Abstract
Photo of Erin E. Price-Hamilton by Mark C. Morris
Although not a new phenomenon, the prevalence of student trauma has recently garnered national attention. This ongoing public health crisis hinders learning, connection, and the well-being of entire school communities. 1 Often on the margins of conversations surrounding student needs or unable to access educational documents, music teachers seeking to support students with trauma are frequently placed in precarious positions that could potentially lead to students’ retraumatization due to missing information, large caseloads, and limited interaction time. Without a deeper understanding of trauma responses, music teachers may find themselves in positions where they are unable to adequately meet students’ needs, ultimately impeding classroom aims and damaging relationships. 2 In this article, I focus on music teacher attunement to trauma sequelae—the biological, neurological, and psychological changes that occur post-trauma—and how this attunement might be leveraged to make music learning environments more “in tune.”
Trauma
Given high rates of trauma in the US population, it is likely that music educators of all specialties and age levels will routinely encounter students with trauma histories. Researchers estimate that more than 50 percent of American children are exposed to at least one traumatic event before reaching adulthood. 3 The National Children’s Alliance lists the approximate annual child abuse rates in the United States as more than 600,000. 4 In 2022 there were 5,383 substantiated reports of child abuse with 60 substantiated fatalities and 138 substantiated near fatalities in Pennsylvania alone. 5
Traumatic events or prolonged trauma include events or environments that are life-threatening, stressful, or dangerous. 6 They can be experienced individually or collectively. 7 Trauma has been defined as an “overwhelming experience that undermines a person’s belief that the world is good and safe.” 8 These experiences can be acute (Type I traumas) or chronic and complex (Type II traumas). 9 Outside of child abuse and neglect, students may accumulate trauma through sudden incidents, including violence or war, displacement, sudden loss, environmental disasters, medical procedures, and cultural persecution. 10 Other ongoing chronic stressors, including serious and prolonged bullying or targeting, inherited family trauma, chronic illness, and poverty, cause pain in students’ lives. 11 Culturally, racial violence, climate change, and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic leave indelible marks on our learners. 12 Exposure to trauma may result in emotional/behavioral disorder labels or posttraumatic stress disorder diagnoses. 13 Although not all individuals develop a trauma response from encountering stressful events, trauma can impact the mind and body pervasively and can require specialized intervention through trauma-informed pedagogies. 14
Additionally, many teachers bring their own traumas to the music-learning space. Teachers may experience feelings of being triggered through interactions with students that remind them of their past traumas. 15 Teachers may develop trauma responses to unhealthy working environments or accrue secondary trauma when hearing about traumas that have happened to their students. 16 In some cases, students’ behaviors may traumatize teachers. 17 These factors of teacher trauma may impact music teachers’ ability to remain attuned to the needs of their students because their own personal overwhelm prevents a measured and present response.
Attunement
Teachers are resilience factors for students post-trauma. During acute events, teacher attunement can negate the immediate impact of trauma. 18 Later, as students navigate trauma sequelae, teachers can leverage attunement to anticipate and respond to trauma behaviors. Attunement is a process in which one’s internal state shifts in a way that allows it to come to resonate with another. 19 When we are attuned to our students, our classroom is in tune; we resonate together. From the fertile soil of attunement, reciprocal relationships that honor students begin to grow; this is the foundation of meaningful connection. Students need attunement to develop secure attachments to others and to restore the broken trust that results from trauma. 20
I am sure you have had experiences where your classroom is vibrating synchronously and then suddenly something feels amiss. We all sense these subtle shifts in our classrooms. Perhaps we see exchanged glances or hear changes in breathing. Perhaps our students’ tones are heightened, or they begin to engage in out-of-character behaviors. These are the warning signs that our students might need us to step off the podium and into their worlds. The more attuned teachers are to minor changes in the environment, the faster they can respond proactively to de-escalate situations that can be detrimental to the communities within their classrooms and ensembles. Attunement helps teachers withstand challenges in the classroom to the benefit of all parties and remain emotionally present to respond to their students’ needs. 21 Conversely, teachers who are not attuned to their students may find themselves unknowingly perpetuating cycles of violence, allowing opportunities for escalation, and decreasing classroom safety. Crucial to attunement is the ability to accurately identify trauma sequelae as they arise and to respond appropriately.
