Listening to the Speaking Wound

Trauma as Lens on School Experiences

We contend that the difficult—those challenging life experiences that inevitably are carried into and lived within classrooms—can and must be made productive relationally and pedagogically within research and teaching (Dutro, 2008, 2011; Dutro & Zenkov, 2008). The inequities permeating school experiences for many students of color, those living in poverty, and GLBTQ students is well established in the research literature (for examples of recent reviews and discussions, see Blackburn, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Lee, 2009; Lucas & Beresford, 2010; Noguera, 2008). Although we focus here on theoretical arguments that lie outside of the field of education, our discussion is grounded in our engagement and participation in that research base and in the assumption that an array of conceptual and practice-oriented tools must be marshaled to actively intervene in unconscionable disparities in educational opportunity for children and youth. Toward that end, trauma studies offers lenses and metaphors that extend and complement other important constructs and metaphors through which education scholars have revisioned students’ lived knowledges and out-of-school literacies with the goal of disrupting what Campano (2007) refers to as the “discourse of deprivation” in schools and classrooms. Such metaphors include funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005), diversity as resource (e.g., Nieto & Bode, 2007), children as social theorists (Jones, 2007), the education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006), and students as cosmopolitan intellectuals (Campano & Ghiso, 2010) (to name but a few).

The trauma studies scholarship on which we draw offers lenses that have not yet been centrally applied to questions in education, though it resonates deeply with related critical theoretical arguments surrounding student experience and opportunity in schools. Trauma studies refers to a broad interdisciplinary field that explores trauma and its psychic, social, and cultural impacts; memory; and representation through lenses as various as psychology, counseling, psychoanalysis, public health, communications, history, social work, and literature (see LaCapra, 2004, for a helpful overview of the field). Our work drawing on literary trauma studies has informed and been informed by a growing cadre of scholars within and outside of literacy studies in educational research (e.g., Cruz, 2012; Jones, 2012; Wissman & Wiseman, 2011; Zembylas, 2008). Because our goal is to examine issues of representation and interpretation of students’ lives in schools, here we turn primarily to trauma studies scholars in the humanities, particularly literary scholars who examine the presence of trauma in literature and film and, to name just one example of analytic focus, the struggle of language to adequately represent traumatic events, even as we are utterly dependent on symbolic representation to access, express, and interpret experience (e.g., Caruth, 1996; Eng & Kazanjian, 2003; Hartman, 1995; Kaplan, 2005; Leys, 2000; Whitehead, 2004; Yeager, 2002). During the 1980s and 1990s, studies of traumatic events and their representations in literature, film, historiography, and art emerged in the humanities disciplines as scholars sought to articulate and analyze the diverse inscriptions of traumatic memory in cultural, social, and political life. Although the Holocaust was (and arguably still is) a central focus of the burgeoning field of trauma studies, scholars have analyzed and continue to examine the textual and visual representations of many manifestations of trauma, including war and its aftermath (e.g., Lowenstein, 2005), slavery, racial and sexual violence (e.g., Tal, 1995), and illness (e.g., Tougaw, 2002). Thus, trauma studies in the humanities is not clinical, nor does it seek to “heal.” Instead, it “operates on the level of theory, and of exegesis in the service of insights about human functioning” (Hartman, 1995, p. 554).

Turning to the central metaphor of our article, Caruth (1996) writes of the idea of a speaking wound—a trauma borne by an Other that speaks to the wounds of the hearer. She draws the metaphor from Freud’s interpretation of Tasso’s tale of Gerusalemme Liberata in which a hero, Tancred, accidently stabs the woman he loves, Clorinda, when he encounters her disguised as an enemy. Tancred delivers a fatal wound to this soldier who he believes to be his enemy, but as his victim lies bleeding, Clorinda speaks, revealing her true identity. Realizing what he’s done, Tancred plunges into grief and despair. Through her reading of Tasso’s tale, Caruth builds an argument about the crucial connections forged by the voice of the Other that speaks at one and the same time to its own and its listener’s pain.

