What Does it Mean to be Trauma-Informed?

• Trauma-aware means to understand that trauma is common and prevalent, and being trauma-informed means integrating this awareness into practices, pedagogies, and policies. Trauma-informed education necessitates collective awareness of how trauma, adversity, and violence impact academic resilience. The focus is not on the diagnosis of individuals as in a therapeutic context, but rather intentional awareness of the personal and systemic violence already present in the lives of campus members and also in the institutional history and practices. Trauma-informed education emerges from neurobiological research and findings on the power of resilience behaviors and interventions to build progressive, positive outcomes.
• Unaddressed trauma affects traditional benchmarks of post-secondary success, including retention, course completion, and graduation rates. Interruptions in school attendance, not being cognitively present due to overwhelming stress and trauma, documented socio-economic pressures of homelessness, food insecurity, and poverty, systemic and institutionalized identity-based violence such as racism, all these factors adversely impact progress in the everyday skills critical to higher education and the workplace.