Addressing Trauma and Embracing Vulnerability in the Literacy Classroom

By: Ty Walkland

“I’m often overwhelmed when I pause and allow myself to feel the enormity of human experience in classrooms,” Elizabeth Dutro (2019) writes in the opening pages of her recent and remarkable book, The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy. “How can one room possibly contain it all?”

If any one classroom comes close, Dutro argues, it is surely the literacy classroom. “After all,” she writes, “literacy practices are the means through which life stories are encountered, shared, and witnessed in classrooms.” As a testament, her book traces a years’ worth of writing produced by a class of third-graders and their teacher who drew upon their own life experiences—including difficult and traumatic experiences—to enliven and enrich their school literacies, and learn to be more critical and compassionate witnesses of each other’s lives.

Dr. Dutro’s broad mission, like ours in the Addressing Injustices project, is to invite the full range of human experience and expression into the classroom as resources for learning and literacies. A handful of us on the AI team were fortunate to spend an evening with Dr. Dutro as part of the Toronto Writing Project’s TWP Speaks! lecture series back in October.

I (Ty) also had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Dutro for TWP’s teaching writers speak podcast. Her words have helped us clarify our own commitments and better articulate how we bring life to writing as a crucial component of our own pedagogy.

Dutro calls upon us teachers and researchers to carefully attune to the way trauma circulates in our classrooms—and not as a constraint to be managed, but as a context for learning in relation with others. Trauma has certainly animated our work over the years with youth and teachers, both as an explicit topic of inquiry and as an undercurrent shaping our interactions as readers, writers, artists, and researchers. Together we have encountered collective horrors like the Holocaust through our reading of Maus; we have witnessed scenes of domestic and racial violence in books like Eleanor & Park and The Hate U Give; we have shared stories of our own difficult and sometimes traumatic experiences. Powerful creative projects, moving films, and rich research papers and presentations have all emerged from these challenging spaces.

Reminding us that “trauma is [both] carried into institutions and inflicted by institutions,” Dr. Dutro emphasizes that vulnerability can only ever be invited, never required, and that we educators need to model and reciprocate vulnerability as we reach towards a more human and humane schooling experience. We have attempted to accomplish this in our work by inviting teachers to read, write, discuss, and make art alongside students. Check-ins and sharing circles have been routine parts of our practice, too—dialogic processes that all of us participate in equally. These strategies, like the ones Dutro shares in her book and in her talks, are continual works in progress. While we may never narrow down a single strategy for containing the breadth and depth of human experience in our literacy classes, we can attempt to create spaces where each of us is reminded that our experiences not only matter, but that the classroom doesn’t come to life without them.