As Caruth (1996) emphasizes, the act of witnessing someone else’s pain involves a sharing, a taking in, of the difficult story one has heard. In her explication of Tasso’s tale, Caruth describes the significance of the voice heard by the hero Tancred as he unwittingly stabs his disguised beloved. Caruth writes,

We can also read the address of the voice here, not as the story of the individual in relation to the events of his own past, but as the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound. (p. 8)

Caruth’s argument about the importance of the speaking wound within literatures of trauma, the crucial connections forged by the voice of the other that speaks at one and the same time to its own and its listener’s pain, provides a lens for considering the role of difficult experiences in forging human connections and, we contend, connections between students and the institutions of schooling.

In what follows, we argue that moving the analytic tools gleaned from trauma studies to representations of lives entering classrooms illuminates both the close human connections and critical distances necessary to support students emotionally and relationally and thus their engagement and success with school and school literacies. As Hartman (1995) describes, a central goal of trauma theory in the humanities is to discover “a way of receiving the story, of listening to it, of drawing it into an interpretative conversation” (p. 541). As introduced earlier, we consider trauma as a lens on student positioning in two interrelated but somewhat distinct ways. First, we consider how lenses from trauma studies can be employed to consider the role and impact of highly significant difficult events in individual lives. Such events as the loss of loved ones, family members in prison, physical or sexual abuse, transiency, homelessness, illness, and removal from a parent’s care are not unusual events for children and youth to experience in the schools in which we work, but they are always extraordinary events and their entrance into classrooms does matter (such experiences cannot but matter to the child experiencing them) and, we argue, must then count in the everyday epistemologies and emotional life of teaching and learning. Second, we discuss experiences of accumulating marginalization within specific school and classroom locations as well as the larger structural and institutionalized inequities of education in the United States as traumas that demand emotional-critical analytic lenses and responses.

Reciprocity in Listening and Responding to Individual Wounds: Carlton and Christine

Christine, Carlton’s teacher, remembers explicitly experiencing the reciprocity of revealing and responding to wounds in the classroom during her first year of teaching, the year before Carlton joined her classroom. Over a weekend, she experienced the loss of a significant relationship and on Monday morning walked into her classroom feeling raw with emotion. When the class gathered on the rug for writer’s workshop, Christine described how she decided to put aside her lesson plan and instead write a modeled personal narrative that began with a memory of her father telling her as a child “In the moment you think you can’t, you’ll discover you can. Always believe in yourself,” a quote she connected to the loss she had experienced over the weekend. When a few tears slipped from her eyes, she kept writing. As she recalls, the children responded with empathy, immediately making personal connections, and left the rug eager to write. Two boys, both usually reluctant writers, stayed behind. Christine expected them to need the kinds of support she often provided for them—suggestions for topics, help formulating a first sentence, encouragement to use their best guess spelling. Instead, one boy asked if it was ok if he wrote about his grandfather’s recent death. The other boy wondered if he could write about his mother and father, both of whom were in prison. With her encouragement, they each immediately and independently wrote their stories. Christine describes this as a turning point in her pedagogy, an epiphany.

Thus, Christine began her second year of teaching pursuing a literacy pedagogy of reciprocal testimony and witness with intention, a commitment made more urgent and more challenging by Carlton’s cancer diagnosis. In collaboration with Carlton’s foster parents, she made space for Carlton’s cancer in the classroom, on his terms. She chose moments to share challenges she has faced with her students, for instance telling them that her grandfather was undergoing treatment for cancer. Soon after, as fall colors appeared on the trees and Carlton’s chemo treatments began, Carlton told Christine he would like to tell his classmates about his cancer. He explained what Hodgkins lymphoma is, what the doctors were doing to help him get better, and how he felt after his treatments. He pulled down the collar of his shirt to show his portacath to his classmates. Starting that day, Carlton began to regularly share his experiences, both orally in morning meeting and through writing.

