“It Helped Me Open My Eyes”: Incorporating Lived Experience Perspectives in Social Work Education

Abstract

Working from a trauma informed lens is increasingly recognized as a vital component of social work practice, as is learning from and incorporating lived experience into one's approach to practice. Further, the critical and feminist informed interrogation of dominant ideas around professional power and expertise within social work practice is necessary in learning and teaching about trauma. This conceptual article describes an integrated approach to teaching fourth year Australian social work students in the area of violence, abuse, and trauma. The intentionally immersive learning and teaching framework presents and incorporates praxis as involving educator lived experience, theoretical knowledge, and practice experience. The approach aims to create transformative and embodied learning opportunities which destabilize dominant constructions of social work identities, use of professional power and different practice approaches. While honoring the valuable contributions of trauma informed practice, we seek to push students beyond this model, prompting critical feminist analysis of the socio-political complexity of trauma experiences. We describe our work, ambitions, challenges, and learnings as feminist educators, sharing these ideas in order to provoke dialogue on possibilities for pedagogical innovation, within the context of power, expertise, social work education, and lived experience.

Keywords

trauma informed practice praxis social work education pedagogical innovation lived experience violence abuse and trauma immersive learning

Introduction

This article is based on the proposition that social work education on trauma is well served by incorporating learning from lived experience. We explore this proposition by reflecting on our experience as educators with hybridized identities who teach trauma to social work students in Western Australia and, subsequently, interrogate ideas about what it is to be both social work educator, practitioner, and trauma survivor. The trauma unit incorporates gender-based violence in addition to other forms of trauma such as historical and community trauma, violence and abuse experienced by disabled people, and refugee trauma. Our intersecting identities, knowledges and approaches are informed by critical feminist theories, extensive practice experience and, for two of us, lived experience of violence, abuse and trauma. We define “lived experience” as a representation of our human experiences of, in this instance, violence, abuse, trauma, and marginalization. In positioning our lived experience alongside, and as intersecting with, our social locations and academic and practice knowledges, we trouble social work discourses that promote different selves, characterized by clear boundaries between the “personal” and the “professional.” Instead, we propose that by intentionally introducing different parts of ourselves and experiences, we invite accountable social work practice and advance epistemic justice (Fricker, 2008). Our educational approach as described in this article seeks to expose taken-for-granted ideas and assumptions about power, identities, and the construction of professionalism as a phenomenon entirely distinct from lived experience. Masculinist social work audiences might label our approach as “unprofessional” and “biased,” yet we are committed to bringing these marginal ideas and practices into the academy and promoting alternative pathways to learning about trauma, violence, and abuse within social work.

Given our emphasis on blurred boundaries and different, intersecting and competing identities, we begin by introducing ourselves, followed by a contextual overview of trauma and related educational approaches in social work, and the place of lived experience in social work education. We then describe our teaching approach, and conclude with consideration of the potential for, and implications of, extending pedagogical practices that move away from tokenism and instead, privilege lived experience in social work education.

Rebecca

I identify as a white, second-generation Australian, mostly cisgender, heterosexual woman with disability. My family were middle-class during my childhood, but teenage homelessness, addiction, and psychiatric hospitalizations changed my class status for a period of my life. I now live with middle-class privilege again. Class mobility for me has been largely enabled by access to education, despite multiple challenges. My initial motivation for education was as an extension of my activism, and determination to change the systems that had harmed me. I began my career as an educator delivering lived experience sessions for police officers in the United Kingdom who were training to become specialist Rape First Response Officers. I saw the way these officers listened to aspects of the training delivered by rape counsellors, psychologists, and other professionals, and the way their focus sharpened when I began talking about what it was like to be a sexual violence victim in a police investigation. I watched these officers navigate deconstruction and transformation as they reflected on their own practice in the new context provided by my perspective, and learned in an unforgettable way that sharing my lived experience was valuable; for me (then) and for others. My expertise being valued transformed me, too—but cost me a great deal emotionally and carried risks of further traumatization. At this time, I was also studying psychology and criminology, and stretching to build myself a new life beyond the debilitating impacts abuse and trauma had had for me. I was lucky to encounter some courageous critical thinkers in my study, and fortunate that my first practice job was with a team of brave feminist social workers. Throughout my working life, in practice, research, and educator roles, I continue to grapple with where and how to locate my lived experience and intersectional identity. I am often unsure who “my people” are, or where I fit. I remain compelled, through my personal politics and what I have learned about pedagogical efficacy and praxis, to push against cultures that shame and silence victims by continuing to carry my lived experience transparently and reflexively.

