2021/05/17 by Robert Petrone, Christine Rogers Stanton · 71 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Child Abuse and Trauma #Education Discipline and Inequality #Educational research #Harm #Law #Migration, Health and Trauma #Participatory action research #Pedagogy #Political science #Psychology #Scholarship #Social psychology #Sociology
paper · doi:10.3102/0013189x211014850
published in Educational Researcher 50(8), 537-545 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2021/05/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Although “trauma-informed education” has gained momentum across the United States in recent years, a question remains neglected by the research community: How can education research inform understandings of “trauma-informed” approaches when education itself is trauma-producing for many students? This article (1) explores limitations of traumainformed educational scholarship, particularly its reliance on individualized, biomedical understandings of trauma; (2) articulates theoretical reconceptualizations for subsequent research to account for historical trauma and ways schools and research inflict harm on students; and (3) calls for expansion of relational, participatory, and humanizing methodologies. Overall, we argue for a shift from research that focuses on “trauma-informed education” to scholarship that enacts a sociohistorical trauma-reducing framework to more effectively interrogate the intersections of trauma, schooling, and research.