Indeed, Carlton’s illness, along with the challenging experiences that several of her students began to share regularly, prompted Christine to plan a literacy unit around Patricia Polacco’s (2007) picture book, The Lemonade Club. In the book, a young girl is diagnosed with leukemia and her teacher and classmates respond with sadness and active support, including shaving their heads as she loses her hair to chemotherapy. The teacher introduces an idea that served as the class’s mantra: Life delivers both lemons and lemonade. Using Polacco’s story as their shared framework, each child in Christine’s class wrote two essays: one about an experience that they perceived as a “lemon,” or challenging experience, and one that captured something happy or fun from their lives, or a “lemonade” experience. After reading and discussing the book, the children used their writing journals to brainstorm lists of possible topics for their narratives. Carlton listed three lemons and two lemonades (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Carlton’s writing journal.

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Figure 2.

One poem from Carlton’s book.

Carlton’s list of possible writing topics illustrates the intersections in our argument for the importance of attention to the difficult in classrooms. Carlton was in the midst of significant “shock” in his young life in the form of a disease that entailed pain, fear, and a literal life or death struggle. Carlton had also been removed from his parents’ custody a few years prior to second grade due to abuse and neglect. He had already been placed in and removed from several foster homes, with at least one of those moves prompted by more abuse. In addition, efforts to keep Carlton and his older brothers together failed, so losing his parents also resulted in the loss of regular contact with his siblings. Carlton may have only been in school for 2 years when he arrived in Christine’s classroom, but the events from his life could not but have already impacted his school experiences and how he was positioned in school. He was a child who arrived at his new school with a hard story that preceded and coexisted with the proliferating cells waging war on his immune system; he came with a narrative already full of wounds that his teacher needed to hear in order to understand and support him. However, those narratives can come with consequences in schools. The hard stories can quickly position children as challenges, rather than as having faced challenges, or frame children as problems, rather than as remarkable human beings who have faced catastrophe and survived. Carlton’s list of lemon and lemonade topics from his life show that some of the experiences he describes as difficult and positive in his life are two sides of the same coin: He doesn’t have his parents, but he has been placed in the loving care of new foster parents; because of his new home, he will be able to see the brothers whose daily presence he has so missed. His cancer, a clear lemon, is the experience on his list without yet a positive counterpoint.

Carlton entered second grade a reluctant writer, but he became more engaged in writing during the Lemonade Club unit (Dutro, Henning, & Kantor, 2010) and, by spring, when the class began their 2-week poetry unit, Carlton bent diligently over his writing journal and, just 2 days later, he approached Christine and told her that he was ready to publish his work. She was skeptical, but he walked over and set his writer’s notebook on her desk and flipped it open with a proud look. Carlton explained that he had written eight poems about his experience with cancer starting with his first treatment and ending with the news from the doctor that he was in remission.

Although we have written about the children’s experiences with this unit in more detail elsewhere (see Dutro et al., 2010), we raise these examples here to illustrate the significant ways in which Carlton chose to integrate his illness, as well as other difficult experiences in his life, into the “official” realm of school when that opportunity was provided and supported. Christine’s decision to embrace a pedagogy of testimony and critical witness that allowed the wounds that she, Carlton, and his classmates carried into the classroom to speak necessarily raise and challenge personal/public boundaries and us/them dichotomies. An event like Carlton’s cancer, the literal wounds and pain that he endured, the threat of losing a child to disease, require an acknowledgement of the emotional tensions of living in that intersected space of the binary. Although risky, we contend that such pedagogical decisions were necessary, for if Christine had not created space in the classroom for the difficult to enter and serve as valued material from which to explicitly draw in sanctioned ways in school, it is not just the “lemons” from Carlton’s life that would no longer count as resources, but also the lemonade. If wounds are not welcome, children will correctly sense that what school wishes to hear is the banal, the safe, the bland, and they will leave what matters most muted beneath a sterile, clean bandage.

Wounds as Accumulating Marginalization: Diego and Lauren

Next, we turn to how the speaking wound metaphor connects to experiences of accumulating marginalization within specific school and classroom locations as well as the larger structural and institutionalized inequities of education in the United States. As we will discuss further in the following, joining lenses from literary trauma theory and the rich body of scholarship within critical race and postcolonial perspectives demands more adamant attention to emotional-critical analytic lenses and responses to student positioning in schools. Diego helps us to consider the stakes in these ideas.

