When trauma comes to school: Toward a socially just trauma-informed praxis

Given the prevalence and devastating consequences of childhood trauma, there has been a surge in initiatives to help schools become trauma-informed. However, despite growing adoption such initiatives, number concerns have expressed. These include lack attention paid issues power inequality including poverty, racism, community violence as well adults neglect, mistreat or abuse children. Contemporary approaches can also serve inscribe deficit-based perceptions children, reinforcing negative stereotypes stigmas; they tend overlook possibility that themselves contribute students’ distress, especially context accountability target-driven agendas. This paper examines current terminology relation adversity, trauma-informed practice. It shows how are entangled with dominant medical model, which views emotional distress symptoms mental disorder, rather than reasonable intelligible strategies ensure survival. An alternative approach, co-authored by psychologists service users/survivors published British Psychological Society, known Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) is then discussed. The PTMF an approach for understanding psychological troubled troubling behavior, based primarily on inequality. was chosen order forefront social justice concerns, whilst remaining attentive state-of-the-art evidence-based understandings trauma care. Furthermore, drawing anti-oppression educational theory Paulo Freire, it argued praxis guided informed PTMF, redress many criticisms existing schools.