Robyn

I identify as a cis-gender, settler, white, queer, survivor woman. My relative privilege allowed me to study social work in my mid-20s in the1980s after surviving a violent heterosexual relationship. I was raised in a political, working-class family who considered protest and resistance “normal”; particularly in relation to issues such as workers’ and Indigenous rights. Studying social work opened my eyes to gendered experiences of subjugation and invalidation, gave me a language to describe my experiences of sexual assault and intimate partner violence, and helped me understand my own experiences of male violence and harrasment in different ways. Most of my social work practice mirrored my lived experiences and interests, including domestic and family violence; sexual assault and violence; substance misuse; women's homelessness; child protection and community based mental health practice. After some years in practice I moved into academia, teaching and researching in critical mental health, service user led projects and trauma. I made the choice to come out about my trauma experiences in 2016 and have found the journey of presenting my hybrid identities unsettling, alienating, and affirming. The motivation underpinning my work is to step aside and create spaces for people with lived experience to direct and guide social work teaching, learning, and research.

Sophie

I am a white settler, cisgender, and heterosexual woman. In addition to the privilege my whiteness provides me, I benefit from multiple other forms of structural power that have enabled access to education. I am neurotypical, physically non-disabled, and come from a family with working-class and middle-class experiences. I came to social work with a commitment to social justice, largely shaped by my experiences of growing up on Ngarluma Country in north Western Australia. There I witnessed ongoing injustice and racism experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the community. Politics and workers’ rights in particular are important in my family, and I began social work with a curiosity to understand some of the experiences imprinted in my own family; violence against women, suicide, and emotional distress. My research, teaching, and social work practice is shaped by a commitment to disrupting oppressive structures, centering survivors and service users, and valuing lived experience knowledges. In seeking to recognize and disrupt structures of oppression, as a white settler, I also recognize a relationship of complicity with conditions of structural power, such as racism. Working alongside Rebecca and Robyn in this unit has stretched me personally and professionally and provided a space for transformational learning as a colleague.

Background

Feminist activists, many of them social workers and survivors of violence and abuse, have fought hard for trauma to be elevated beyond an individual concern and instead understood as a social, political, and health issue (Twomey, 2013; Whittier, 2009). Such activists draw sharp attention to the limitations of medicalized and pathologized understandings, highlighting the intersectional disadvantage associated with gender, race, class, and disability (Wilkin & Hillock, 2014). This means biological, “brain based” and reductionist accounts of trauma which minimize or displace survivor narratives are critically interrogated (Tseris, 2013; Wilkin & Hillock, 2014). Further, Judith Herman's ideas about the political nature of trauma and the de-legitimization of survivor's accounts of the “unspeakable” (Herman, 1997, p. 1) provide useful feminist informed reference points.

Public awareness of trauma, its impacts and the need for sensitive responses have been heightened in various jurisdictions through public investigations, with a local example being the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (McPhillips et al., 2017; Salter, 2020). The growing international awareness regarding the widespread nature of trauma and abuse has led to the development of a variety of service delivery frameworks and responses. In particular, “trauma informed practice (TIP)” is an approach found in many social work settings which recognizes that trauma is a common occurrence with significant impacts for victims and survivors (Sweeney et al., 2018). More specifically, TIP rests on the principles of safety, trustworthiness, collaboration and power sharing, choice and control, and empowerment (Kezelman & Stavropoulos, 2012). While many organizations across the global north claim they are “trauma informed,” survivors’ experiences of receiving these services raises questions about the uniformity of service delivery practices (Breckenridge & James, 2010), and whether intersecting identities representing race, socio-economic status, and disability (as examples) are recognized. Additionally, mainstream trauma approaches fail to recognize the historical and intergenerational trauma that is central to Indigenous peoples’ experiences (Pihama et al., 2014; Richardson et al., 2021). This means survivors can experience inconsistent and culturally unsafe responses from services claiming to be trauma informed, and the potential for their safety and credibility to be undermined is amplified. The possibilities associated with TIP are usually emphasized (Tseris, 2018). Yet, the ideas underpinning TIP can inadvertently “other,” stigmatize, violate, and limit access to support and understanding of women who have experienced certain types of trauma (e.g., organized sexual abuse; see Salter, 2013), or whose intersecting identities see them present in particular (often challenging) ways (Gavey & Schmidt, 2011). While a trauma informed approach invites a “socio-contextual analysis of the origins of mental distress” (Tseris, 2018, p. 1), the resulting mainstream practice rarely extends to consideration of intersections of disadvantage, taken-for-granted assumptions or power relations; instead locating trauma in dominant discourses informed by white privilege. Importantly, the culminating and complex ways in which historical trauma impacts the cultural, spiritual, and physical wellbeing of Indigenous peoples is unrecognized (Pihama et al., 2014). A critically informed and intersectional approach to trauma recognizes the impacts of trauma, centers survivor voices and knowledges, embraces complexity, traces and recognizes intersections of disadvantage and interrogates professional privilege (Tseris, 2018). Such approaches try to avoid rigid and prescriptive practice as well as generalized understandings of abuse and its effects.

