Heirloom Treasures in the Classroom

Inter-Generational Trauma and its Impact on Students' Learning and Behaviour

Why do we care about Trauma and its expression in a classroom? Because it expresses itself physiologically and more importantly behaviourally and cognitively. Why do we care about Inter-Generational Trauma? Because it frames the context for how our students are disposed to the expression of their trauma. 

Are we going to work with each student and their trauma? Are we educators now becoming therapists? No. But one has to acknowledge and work with the trauma that is going to be present in the classroom. The dynamics of the classroom ; personal, cognitive and behavioural are intrinsic to the knowledge we hold as educators in the classroom. 

So in order to equip ourselves to frame the context, this article will be a personal elucidation of inter-generational trauma in the classroom. I am going to start with my favourites; a metaphor. 

Our classrooms are baskets of apples. We need to know the trees and the orchards that they fell from if we need to be good cultivators of apples. The apple may fall far from the tree or close to it, but by the time it reaches our baskets, we need to know the tree, the soil and the orchard it came from if we need to make sure that the apples are optimum before they become trees of their own! So understanding the trauma and its impact will deepen our skills and practices as educators.

Trauma : Poverty, Chronic Stress, Chronic Abuse 

Trauma has many faces. Trauma is shaped by intensity, by duration and by proximity. Trauma can be environmental, actively orchestrated and circumstantial. The expression of trauma is dependent on the interactions of all of the above. The term inter-sectionality is not just a woke term to discuss identities but is the encapsulation of the traumas and experiences that are held in the different identities that are held by the individual. 

Trauma, as I understood from Albert Wong an expert on Polyvagal Theory, is the shock to the nervous system. Something that happens ‘too much, too fast, too soon, too long, too little, too late’. Events that happen out of the ‘window of tolerance’ of our systems. It is the fragmented processing of a memory. The fragmented development of the brain-body. The brain-body’s capacity to organise, categorise, sequence, access and retrieve memories through sensation, image, emotion, behaviour and meaning. 

Therefore the students in our classrooms come with multiple narratives. But I am stating the obvious here, ‘ trauma affects their capacity to study’. What, as educators, we want to understand is how does it? And to what extent? 

Trauma can affect their behaviour or their socio-emotional processes. Their capacities to regulate their brain-bodies unravel as they lose the continuity of processing. Their interactions with the other is coloured by their brain-bodies attempting to assimilate the information their trauma is giving them.  Trauma affects their cognitive skills. A body-brain that is confused about their safety and is busy trying to process what is happening to it is not interested in the combinations and relationships of numbers, letters and concepts, fascinating as they may be. 

Trauma can affect their physiology. Their organs and the functioning of the brain-body will then start responding to the stimulus of trauma. So what? We can manage the first two; behaviour and cognition, in the classroom and the medical practitioners can figure out this bit right? Well not really. 

Impact on Genetics

There is this fascinating part of the human condition known as genetics. And when joined with the fun prefix of ‘epi’ we stumble onto this whole new space of mindblown. ‘Epigenetics’ complicates things for us educators as we now have to see our students as a lot more than what we have all this time. Like what a lot aboriginal and ancient cultures have seen people as; an accumulation of their ancestry that they bring into the classrooms; as the bodies holding historical experiences that impact their genes and their brain-bodies. Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in primary DNA sequence. The environment and experiences of individuals impact the expression of the genes, almost like turning on or off switches known as epigenetic tags. This enables the development of certain ‘dispositions’ that inform behaviour, cognition and as we well know, the physiological processes. 98% of DNA is responsible for the emotional, behavioural and personality traits that one inherits; that is a vast amount that was otherwise rendered 'noncoded'.

Eric Jensen, elaborates in his “Teaching with Poverty in Mind”, the acute and chronic impact of epigenetics within the classroom; cognitively and behaviourally . Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) affect individuals in the timeline within their own lives. Epigenetics lays light on the fact that ACEs felt by previous generations inform the habits and dispositions of students today. Mark Wolynn elicits that intergenerational trauma is retained for upto 3 generations before. There is an ‘epigenetic preparedness’ he speaks of in response to stress. Eric Jensen is able to clarify the impact of this preparedness on the cognitive dispositions as well. 

This stream of study is deep and is only accumulating more information that can nuance our understanding of our students and ourselves. The responses of the brain and the body to learning environments, content and individuals is not only that of their own. It is coded and informed by earlier experiences and those that occurred prior to their existence itself. 

Breaking the Cycles 

As stated earlier, the different identities and the corresponding trauma that is held by the student is immense. In India, the caste and gender based inequity runs deep. The disproportionate dispositions to the standards that are set for the educational demands within a classroom become blaring. Inequity within a classroom is not only confined to the backgrounds of the students but these deeper dispositions.  And it is then enmeshed in the classroom that is aiming to normalise the students towards one achievement. These cycles of intergenerational trauma cannot be broken with a tabular solution. The answer is as nuanced and complex as the problem itself. 

It is in the need to diversify standards, demands and methodologies. As educators, and not the system, one can turn a keener eye to the students’ capacities, interests and scope of learning. An embodied education, allows for the student to tap into their experience and their embodied selves. In doing so, they are exposed to their inner worlds. They are equipped with perspectives of themselves and the environment that are in congruence with their embodied experiences. 

“New experiences when perceived as positive, rewarding, meaningful and engages in curiosity and wonder” can re-wire existing neural patterns. Neuro-plasticity is our avenue for re-writing the students’ history. In order to do so they require the brain-body to engage in experiential shifts in their understanding of the environment and themselves. In order to engage with trauma, there is a strong argument for engaging the body and entering the body to build awareness and practice. In traumas related to learning, there needs to be a whole-bodied shift such that the pre-frontal cortex (part of the brain) responsible for memory and learning can store it in the natural way that it is attuned towards. 

One might read this and feel the enormity of the interacting neurons, bodies and individuals. However it is helpful to note the purpose with which the article was birthed. Educators are not going to begin to become therapists, nor can we be. However educators must begin to acknowledge and facilitate the whole-bodied shifts that students can have. Remember the metaphor, apples and trees and falling. Understanding the dispositions of our students within the classroom is understanding that the apples are going to have multi-dimensional difficulties in establishing themselves. The role of us as educators is witnessing it and facilitating deeper, more natural experiences such that the roots set are as strong and deep. With a force so that the capacity to reckon with further difficulties is imminent and not at a disadvantage that they were unconsciously inherent to. The apples will need to heal, our students, ourselves, will need to heal if we are to face the deluge of complexity that the future is to bring.