Trauma Sequelae
Across ensembles, we music educators aim for our students to be in tune with each other. We prize our skills as leaders, our discerning ears, and our musicianship as we make highly detailed corrections and decisions to improve the collective sound of our groups. Trauma sequelae, including hyperarousal, intrusion, dissociation, constriction, and disempowerment, can create barriers to cohesiveness due to feelings of lack of safety, emotional disengagement, and attentional issues. Occurring outside of the control of our students, these barriers can lead to moments of “sharpness” or “flatness.”
Sharpness
Just as being sharp raises a pitch, hyperarousal creates a heightened baseline of arousal through an escalated autonomic response. 22 Although hyperarousal is a protective measure for children suffering abuse—children often will attend to the vacillating inner states of their abusers in an effort to prevent further abuse 23 —it causes children to “feel chronically unsafe inside their bodies.” 24 Hyperarousal may present as a need for routine, exaggerated startle responses, impaired perceptions of safety, social deficits, inattentiveness, and hypersensitivity to minor boundary violations. 25 At times, hyperarousal may cause students to flee the music classroom, preventing them from being present to learn key information. Music students experiencing hyperarousal may become overwhelmed by the varied sounds of the music room, feel uncomfortable with activities that require touch, or perceive interactions with their music teachers as hostile. Wounds may be deepened by rejection from elite ensembles, dictatorial language, and power struggles, leading to pervasive feelings of hurt, distrust, and unease.
Intrusion, or the involuntary recall of detailed and disturbing memories related to the original trauma, further exacerbates feelings of anxiety in the classroom. Episodes of intrusion are often sudden and can be highly distressing. 26 Because some incidences can occur without a known trigger, students may feel an overwhelming sense of dread or feel that unwanted reminders of their trauma may surface at any moment. Other occurrences of intrusion can be triggered by environmental factors, class content, interactions between classroom community members, and gesturing. 27 Music students may find repertoire triggering, either from direct correlations between a piece of music and original trauma or a song’s themes, tone, or topic. 28 Music repertoire can contribute to these reminders of trauma through erasure and, at times, direct violence, where music is used as a method of torture, forced assimilation, or the background track to an uninvited experience. 29
Flatness
Music teachers may notice moments of disengagement, flat affect, or disempowerment from their students with trauma histories. Students may be perceived as down, hopeless, or inattentive. Dissociation, or the “mental process of disconnecting from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity,” 30 is a highly adaptive and protective measure for individuals with trauma. It arises from the inability to integrate traumatic events into a person’s conscious state. 31 Most frequently occurring in older children and teens and in victims of repeated abuse, dissociative symptoms may manifest as depersonalization or derealization. 32 Depersonalization, or the feeling of being detached from one’s mind or body, may keep students from feeling in control of their bodies when engaging in physically demanding tasks such as singing, dancing, and instrument playing. 33 Derealization, or the “persistent or recurrent experiences of unreality of surroundings” in which environments are experienced as “unreal, dreamlike, distant, or distorted,” 34 may further contribute to student experiences of detachment and lack of community. Both manifestations of dissociation may result in inattentiveness to musical tasks and performances, struggles with memorization, trance-like states, inconsistent access to memory, and a sense of panic due to missing information. 35 In the music classroom, musical concepts often build on one another. Both manifestations of dissociation can interrupt this delicate process, impacting students’ developing knowledge and contributing to further struggles. Additionally, dissociation can contribute to incidences of aggressive behavior without apparent cause.