Diego and Lauren met when Diego was a student in Lauren’s 10th-grade World History class at a large high school located in the center of a midsized city. Lauren described Diego as a “big teddy bear” and he often referred to her as his favorite teacher. Although the majority of students in their school are White and middle to upper middle class, it also includes other students of color and a small, but significant and growing, population of Latino students as well as students from working-class families.

As an increasing number of working-class and immigrant Latino families moved to the city, issues of race and racism, economic disparities, and academic achievement gaps (as measured by state standardized assessments) became increasingly visible in some of the city’s schools, including Diego’s high school where Lauren often expressed she felt the weight of her colleagues’ comments, imbued with deeply entrenched deficit perspectives grounded in us/them dichotomies she struggled to understand. She described feeling “astonished by how, almost negative it is about students. . . . When I came [to this school] it was really shocking the perspectives that people have on race and how much they let it get them down almost.”

Diego had lived in the town his entire life, attending the city’s public schools since kindergarten. During an interview, Diego talked about the family support he received in relation to his education, explaining that when his social life seemed to be negatively impacting his grades during middle school, it prompted his mother to arrange for him to attend another school in the district where fewer of his friends attended.

When asked about his vision for his future, he indicated his desire to attend college, following in his sister’s footsteps.

Later in the interview, he mentioned his sister again, sharing that she was studying forensic science in college and describing her as “the smartest person in our whole family.” Diego’s mother’s interventions in his school experiences, his own desire to pursue a college degree, and his sister’s success post high school all point to the significant support that Diego received at home in relation to education.

In spite of this, the in-school experiences and opportunities he recounted were disconnected from the emphasis on school success evident when he spoke of his home and family. When Diego transitioned from middle to high school, he was identified as a student in need of academic support, so during his ninth-grade year he was enrolled in an academic support program specifically for Latino students. After just one year in the program it was recommended that Diego be enrolled in another form of academic support and began to attend the school’s Learning Lab. Given his placements when he arrived in high school, it seemed clear that by the time he entered high school, Diego had been cast in the role of underachieving student. It seems possible there were few other roles available for Diego and his Latino classmates as Lauren describes the transition into Mountain Valley High School for students of color, explaining, “you come [here] and automatically you walk through those doors, and you are the lower class of the school.” She recognized this reality of the school; however, she vehemently rejected it and over the course of 10th grade, Diego demonstrated a commitment to Lauren’s class that raised significant questions about the “underachievement” label he had been assigned and the corresponding academic support programs in which he was required to participate.

Lauren sensed that Diego needed and deserved dedicated support from teachers who believed in his abilities and truly “saw” him and connected to him, and she expressed frustration with some of her colleagues who she felt would not provide such support to Diego and other students she believed were marginalized in her school. “The teachers of [Mountain Valley] were like, there’s no way I’m spending a period there tutoring students. Like, just no, oh, why would I do that? Shouldn’t they be getting that in their classes?” Reflecting on her own teaching, Lauren shared, “I get emotional about it because I don’t like to see them struggle. It’s just, I think that’s a part of my teacher nature is that any, any struggle whether it’s emotional or academic, I’m like, let’s fix it.”

The relationship Lauren forged with Diego—the relationships that she has developed with so many of her students—became the tool with which she tried to “fix” the pattern of inequity she observed each school year. She explained,

I can’t imagine just walking into a class and not having a relationship with [my students], where they would know that I would be okay with them talking to me about anything. And then how that would affect my teaching. I don’t think that I would be, you know, as involved as a teacher and I don’t think [I would be] as good of a teacher if I didn’t have that relationship with them.

The personal and the pedagogical are inextricably linked in Lauren’s classroom where the relationships she builds with her students become powerful tools for teaching and learning. Her strong connections with students are indeed important, in and of themselves. But, of particular importance for breaking the cycle of inequity in this school, Lauren taps into these personal connections, working hard to hold up a mirror and enable the young people in her classroom to see the possibility she sees. Providing insight into her classroom practice, Lauren shares,

All it takes is to sit down next to one of them, and say that you care about them succeeding. And a lot of times they will blow you off and they’ll say, “No you don’t,” and you say, “Okay I’m going to sit here until you answer this question,” or “I’m going to sit here until you get this concept.” And it’s persistence, but it’s personal persistence. It’s not, like, you need to go work on that and bring it to me when you’re done. It’s I am here for you.