Social Work Education on Trauma

In noting the historical and contemporary conceptualizations of trauma, it is useful to consider social work's relationship to trauma. We know that social workers routinely meet trauma victims and survivors. The social work profession has also played an active part in the polices of cultural genocide and intergenerational trauma for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia (Green et al., 2016). This suggests social work curricula and the academics teaching it, need to work to decolonize (Fernando & Bennett, 2019), build a critically informed, culturally responsive (Green et al., 2016) and socially just knowledge base which prepares students for practice (Breckenridge & James, 2010; Strand et al., 2014). In the Australian context, social work education is generic in orientation, meaning graduates receive introductions to experiences like trauma across a range of practice settings. Some graduates will of course choose to develop in-depth trauma knowledge and work as specialist trauma social workers. Again, we argue that contemporary understandings of, and responses to trauma, must move beyond the individual, considering the range of complex and intersecting identities and factors that inform the experience (Quiros & Berger, 2014). However, literature on trauma education in social work is largely preoccupied with the potential for students to be traumatized by learning about trauma and through field education experiences (Carello & Butler, 2014; O’Halloran & O’Halloran, 2001). This preoccupation reflects the dominant influence of cognitive behavioral therapy, psychodynamic approaches, and systems theories.

There is growing acknowledgement that the trauma related injuries are political, social, cultural, and psychological; which further highlights the necessity for social work responses to be located within a social justice orientation (Berger & Quiros, 2014; McPhillips et al., 2017; Salter & Hall, 2020; Reynolds, 2012). Such approaches actively work against the historic silencing and disbelieving of survivors (Fassin & Rechtman, 2009; Herman, 1997; Salter & Hall, 2020; Whittier, 2009). Encouragingly, there is a shift in social work education towards a non-pathologizing approach (Wright, 2017) which is simply embodied in the question “what happened to you” as opposed to “what is wrong with you” (Sweeney et al., 2018). These discussions highlight the need for social work educators and practitioners to critically examine how we enable and contribute to individualizing and pathologizing trauma discourses (Dietz, 2000; Tseris, 2013). Further, and in line with a critical feminist pedagogy, consideration of, and accountability for, our personal privilege is called forth in the context of resisting traditional, educational hierarchies of power (Crabtree & Sapp, 2003; Wilkin & Hillock, 2014). This leads us to examine how lived experience broadly, and more specifically in relation to trauma, can inform and influence social work education.

Lived Experience and Social Work Education

Alongside introducing students to trauma and related approaches, there is growing involvement of people with lived experience in social work education (Beresford & Boxall, 2012; Dorozenko et al., 2016; Newman et al., 2019). Commonly, this involves guest lectures from people with lived experience who “share their story” with students (Felton & Stickley, 2004; Happell et al., 2014). More recently, this is shifting from what the late disability activist, Stella Young framed as “inspiration porn” (Young, 2012) to more meaningful and embedded activities such as designing curricula and assessments, coproducing simulated learning and assessing student assignments (Dorozenko et al., 2016; Newman et al., 2019). The contribution of people with lived experience is a form of testimonio, rejecting ideas of singular “truths” and tidy narratives (Gale de Saxe, 2016) and exemplifies the growing public engagement with personal experience of trauma as a method for pursuing social and political change (Salter, 2020; Whittier, 2009).

Service user and carer involvement is mandatory in social work programs in the United Kingdom (Askheim et al., 2017), yet apart from brief mentions of service user perspectives in the Australian Social Work Education and Accreditation Standards (Australian Association of Social Workers, 2020), no such requirement exists in the Australian context. Learning from lived experience encourages students to build critically informed understandings and develop unique insights that challenge negative and prejudicial attitudes and facilitate skill development (Beresford & Boxall, 2012; Happell & Roper, 2003; Ridley et al., 2015). Further, service user involvement in social work education is considered “political … as well as a matter of human rights” (Askheim et al., 2017, p. 130), as it disrupts traditional ideas about the (il)legitimacy of service user knowledge. We also note that the inclusion of “lived experience” or sharing of personal testimonies is subject to co-option and commodification where “stories have become a kind of pornography and consumed in the interest of the audience itself” (Costa et al., 2012, pp. 92–93). Further, we note the tendency to reduce identities to particular diagnostic or experiential categories, thereby obfuscating the multiplicity of intersecting identities and experiences of people with lived experience of disadvantage and oppression.

