Abstract
In this chapter considers the constraining impact of trauma on educational endeavour. It begins by canvassing the literature on trauma in education, including the neurological adaptations which occur when a child is exposed to traumatic situations and the on-going psychological burden of trauma. When a young person brings a history of trauma with them to school or when stressful life events unfold while they are away at school, common sense and neuroscience concur that education outcomes will be adversely affected and that schools have an important role to play. For a number of participants in this book, school itself was a locus of trauma.
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Notes
- 1.
The Compendium quotes one school leader as saying it is ‘fairly rare these days’ that students are sent to boarding school to avoid a destructive home environment but ‘What we’re able to do in those situations is provide for the physical needs of the students, so they are getting a healthy diet and clothing and so forth, which may have been missing from the community’ (2015, p. 50). Any responsibility the school might have had to address the wider social and emotional health and well-being needs of the student is not acknowledged.
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O’Bryan, M. (2021). Trauma. In: Boarding and Australia's First Peoples. Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World, vol 3. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6009-2_10
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