Individuals with trauma may experience a deadening of emotions or an inability to feel pleasure due to constriction. As trauma occurs, a stifling of both ends of the emotional spectrum may result. 36 This may reduce the pain experienced by the victim on the distress end of the spectrum; however, it comes at the cost of joy because the pleasure end of the spectrum also constricts. 37 As music educators, we often prize the emotional expression that is found in a compelling performance. Students experiencing constriction may not be able to access the full range of the emotional spectrum and may experience frustration and feelings of disconnection as they struggle to connect to pieces in the same ways that resonate with their nontraumatized peers. These students may not be able to meet the demands of well-meaning educators who seek to encourage expressive performances, or they may struggle to assign typical emotions to conversations surrounding composer intent. Additional changes to affect and expression may further complicate the efforts of students who seek to emotionally identify with texts and musical works. Emotions may present as engaging in perfectionistic or people-pleasing behaviors, reactive aggression as a form of expression, or a negatively biased outlook. 38 Further complicating students’ emotional expression, alexithymia and other difficulties with verbal expression may reduce their abilities to label and communicate feelings. 39 This may require students to externalize their feelings through alternative routes and may become alienating.
Because traumatic events are often violating and personal and render the victim defenseless, a feeling of disempowerment often accompanies trauma. Students with trauma histories may experience pervasive feelings of decreased autonomy, struggle to advocate for themselves, or adopt helpless outlooks. 40 To combat feelings of powerlessness surrounding trauma, music teachers might focus on offering choices in modality, repertoire, or genre. Allowing students to enter and exit the music-making when they feel comfortable, sharing power in ensemble decision-making, and encouraging improvisation may redistribute perceived power imbalances during trauma, raising the collective “pitch” of the ensemble. 41 Because students with trauma may attempt to control their peers or teachers to offset feelings of powerlessness, 42 every effort should be made to proactively diffuse power struggles in the classroom and eliminate demands of musical perfection. 43 Simply making an effort to validate, recognize, and praise the individuality of students may create massive shifts in interpersonal relationships and prevent the retraumatizing of trauma survivors, who often are trapped in patterns of invalidation. 44
In Tune Music-Making Spaces
When teachers have a better understanding of hallmark trauma responses, they are more likely to respond in ways that support students. 45 Utilizing a trauma-informed pedagogical approach universally, acknowledging the ubiquity of trauma, and leveraging compassionate approaches to communication, relationship building, and instruction may support all students in the classroom. 46 Teachers may create harmonious spaces for their students by leveraging attunement as a tool to actively resist retraumatization, respond proactively to students in crisis, foster resilience and belonging, encourage creativity, and protect safe music-making spaces. Attunement to the needs of our students and alignment with their feelings may help us validate their lived experiences and remain emotionally present in times of escalation. Attunement may also serve as a protective measure for teachers who are experiencing trauma in their school environments. Intervening proactively in situations instead of reactively once things have escalated may decrease overall instances and severity of undesired behaviors.
When teachers prioritize attunement and compassion over management, punishment, and control, students can flourish as music learners. Opportunities for empowerment may arise when teachers respond to behaviors using a trauma-informed approach that prioritizes safety, choice, trust, and collaboration. When teachers actively accept student trauma, they communicate their care for their students, which may be the catalyst for the formation of trusting relationships. Within these reciprocal relationships, students may feel prepared to begin experimenting with self-regulation and expression, leading to more focused, emotive, and expressive music-making.
Conversely, teachers who actively deny trauma, leverage punitive practices, and exact authoritarian control in their classrooms may unintendingly create cyclical patterns of violence in their classrooms. Barriers to this acceptance include denial of their own trauma, trauma triggers present in the classroom, and difficulty accessing student support records. Unique to the music classroom, exceptional performance pressure may pose an additional hurdle because music teachers routinely must justify their position through community performance. Additionally, gaps in music education research create a space of ambiguity in which teachers may become unintentional sources of student trauma.
Situated at the intersection of communication, processing, and expression, music educators hold a distinctive position to create nurturing environments for individuals who have experienced trauma. Recognizing and appropriately addressing trauma responses, such as hyperarousal, intrusion, dissociation, constriction, and disempowerment, can serve as a significant channel for support. However, misjudged attempts to identify and address trauma-related effects can compound the challenges already faced by students with emotional or behavioral needs. As music teachers, much of our musical training has been focused on being attentive to the most minute differences in the elements of music—our ears are primed to keep our ensembles in tune. Being attuned to our students is a natural extension of what we have been trained to do. When we are attuned, our classroom community can sing!
Footnotes
Erin E. Price-Hamilton (