Within this landscape of the political and intersectional nature of trauma, social work's dominant approach to understanding, teaching, and treating trauma, and the inherent value of learning from lived experience, we have developed a particular approach in our work as social work educators. This work is built on the experiences and intersecting identities we noted in our introductions. We actively seek to dismantle and unsettle ideas about fixed identities of “academic,” “social worker,” or “person with lived experience” as they represent exclusive binaries. We model this approach in our teaching, often reflecting on the relative privilege available to us to be able to speak of lived experience, while drawing on practice wisdom and theoretical knowledge. Further, we seek to undermine ideas about who can claim legitimacy as a “valid knower” and what is counted as “valid knowledge” (Walsh, 2016). We situate ourselves in multiple, intersecting subject positions which draw on lived experience and academic and professional knowledges, openly challenging dominant ideas about expertise, knowledge, and power (Fox, 2016), and also seeking to reflexively examine our claims. With this in mind, we now describe our approach to teaching trauma which includes quotes from students who completed evaluations of our teaching approach over the period 2018 and 2019.

Disruption: Our Approach to Teaching Trauma

Our teaching unfolds in a undergraduate social work unit titled “Violence, Abuse and Trauma,” undertaken by final year students. The unit is delivered over 5 days as a face-to-face intensive with preparatory online materials such as readings and first-person written and audio-visual accounts of trauma. Over the 2 years (2018 and 2019) that we taught the unit together (noting some authors taught the unit before and after these 2 years), enrolments have ranged from 70 to 100 students. We do not collect data on student demographic profiles for this unit, yet our interactions with students lead us to understand students have many identities which include cisgender, non-binary, queer, trans, able bodied, disabled, older, younger, white, settler, culturally diverse and First Nations. Standard to all courses in the University, students are invited to contribute to anonymous evaluation of the unit and on average, 20%–25% of students provided this feedback. Students are informed through readings, lecture materials, experiential activities, staff presentations, and audio-visual accounts that lived experience is central to the unit. Our focus on lived experience brings into question notions of “professionals” as experts, and trauma survivors as “other,” non-experts. Topics covered include sexual violence, family and domestic violence, working with perpetrators of sexual and physical violence, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander/First Nations peoples’ experiences of trauma and healing (delivered by a First Nation's social worker); cultural diversity and disability. The gendered nature of trauma is explicitly addressed, although we do not adopt an exclusively gendered violence perspective, leaning into trans, non-binary, and cis-gender male experiences of violence, abuse, and trauma. We do, however, continually circle back to gendered understandings of violence, drawing student's attention away from relativist framings (i.e., everyone has lived experience of abuse, or “not all men” statements and accounts). We draw the students’ attention to statements and positions which cancel and neutralize women's experience of men's violence through statements like “but what about male victims”?

Our intersecting identities as educators with lived and practice experiences make this work of unpacking gender, violence, abuse, and trauma tricky. We openly and reflexively examine our responses and positions and as both Rebecca and Robyn experienced gendered violence, we debrief and critically reflect with Sophie, checking our assumptions and tendencies. Students are invited to examine their own intersecting identities and lived experiences through a range of activities, including mapping their identities and the associated implications, discussing how intersecting identities inform and influence both service users’ presentations to social workers, and social worker's responses (which can harm, silence, enable, or nourish). Similarly, assignments require students to demonstrate engagement with ideas associated with intersecting identities and these include a positioning paper, a critical deconstruction of a text referencing trauma and a simulated professional conversation. Assessment of the simulated conversation includes at least one member of the team with lived experience and emphasizes intersections of experience and identity.

As our introductions attest, we bring multiple subject positions to our teaching and situate trauma within the context of intersecting social, political, and structural factors that mediate individual and collective experiences of trauma (Collins, 1993; Crenshaw, 1991). Critical consideration of the inclination within social work and “helping” professions to individualize and pathologize lived experience of trauma is central to our approach, often exemplified by our question “what about poverty/racism/age/gender/disability” when listening to student's ideas on how they plan to approach service users. We do this by problematizing simplistic, individualized, and depoliticized constructions of survivors, perpetrators, and TIP. Students are invited to step into the uncertain, complex, and often contradictory experiences associated with trauma, including unpacking ideas about “truth.” Our focus is on building student knowledge related to trauma, developing core practice skills for generic trauma work and a clear value base. To this end, we draw on approaches such as Narrative Therapy (White, 2007) and Response Based Practice (Coates & Wade, 2004) to promote skill development, while firmly holding and tracing the intersection of structural mediators of disadvantage and oppression.

