deeply concerned about addressing the unchecked pain of our Black children, especially our Black boys. Here’s what they had to say.
BlackDoctor: As an educator what do you feel trauma does to the outlook of a child? Specifically affects it effect them in the classroom or school in general.
Leatherwood: The dictionary defines trauma as “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience”. As and educator, I believe trauma has the potential to completely derail a student in the classroom…distracting them for their work, handicapping their social emotional development, keeping them from realizing their full potential. However, trauma is not a singular event/experience and all students are not the same.
So a blanket statement about the relation of trauma (there are various traumas one may experience) and the academic outcomes of students is a bit unstable in my opinion. Therefore, I would like to think of this relationship from a research perspective (in addition to my educator perspective) and engage this question empirically. Scientifically, what do we know about the relationship of trauma and student academic outcomes?
Let’s take one example for the sake of discourse. In a study conducted by Boyraz and colleagues (2013) on the relation between Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and college persistence for Black students in their first year of study, the authors found that PTSD levels were positively associated with an increased likelihood of leaving college before the end of the 2nd year of college for women. However, Boyraz and his co-authors (2013) found no such relationship (at least a statistically significant one) for Black males.
There are more examples that we can cite but for the sake of time I will end with this, personally I believe trauma to have the capacity to seriously disturb the potential for academic success for