our humanity by grappling with those various feelings. Consider a loss you've experienced in your life. What feelings do you recall? Did any of them surprise you?

Olivia: And how are you navigating that loss? And, when feeling grief, it can be difficult to see outside of it, or even imagine that if you attempt to engage in actions outside of grieving, you're not somehow betraying yourself and those you are grieving. This ties so beautifully thyself, because we as adults have to do our own grieving inner work before working with students.

Olivia: And Arlène calls out how our society lacks the implementation of grieving rituals in schools. And yet, grieving is such a trauma responsive practice because it helps people to not be reduced by what has happened to them, and instead to process it in a community and move on in ways that honor them. [00:13:00] Stage 6.

Olivia: Initiate the Archetypes Arlène defines archetypes are ancient images and symbols that have guided civilization from the beginning of time. From places like forest, the castle, the home, to things like heart, animals, and amulets, to selves like the warrior, queen, father, child. These images have been crucial in understanding the human condition.

Olivia: The individual and collective consciousness. And within stage six, Arlène empowers us. She reminds us that the teacher sets the stage. And when we are open to outcome, we know that the most profound teachable moments happen when we create the right conditions for students to learn and grow. That we are always moving through the different archetypes.

Olivia: She asks us to journal and reflect on when we are the [00:14:00] warrior, the leader, what qualities does the healer embody? What kind of vision do we hold for our recovery, for our students, for their families? And how can our teaching practices support us in holding healing spaces for our colleagues, students, and their families?

Olivia: I always consider the people that I choose to surround myself with, and I love the sentence on page 87. It can also be helpful to note how you notice the archetypes manifesting in the people around you. What gifts are they bringing to the table at different times, and how can this help you be more trauma responsive alongside them?

Olivia: Stage 7. Heal and transform. The intention and practice of teaching the whole child while nurturing your well-being. Our line goes on to say, in this final stage, we take all that we have [00:15:00] learned from trauma informed care and trauma responsive pedagogy in the previous sections. To experience a healing centered paradigm shift that promotes transformation in our teaching practices by integrating inclusive frameworks such as culturally relevant pedagogy, social emotional learning, and trauma responsive pedagogy, we tend to the needs of our students in an effort to help them grow holistically.

Olivia: And that school can be the perfect place for restorative and transformative practices that help children and faculty regain wholeness. And Arlène concludes this section with hope. Hope that we can use the knowledge, strategies, and tools that we've learned from her and her book to implement trauma responsive pedagogy with compassion, grace, and flexibility for ourselves and our students.

Olivia: This quote directly connects with one of [00:16:00] my beliefs around parallel practice. She says, remember, it's a parallel process. And as we say in Haiti, Behind mountains, there are more mountains, so don't strive to arrive, instead commit to be present. Enjoy the landscape and savor the lessons learned along the journey.

Olivia: Thank you for joining me for this bonus episode. Thank you to Arlène and Courtney for this resource that is needed now more than ever. We're in this together, and I can't wait to see you next week. Until then, take care. Schoolutions: Coaching and Teaching Strategies is created, produced, and edited by me, Olivia Wahl.

Olivia: Thank you to my older son, Benjamin, who created the music playing in the background. You can follow and listen to Schoolutions wherever you get your podcasts, or subscribe to never miss an episode and watch on YouTube. Now? [00:17:00] I'd love to hear from you. Send me an email at Schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com. Let me know how your community is striving to regain wholeness.

Olivia: What restorative and transformative practices are you interested in putting into place? Tune in every Monday for the best research backed coaching and teaching strategies you can apply right away to better the lives of the children in your care. And stay tuned for my bonus episodes every Friday. Or I'll share how I applied what I learned from the guests in schools that week.

Olivia: See you then.