Testing Trauma Informed Principles

While we base our teaching on the trauma informed principles of safety, trustworthiness, collaboration and power sharing, choice and control, and empowerment (Kezelman & Stavropoulos, 2012), we move in and out of these ideas by critiquing, questioning, and unsettling the core concepts. For example, when considering the first principle of safety, we start by considering and co-designing student safety through a series of experiential and confidential activities. We emphasize that “safety” means different things to different people, and that it can be dynamic, shifting as circumstances or personal positions change. For example, “safety” for Rebecca means more than the protection of her embodied self from physical harm; it includes emotional safety, and particularly safety from being shamed, betrayed, or lied to. Social safety is also important, as she reveals potentially controversial information about herself in public. To do this work, Rebecca has to extend trust to students and readers that this information will not be used against her in a defamatory way. For Robyn, safety is a felt sense where a person trusts enough to explore and be themselves. Students’ definitions of safety are likely to be different from ours, as they occupy a different position in relation to us.

We openly acknowledge that many students in the room will have personal experiences around the topic of violence, abuse, and trauma, and clarify that we will work to create an environment in which students can seek support, or change the way that they participate in order to avoid unnecessary distress. We inform students that there will always be one educator available to talk with anyone who leaves the room (and this happens regularly throughout the intensive), but ultimately, students must pursue their own version of safety in the environment, as they will in their social work practice. An invitation to continuously reflect on what safety means to them in each moment means that “safety” moves from being an abstract concept and something to “do” or “do with” service users to a real-time consideration for the students throughout the 5 days of learning and teaching. We then broaden the conversation to consider safety for survivors, bringing in the lived experiences of Rebecca and Robyn who highlight that safety is much more than a comfortable room with an unobstructed view of the door and is often reflective of other, intersecting identities and needs (e.g., how safe is someone who leaves a session to return to unsafe and precarious housing?). At this point, students report they often struggle to integrate and reconcile the multiple subject positions of Rebecca and Robyn. This suggests to us that binary constructions of identity (i.e., senior academic, social worker, person with lived experience) mediate students’ ideas about who experiences trauma. Further, we are reminded of bell hooks’ arguments about how it can be “productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material” (1994, p. 21). We use these opportunities to stand back and collectively examine assumptions about “trauma survivors” and this leads many students to recast their views and opinions. The following quote from an anonymous student evaluation highlights this:

I really valued your openness and honesty in sharing your lived experience. It helped bring home the importance of trauma-informed practice and its real-world application. Key learnings for me were the realisation of differing perspectives of safety and the importance of recognising acts of resistance. These were due to your generosity in sharing your lived experience. Thank you.

Our focus on safety adopts a critical edge when we consider how professionals’ assumptions about safety can alienate or unintentionally re-traumatize survivors. Rebecca shares an encounter with a child protection agency where the difference between her definition of safety and the agency's definition of safety, combined with the agency's power over her, caused great harm to Rebecca. This discussion is pertinent, given many of the students will work in child protection and other powerful agencies upon graduation. We hope that students reflect deeply on how their own ideas about safety could be in conflict with future clients’ idea of safety, and encourage them to avoid concrete definitions which may in fact lead to systems violence. Other critical examinations include “problematic” coping strategies such as self-harm and substance use. We draw out lived experiences to highlight how these techniques may be both—and simultaneously—physically dangerous and crucial tools promoting emotional safety.

Similarly, other trauma informed principles are considered as well-intentioned, yet sometimes dangerous and harmful for survivors. We return to ideas such as authenticity, transparency, and power sharing and argue that social work's attention to power and privilege requires sustained, critical, and ongoing attention. Our teaching on the impact of trauma on First Nation's peoples, developed and delivered by an Aboriginal Social Worker, teases out the enduring impacts of colonization and social work's flawed role in this project. Situated alongside critical concerns about power is our proposition that social workers have a key role in creating the conditions for service users to take the lead, sit at the center and direct the work. Central to this are interrogations of ideas such as empowerment; in particular, asking “can we empower someone else,” or “can we create the conditions for someone to explore their own empowerment”?

We intersperse theory, evidence, and lived experience to highlight the impact of language which can harm and disempower. Robyn shares her experience of childhood sexual violence with the students, taking their questions and contextualizing her experience in practice frameworks and theories such as Narrative Therapy. In this exercise, students ask Robyn Narrative Therapy informed questions and she answers based on her lived experience. This then leads to an exercise where Robyn talks about the impact of a student question “why didn't you tell someone sooner.” We use this example to highlight the insidious and disempowering impact of insensitive questions with Robyn talking about how this question reinforced her long-held ideas about being responsible for the abuse, leading to deeply internalized shame. Students consistently report that learning from lived experience challenges and changes them:

It helped me to open my eyes to working with people with lived experience of trauma and made me think about the diversity of lived experiences and the importance of ways of working with people. It helped me being aware of my perceptions, values and my privileged position as a future social work practitioner.

