Optimizing a critical juncture: Trauma, neoliberal education and children’s agency

Abstract

Trauma sensitive approaches are being adopted in schools across the U.S. While responding to children’s trauma is imperative, this analysis points to significant limitations posed by individual pathology-focused science and neoliberal influences, including an outline of fundamental contradictions. This is followed by a conceptualization of trauma which illustrates alignment with and the necessity of critical pedagogy as a means for developing critical knowledge and world views that are resistant to domination and may counter the effects of trauma.

Keywords:

• Critical pedagogy
• education policy
• trauma

Acknowledgment

We express appreciation to Kathleen Sellers and other teacher-scholars who have the vision and courage to construct critical pedagogy in ways that are responsive to trauma and promote their students' agency.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Hulgin

Dr. Hulgin is an Associate Professor of Education and her research and teaching interests are in the areas of educational policy, inclusive education, disability studies and trauma. (*corresponding author [email protected])

E. Frank Fitch

Dr. Fitch is an Associate Professor Emeritus of Education and his research and teaching interests are in the areas of educational philosophy, inclusive education, disability studies, and cooperative learning.

M. Nickie Coomer

M. Nickie Coomer is a doctoral candidate in Urban Education Studies at the Indiana University School of Education-Indianapolis (IUPUI). Her research focuses on the ways in which teacher identity and agency interact with organizational accountability structures to both resist and assume deficit discourses of neoliberal economies in ways that pathologize student emotion and behavior in a process of debilitation for the purpose of remediation