Integral to the relationships she builds with students is Lauren’s willingness to privilege the humanity she shares with her students in a way that challenges boundaries of us/them. Sometimes, as she describes, this takes the form of purposefully including joy, silliness, and humor, emotions she views as integral to her practice: “I mean it’s just that: Being vulnerable. I make a complete fool of myself like all the time in class, but it makes it so the students laugh and they feel comfortable, and it, it’s different than just two plus two is four and this is how it works.” However, also, as was the case with Diego, she shares painful episodes from her life with her students. As an adolescent, Lauren experienced a period of emotional upheaval that she remembers impinging on her high school experience. More than once in her interviews she emphasized that she shares those memories with students when they are facing their own difficult circumstances. Sometimes their stories, she says, connect deeply to her own, even though the situations may vary, and she wants them to know “I can relate and they are not alone.”

Strikingly and consistently, Lauren’s collaborations with Diego resulted in a level of academic success that defied his high school record and the perceptions and expectations of many of his other teachers. Lauren admitted, “If I didn’t know him so well that I can get under his skin, then he would never perform in my class.” Relating what a teacher colleague had told her, Lauren shared, “[She said] ‘you know, he just loves you because you get him. That’s what he says, that you get him.’ And so in my class he’s—he’s doing great. You know, and he’s doing work, and I can get him to do the work, but I could see how if you did not have a relationship with Diego, there is no way.”

Diego and other students corroborated Lauren’s perceptions of some of the gaps in the support they experienced in the school during a focus group conversation in Lauren’s office. Lauren asked a group of students of color what they needed and wanted from teachers at their school.

Although Diego had a close relationship with Lauren and was keeping up in her class, he continued to miss other classes and admitted that, generally, his grades did not reflect his best work. Indeed, in an interview, he explained that he was biding his time until his junior year when he would be eligible to enroll in a TEC (Technical Education Center) program where many of his friends were earning certifications in auto collision repair.

A decision to attend TEC is a path that could certainly be commended; but, when asked if this was the career he most wanted to pursue he explained that it was a valuable skill he wanted to have for the times when his mom’s car broke down. The path Diego identified as his hope for his future was the one that would lead him to college.

We include Diego’s story precisely because it is not extraordinary. In its all-too-ordinariness it serves as illustration of the well-documented systemic and institutional racism in schools, as we discuss in more detail in the following section. At the same time, Diego’s experience in school and Lauren’s responses point to crucial theoretical and pedagogical extensions offered by trauma studies that demand framing such school experiences as extraordinary, as shocking, and anathema to what is tolerable in the everyday functioning of schools and classrooms. As Caruth (1996) writes in relation to the speaking wound, “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way its very unassimiliated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (p. 4). The speaking wound metaphor and the theories in which it is embedded emphasize the emotional and moral imperative of recognizing and intervening in those everyday cataclysms faced by students in schools, an idea we discuss further below.

Trauma as Difficult Life Experiences That Enter Classrooms

Caruth’s speaking wound metaphor applies to the identifiably difficult experiences that kids carry into school but that they soon realize are “not for school” (in the words of one second grader with whom we worked). Because most of us do not get through life unscathed, pain, in its various degrees and guises, is very often relatable and relevant across time and human experience. However, in Caruth’s view, allowing another’s wounds to open one’s own is necessary if effective witnessing is to be achieved. Thus, witnessing within the metaphor of the speaking wound necessarily challenges binaries of self/other and public/private that are often raised in discussions of what experiences are appropriate to acknowledge in classrooms. Such binaries construct distances between crucial human experience and the institutions of schooling. If a child’s wounds must be hidden upon entering, it seems unrealistic to expect that child to forge deep ties to school. Our reading of Caruth’s metaphor suggests that recognizing and connecting through the difficult can help to bridge such chasms between experience and the institutions of schooling. Further, in Caruth’s argument, witnessing cannot be achieved in concert with Othering. If the speaking wound is truly heard and allowed to speak deeply to one’s own trauma, the distance that is necessary to position someone else as other is absent. For our purposes, thinking about these ideas in classroom spaces, considering how to challenge and intercede in Othering impulses is crucial. The difficult experiences of children and youth are too often employed as evidence of the distance of certain students and families from what is constructed as the norm through societal discourses of deficiency and deviancy that circulate about students of color and economically struggling families. “The possibility and surprise of listening to an other’s wounds” and allowing another’s story to piercingly remind the listener of common humanity in theory disallows an Othering that locates struggles in particular categories of human beings.