“I Am More Than What Happened to Me”

Our approach as described above attempts to dismantle the dominant approach to trauma education which elevates individual pathology or “brokenness.” This dominant approach is coupled with teaching techniques and strategies that can “fix” trauma “symptoms” through counselling or therapy. Instead, we ask students to step into people's lived experiences and the associated intersections of disadvantage, silencing, and marginalization. This also means that we ask students to critique the ideas that trauma is a singularly defining characteristic (Coates & Wade, 2007), found in the resistive statement: “I am more than my trauma or my experiences” (Kelly et al., 1996; Ovenden, 2012). As lived experience educators, Rebecca and Robyn are tangible reminders that we are more than what happened to us, within the context of our relative privilege (of being able to stand in a room and talk about our experiences and continue to dedicate time and resources to our healing). For some students, this is a moment of revelation and validation, as they realize that their own lived experience need not define them or remain concealed, as demonstrated in this student's comment: “ thank you … for showing my irrational brain that just because I am a trauma survivor doesn't mean that I am any less of a professional.”

Unsettling, Unravelling, and Unlearning “Social Work”

Our approach to unsettling dominant ideas about trauma also extends to social work practice. In order to do this, we ask students to step into a space of not knowing and “unlearn,” or consider ideas, assumptions, and knowledge in new ways. We describe this to students as “de-centering the professional” in order to have the service user(s) drive the work (reflecting the trauma informed principles of collaboration and power sharing). Students tell us that these ideas and practices leave them wondering what it is to be a “professional” and whether these inherently conservative discourses will serve them as critical social work practitioners. The following student quote highlights this:

We were informed we would be ‘unlearning’ some of the things we had encountered in our social work degree and I found this process to be extremely conducive to learning ‘real world’ applications to very sensitive topics. From the use of lived experience tutors who shared their journeys with us to experiential learning and open discussions with students, I found that this unit felt connective – emotionally and intellectually. Theory was incorporated into empathetic and social understandings of trauma and I found this very beneficial to how I will work in these spaces after graduation. Thankyou

Problematizing “Professionalism”

Our hybrid identities of lived experience/academic/practitioner/social worker lead us to appreciate the concepts of epistemic justice and injustice (Fricker, 2008). In particular, Fricker's account of “testimonial injustice” (2008, p. 61) helps us to explore with students how perpetrators and their supporters discount survivor accounts, by claiming them to be impossible and untrue (Herman, 1997). Further, we explore how common social work practices such as assessment reinforce professional power as they aim to establish linear and “plausible” versions of the trauma event(s). Students are challenged to think through their attachment to the “truth,” particularly when trauma narratives are fragmented, circular, and difficult to comprehend.

The markers of professional discourses are interrogated for their seemingly “common-sense” ideas. For example, boundaries are rarely questioned and closely aligned with “professionalism,” and we ask questions about how distanced forms of engagement, objectivity, and neutrality (Healy, 2005) promote or undermine a trauma informed approach. We invite curiosity about professionals and emotions, asking students to reflexively examine their views on professionals who cry, show anger, and express disbelief and bewilderment. Clearly, our presence undermines ideas about who constitutes “them” (usually ascribed to service users) and “us” (commonly social workers and other professionals). This means we ask students to listen to lived experience accounts differently, in order to adopt an activist stance which addresses the marginalization of trauma survivors (Gale de Saxe, 2016).

Student Safety

We are mindful that it is not only Rebecca and Robyn who have lived experience, and pay detailed and consistent attention to safety for the students. Each time we teach the unit, students tell us at the beginning of the first class they are concerned about being “triggered,” insufficiently skilled or knowledgeable in responding to disclosures, or worried they will be unable to control their emotion, especially when hearing lived experience accounts of trauma. We also hear from students who are deeply affected by shame and guilt over their own sense of comparative privilege. These students question their suitability for social work, due to their perception that they have had “too good a life.” We honor and respect these concerns and work with the students to explore their sense of safety, undertaking activities that co-create safety. Students identify and implement what they need to feel safe (with staff support if required). Additionally, we check in, reconsider, and explore safety throughout each day of teaching, with tacit knowledge that what feels safe one day (or one hour), can feel very unsafe the next. Our approach to co-creating safety sees us model safety, vulnerability, and the need to take time out, reflect, and take care of ourselves.

Having provided an overview of our approach to teaching which incorporates intersectional, critical, feminist, and lived experience perspectives, we now consider the implications and limitations of our work.

