Trauma-Sensitive Literacy Instruction: Building Student Resilience in English-Language Arts Classrooms

It is vital for educators to be aware of how traumatic experiences affect today’s students, yet few teachers learn the tools needed to successfully teach these students. This book highlights how English Language Arts teachers, who are typically not licensed or specifically trained to work with trauma issues, can design and implement instruction that helps students see that they are supported. Readers will find specific strategies for teaching literacy based on the authors’ extensive knowledge and experience in trauma-sensitive instruction, adolescent literacy, and culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies. The authors show how to support middle and high school students with specific literacy practices (reading, speaking, listening, and writing) that build resilience. Trauma-Sensitive Literacy Instruction is for the many teachers who are unsure how to invite students and their traumas into classroom instruction and embed critical discussions and learning within their teaching practices and pedagogy. It will help ELA teachers navigate student trauma in a way that empowers both students and teachers.

Book Features:

• Responds to research that consistently shows how schools are often places that marginalize―and sometimes traumatize or retraumatize―children.
• Offers specific information related to literature, writing, discussion, and inquiry activities focused on various traumatic experiences.
• Provides rationales and research, along with examples, teacher vignettes, and steps for incorporating relevant practices in classrooms (grades 6–12).

Rachelle S. Savitz is an associate professor in the Department of Literacy Studies, English Education and History Education in the College of Education at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. Britnie Delinger Kane is an associate professor of literacy education in the Zucker Family School of Education at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, where she also serves as the department head.