As Caruth and other trauma studies scholars emphasize, however, listening and connecting to another’s wounds is not the same as appropriating someone else’s difficult experience. This idea arises in an interview Caruth (1995) conducted with renowned trauma studies scholar Robert Lifton. In her interview with Lifton, Caruth references one of his studies in which Lifton, a psychologist, conducted interviews with Holocaust survivors. Caruth asks him, “Do you feel a little bit yourself like you’re going through the trauma as they talk, that you’re participating in it?” Lifton replies,

More than a little bit. This is the significance of the encounter. . . . But it’s being a survivor by proxy, and the proxy’s important. You’re not doing what they did, you’re not exposed to what they were exposed to, but you must take your mind through, take your feelings through what they went through, and allow that in. It’s hard, it’s painful, and yet you know you must do it as you come into contact with it. (p. 145)

For Lifton, distance between testifier and witness must be bridged in ways that require the listener to experience pain, even as the related experience firmly remains the testifier’s.

Whitehead (2004) echoes this idea when, discussing testimony on the written page, she writes,

Speaking beyond understanding, testimony requires a highly collaborative relationship between speaker and listener. The listener bears a dual responsibility: to receive the testimony but also to avoid appropriating the story as his or her own. A fragile balance is engendered between the necessity to witness sympathetically that which testimonial writing cannot fully represent and a simultaneous respect for the otherness of the experience, which resists rendering it too familiar or indulging in too easy an understanding or affiliation. (p. 8)

This is a delicate balancing act, indeed, and one we argue is necessary in order for difficult experiences to function in ways that support, rather than undermine, students’ positive relationships with school. Although we appreciate Whitehead’s call for care in avoiding overrepresentation with others’ traumas, Caruth’s metaphor of the speaking wound prompts us to move beyond sympathy in our notion of witness and ascribe a far more active stance to the testifier. To listen to testimony with sympathy does not imply the painful taking in of another’s experience to which Lifton points as a requirement of witnessing. Within the speaking wound, witnessing is implicated in very real and personal anguish, a calling up of the difficult that is likely to provide its own testimony. To turn again to Caruth’s reading of Tasso’s tale, at the moment of his realization of what he has wrought Tancred is witness to Clorinda’s testimony of her death, even as his grief provides its own testimony to pain and loss.

Thus, the witness is not the only or primary actor here. To provide testimony to challenging experiences is to engage in a profound risk of vulnerability. Whether literally spoken or performed and embodied in other ways, testimony to a hard experience turns a personal event into a text to be read, interpreted, and circulated by others. As a text, it insists on response, indeed, cannot avoid or resist response. A testifier deserves a critical, conscientious reader/listener, a witness willing to recognize and share in its risks and complexities, even while resisting appropriation. Thus, we contend that testimonies require critical witnessing, a move that requires a conscious analysis of how one’s positioning may differ from those who provide testimony, particularly in terms of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation (Dutro, 2009, 2011). This view of the responsibilities inherent in critical witnessing is similar to Kaplan’s (2005) formulation of witnessing in relation to texts that convey first-person accounts of traumatic experiences in postcolonial documentary texts. She writes,

For in bearing witness, in the sense I intend here, one not only provides a witness where no one was there to witness before, but more than that, one feels responsible for injustice in general. Witnessing involves wanting to change the kind of world where injustice, of whatever kind, is common. (p. 122)

Similarly, critical witnessing in classrooms involves, at once, a rejection of us/them dichotomies that position students at arm’s length and recognition of how privilege constructs differences in the stakes of some of the life stories that enter classrooms.