Discussion and Implications: Pedagogical and Ethical Reflections

Any teaching on trauma has the potential to be distressing for students, whether they have personal connections to the topic or not. Regardless of where and how lived experience is positioned in the teaching of trauma, it requires a respectful awareness of the potential for students to experience vulnerability and distress. To teach a unit on violence, abuse, and trauma without the inclusion of content directly discussing these issues would be of questionable effectiveness in preparing students for practice. We are not sure whether the content we share with students about our experiences is any more graphic or confronting than if we were to only use videos or case studies. However, we think the difference is in the personalization, and the immediacy, of the content. Whether this makes the content more or less traumatic for students to witness is difficult to know. For some students, the foregrounding of our lived experience seems to facilitate easier disclosure and discussion of their own safety needs; for others, the power and expertise that can accompany us speaking from lived experience, and as educators and social workers, may silence. We are very mindful of the power position we hold; both through the authority of our lived experience, and as the people who mark students’ work. We seek to ameliorate the power imbalance by developing a friendly and open rapport with students, in the hope that this helps break down the “us” and “them” of this relationship. However, educators ultimately hold power over students, and this may cause internal conflict or tension in the way students absorb and respond to our disclosures.

Student Responses

Reflecting on the kinds of responses we have seen students struggle with, we note this may relate to their own intersectional position, personal experience of trauma, concern about being emotionally affected by the lived experience content, and questions of privilege and suitability in working with trauma survivors. In some ways, determining what is appropriate care and support for a student experiencing the latter is more challenging than responding to a student distressed by their own experiences of trauma. As experienced practitioners and educators, we are adept at providing support to students grappling with intersectional disadvantage and/or their own trauma histories, but are less experienced at responding to the distress that comes from students confronting their own perceived privilege. We wonder, too, about the experience of students in the classroom who feel distress over perceived privilege, and do not approach us to discuss it. Could this be one of the most silenced positions in the space? If so, are we doing enough to consider and respond to this? Perhaps this is one of the benefits of the lived experience approach: that students explore their identity/position as a social worker in the comparative safety of a learning environment, rather than encountering this for the first time in a practice setting, with less space to reflect or make mistakes. Again, however, we are mindful of the power and status imbalances in the relationship between student and educator.

Educator Responses

One of the challenging aspects of foregrounding our lived experience in learning and teaching is balancing our commitment to modelling critical TIP in an authentic way. This has implications that distress might surface for us while teaching. While we may think about and plan for this, it is much harder in practice. Rebecca and Robyn have reflected on moments when they have shared their stories and felt a strong need to retreat from both the story and the spotlight. However, we are simultaneously aware of our responsibility to student safety and learning. To simply retreat from the students and the story when we encounter our own strong emotional responses can leave the students needing resolution for their learning and reactions to the shared lived experience. Often, we push through, sidelining our own needs, with the focus on attending to the students first, and taking care of ourselves later. We are deeply aware of the imperfect nature of our work in this area and make decisions as any educator does—in a dynamic and responsive way, balancing perceived needs with available resources, often in challenging circumstances.

Another challenge relates to our professional identities as academics and educators—and potentially, to our reputations and relationships in the workplace. The decision to “out” ourselves as people with experience of violence, abuse, trauma, mental distress, and substance use is a political decision, and one that feels morally significant. However, it does not always feel safe: for example, Rebecca's experience of being Googled by a student while teaching and this student sharing an old media article about her abuse experiences. This felt beyond what she had consented to share with students, and was in conflict with Rebecca's definition of safety. Despite such challenges, we are aware of our privilege as survivors, and the ways in which our particular intersectional experiences have awarded us opportunities which may not be available to other trauma survivors.

Finally, we are aware that as trauma survivors who may be emotional, yet remain contained and articulate (as well as white, now middle class, and no longer visibly affected by substance use or mental health issues), we occupy a kind of “goldilocks zone” of victimhood, ideal for commodification and public consumption. While remaining considerate of students’ right to emotional safety in learning spaces, we are not blind to the potential for a skewed understanding of trauma which might come from this kind of privileged representation. Further, our representations of trauma experiences, while fundamentally different, are in no way demonstrative of the diversity and spread across culture, gender, class, race, and socio-economic status. We sit in some discomfort in our awareness of our own epistemic privilege, and our positions as gatekeepers of lived experience content. While our life-courses have been significantly impacted by violence, abuse, and trauma, we are white women in a colonized country, who have had opportunities to access education which has created class mobility. We acknowledge that many trauma survivors do not have such opportunities. At this point in our lives and our healing, we (mostly) represent the tidy, easy-to-witness survivor. We are not too “messy” or confronting in our distress. We do not require witnesses to step outside of their usual positions in order to support us. We question if, and how much, this restricts deep challenge and unsettling of student assumptions and values.

Other Considerations

While we believe that teaching this course in an intensive format is beneficial, we acknowledge the challenges of this approach. Participating in a large group (sometimes up to 80 students) can provide students with the opportunity to “hide” by sitting quietly; yet paradoxically, also leave them feeling visible, as anything they do or say (or do not do or say) exposes them to the entire student cohort. Similarly, our focus on co-creating and ensuring safety within the unit is not without limitation. We encourage students to take breaks and consult privately with us; however, for some students this is deeply exposing (i.e., leaving class during the middle of teaching). We understand from our own experiences of trauma and the feedback from students, this can lead to a sense of being trapped, frozen, and unable to flee. Similarly, the immersive content leaves little room for distraction and means the student's life is saturated with the topics of violence, abuse, and trauma leading up to and during the 5 days of teaching. This may be valuable for students in the final phases of their degree; however, it could be unbearable for a student who is struggling with their own experiences of violence, abuse, and trauma.

The explicit presence of our lived experience creates another potential source of exposure for students, one that we value but are also apprehensive about. Students with prejudicial attitudes towards women or victim-blaming opinions can find themselves with nowhere to hide in the face of our lived experience. Such attitudes have been exposed in student class discussions and written work. Our lived experience presence removes some of the hypothetical and conceptual nature of student assignments, instead shifting both written work and simulations closer to the realm of “real” practice and “real” experience. While there are some clear benefits to this immersion in real-life experience, especially as students prepare for their final fieldwork placement, it could also be considered higher stakes assessment, compared to other conceptual and theoretical assessments. There is something about the bright, frank light that lived experience shines on a student's work which starkly reveals readiness or un-readiness for practice. There is value in eliciting such a revelation in the comparatively safe environment of learning and assessment rather than in practice settings where the stakes are even higher for all involved. However, we appreciate the potential for crises of confidence and professional identity that students might experience following exposure to teachers who embody lived experience, theoretical knowledge, and practice experience. While we appreciate the positive nature of the anonymous student feedback, we are also keen to reflexively examine what spaces our lived experience might open up and shut down. We appreciate that our approach is not without critique or risk.

Conclusion

This article has described an approach to teaching social work students about violence, abuse, and trauma by situating lived experience alongside theoretical and practice knowledge. While the feedback from students is positive, we have also adopted a critically reflexive position about our work, asking questions such as “can lived experience both open up and shut down dialogue”’? We have sought to share some of our learning in the early stages of this unchartered territory, with the hope of provoking constructive, critically reflexive dialogue on the issues we are encountering. One of our priorities in centering lived experience is to disrupt student's perceptions of professional identity; challenging ideas about “us” (professionals) and “them” (service users). Further, we seek to undermine dominant ideas in social work education approaches to teaching trauma.

It may be risky to publicly share our reflections on our work while we continue to find our way. Yet avoiding discomfort, risk, and our own vulnerability would be in conflict with the pedagogical and practice philosophies we are committed to. We are aware that there are challenges which may complicate a broader rollout of this approach, and hope to provoke further thought and discussion from other educators. The challenges of enacting a lived experience approach are practical, ethical, and pedagogical. We have been fortunate to receive support from our School, which may not be true in all institutions. Additionally, it could prove difficult to recruit staff who are willing and able to draw on combined lived experience, practice experience, and theoretical foundations, and to hold identity loosely. An alternative is to teach the subject with academics who address the theoretical (or perhaps theoretical and practice) aspects of the content and employ guest lecturers who speak from lived experience. However, binding educators into discrete roles (lived experience educator, academic, practitioner) may not provoke critically reflective student engagement on constructed identities and professional power.

Student evaluations for this unit consistently show that the lived experience content is highly valued, but we do not know exactly what is so valued and why. It is difficult to determine whether students are engaging with the material in the ways we intend, or whether there might be an “inspiration porn” (Young, 2012), positioning behind comments such as “I loved the lived experience.” Exploring what students find most useful to their learnings, as well as examining the challenges and questions we have raised in this paper would be of great benefit in further research.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Rebecca J. Moran

Author Biographies

Rebecca J. Moran is a PhD candidate and Lived Experience Engagement Fellow at University of New South Wales, Australia. Her interests include complex trauma, mental health, critical social theory, pedagogical and methodological issues, arts-based research, and engagement with lived experience.

Robyn Martin is Associate Dean for Social Work and Human Services at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She has a keen interest in privileging and centring lived experience in her social work teaching, research and practice.

Sophie Ridley is a PhD Candidate and Lecturer in Curtin University's School of Allied Health. Her research interests include mental distress and recovery, trauma, homelessness, substance use, family and domestic violence, and the involvement of people with lived experience in education.

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