Our global, multicultural student body–as well as faculty and staff–continue to experience the compounding impacts of COVID-19 (and other public health crises), war, natural disasters, race-based traumatic stress, and other life contexts that differ from regular stress because they are unrelenting. In a community such as ours, it is important to remember that any geopolitical crisis or natural disaster may have local and lasting repercussions among students and faculty.
Learning routines and retention abilities are challenged by, or even lost, due to such trauma. Combined with situations that may place family members or countries of origin in harm’s way, the general stress of student experiences can impact their abilities to self-regulate learning behaviors and focus on their work. At NYU Abu Dhabi many of our students experience complex trauma (multiple sources of trauma at one time) due to their diverse backgrounds and specific challenges. For instance, COVID fears in Abu Dhabi likely overlap with constant fears for loved ones at home for international students, particularly when families are in war zones or without COVID vaccines that are available in the UAE.
Trauma-informed approaches to teaching strive to understand how various forms of trauma may have impacted the lives of learners and use that understanding to accommodate learners’ needs, prevent further or retraumatization, and promote resilience and growth.
Trauma-informed and equity-centered practices are universal and benefit everyone. Beyond supporting community members with compassion, these practices also ensure improved learning outcomes. There is no perfect implementation or checklist to be completed. The resources provided here are a meant to guide enhancements for faculty practices and pedagogy to provide support to students and themselves. They are meant to support your action in the classroom and your involvement in university-wide procedures and responses.
Faculty can play a positive role in cultivating student resilience by building respectful places for learning. This involves facilitating relationships of trust with your students and among them. Being trauma-aware and equity-centered will improve student engagement and learning outcomes. Trauma-aware teaching is relevant to all disciplines, regardless of whether or not your course content is directly related to trauma and equity itself. There is also information here relevant to courses that do have trauma-related content.
The challenges brought forth by global disruptions, COVID-19, natural disasters and conflict, mean that our student body is experiencing a combination of traumas at this time. In this session we discuss how to foster trustworthiness through communication to help students address the uncertainty of these times for deeper learning.
Our teaching-related support videos are currently only available to the NYU/NYU Shanghai/NYU Abu Dhabi Faculty via login.
Do the policies in my course take into account the different challenges students may encounter, especially during a pandemic or ongoing situations of global conflict? Do they account for students who may have suffered trauma due to geopolitical conflict, dislocation, racism, or sexual violence?
Students may…
Source: Adapted from ALA, cited as Davidson, 6-8; Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 55-88, 145-150
Recognize that trauma is both real and pervasive. We won’t know, and can’t assume, which of our students have been impacted by trauma and must ensure that our teaching practices are consistently trauma-informed and empathetic.
Trauma-informed education is anti-racist and against all forms of oppression (Alex Shevrin Venet, 2021, p21). Race-based traumatic stress includes emotional or physical pain or the threat of physical and emotional pain that results from racism in the forms of racial harassment (hostility), racial discrimination (avoidance), or discriminatory harassment (aversive hostility). The target may experience significant emotional reactions, and symptom clusters emerge that reflect that reaction, but the racial component is important in recognizing and connecting the racism to the emotional distress and pain.
The events that may produce race-based traumatic stress reactions occur in many different forms. Racial encounters may be direct or subtle and ambiguous. They can occur on an interpersonal level (microaggressions, verbal assaults, use of symbols, or coded language), and can be the effect of structural or systemic acts. Racism may occur on an institutional level, as an application of racial stereotypes, or as encounters and assault, and it may occur through cultural racism. (Robert T. Carter, 2007)
For additional information related to inclusion, diversity, equity, and belonging at NYUAD please visit The Office of Inclusion and Equity faculty resources page.
Instructional strategies such as the following can also help students approach challenging material:
Source: Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Waterloo, https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/trigger
Avoid Harmful Interactions
More resources on managing difficult conversations can be found here.
Recent research conducted by Hooper et al. (2023) used a trauma-informed lens to understand how teaching personally traumatizing content could impact students’ learning. The case study investigated a course called “Religion and Politics” at the University of California.
The students were active participants in their own learning journey, applying course content to their personal experiences through weekly reflection assignments. Assignments included weekly reflection assignments, intended to empower students to demonstrate elements of the five core trauma-informed principles. The key is not to further burden students but to ask them to connect the course material to current events and their daily lives such that they:
Reference: Hooper, A. M., Hyder, M., Colclough, T., & Mann, D. (2023). Re-envisioning learning through a trauma-informed lens: Empowering students in their personal and academic growth. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 23(3), 74-94.
The goal is to create consistent and sustainable standards that build community and support deeper learning. A key pedagogical practice is to provide flexible opportunities for access and expression. The challenge is to balance being predictable with being flexible. (Venet, 2021, p77)
In order to build peer support from the first day of class consider activities such as having students get to know one another through small group discussions or collaboration (breakout rooms if on Zoom). Further, invite them to create a WhatsApp group amongst themselves, and encourage them to support each other.
Source: Karen Costa, "Trauma-Aware Teaching Checklist," https://bit.ly/traumachecklist
Karen Costa's Trauma-Aware Teaching Checklist includes strategies on fostering trustworthiness between students and faculty in the classroom. Strategies for fostering connections and peer support are included. More resources on how to build community in the NYUAD classroom are available here.
When a student's behavior causes concern or alarm it is important to provide appropriate referrals. NYU Abu Dhabi maintains a Distressed Student Protocol and faculty are encouraged to keep a copy on hand. This protocol can be accessed here. Knowing where to refer students for professional help is important, for example, refer them to Counseling for mental health issues, or to the Moses Center for Student Accessibility services, etc.
Key contacts for student referrals include:
