This text forms an excellent starting point for community college individuals and institutions because it offers rationale for trauma informed community college as well as a lens for best practices. Verschelden uses the non-pathologizing, non-medical frame of “cognitive bandwidth” to describe ways in which a student’s cognitive availability can be “sapped” or “increased”. Systemic inequality, racism, homophobia, and stereotype threat along with basic needs insecurities represent factors that sap or take away from the cognitive resources a student has to pursue academics. There are ways in which post-secondary institutions can restore or increase cognitive bandwidth by calibrating policies and practices aware and responsive to adverse dynamics that sap including trauma informed pedagogy and practices.
Note: Bandwidth Recovery offers an excellent introduction to trauma informed higher education, and especially community colleges, and would be a great choice for a book group as campuses begin to consider trauma informed. The concept of “cognitive bandwidth” makes for a very generative, non-pathologizing, non-clinical conceptual tool describing factors that adversely impact academic resilience as well as how colleges can positively increase and support the cognitive resources students bring to their work.
Verschelden, Cia. Bandwidth Recovery: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism, and Social Marginalization (2017).
Verschelden also offers training: https://bandwidthrecovery.org/