As Caruth (1996) writes, “It is this plea by an other who is asking to be seen and heard, this call by which the other commands us to awaken . . . that constitutes the new mode of reading and listening that both the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demand” (p. 9). Caruth’s words here perform the complexity of exposing, recognizing, and responding to wounds as well as the inability of language to fully convey traumatic experiences. The other here, the testifier, “pleas,” “asks,” “calls,” “commands,” and “demands” yet is also “silent” and “mute.” The hearer must listen and read in a “new mode” that requires “us to awaken” and heed calls for witness that may be expressed in silence. As many trauma theorists emphasize, traumatic experience is both beyond language—language is inadequate to the task—and dependent on language to find witness. Caruth’s words also perform a challenge to binaries (silence/call, command/mute) that invokes the disrupting of dichotomies that we argue is one of the powers of bringing a trauma studies lens to classrooms.

Trauma as “Mundanely Catastrophic” Marginalization in Schools

In our work with students and teachers in classrooms, we increasingly encountered the utility of bringing trauma studies and its metaphors to bear as additional lenses within critical and postcolonial perspectives on some students’ accumulating marginalization within schools. Indeed, literary trauma studies scholars pose arguments directly extending the concept of trauma into analyses of representations of everyday oppression and marginalization. For instance, Forter (2007) describes his desire to engage a concept of trauma in his literary analysis that addresses “those forms of trauma that are not punctual, that are more mundanely catastrophic than such spectacular instances of violence as the Holocaust” (p. 260). As he explains,

I am speaking here of the trauma induced by patriarchal identity formation rather, say, than the trauma of rape, the violence not of lynching but of everyday racism. . . . Such traumas are also so chronic and cumulative, so woven into the fabric of our societies, that they cannot count as “shocks” in the way that Nazi persecution and genocide do in the accounts of Caruth and others. They are emphatically social disturbances, but have been thoroughly naturalized in ways that make it necessary to excavate and “estrange” them in order to see them as social traumas. (p. 260)

As trauma, the cumulative violence perpetrated on children and youth who are positioned in difficult ways (or positioned as difficult) in school may be experienced through what Caruth (1996) calls “dislocation” (p. 9). In her view, dislocation occurs when trauma happens not just as an event experienced in the moment, but as a continual revisiting post-event. As Caruth also emphasizes, within a continual revisiting of trauma, survival itself can constitute a crisis. In our view, the idea of dislocation is useful in considering how the trauma of marginalization in schools is not an in-the-moment difficult experience. However, the ongoing challenges of marginalization are continually, even if not always consciously, difficult to bear and hold potentially devastating consequences for opportunities to positively pursue educational opportunities.

Forter’s (2007) aforementioned argument intimately connects with the idea of microaggressions, one term critical scholars within and outside of education have used to characterize the day-to-day experiences of being positioned outside of the assumed and policed norms related to race, class, gender, and sexuality (e.g., Solorzano, 1998; Solorzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000; Sue, 2010). Other researchers have used the metaphor of “racial battle fatigue” to characterize the impact of ongoing negotiation of racial stereotypes, racist images and narratives, and discriminatory institutional practices (see Smith, Hung, & Franklin, 2011, for a discussion of this research). Research surrounding the toll of continual struggle and resistance to marginalization resonate with postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of the “epistemic violence” perpetuated when the perspectives of those situated as “Other” are systematically sublimated. Indeed, the metaphors grounded in the violence of being positioned as “Other” point directly to the importance of mining trauma as a conceptual tool for confronting and addressing wounds inflicted daily, weekly, yearly through educational practices that have been “socially sublimated into ongoing, systemic practices and patterns of behavior” (Forter, 2007, p. 260).

In this view of trauma, testimony and witness are again importantly, if complexly, at play. Students deserve and require witnesses who can recognize and actively intervene in marginalizing practices in schools. However, Lifton (in an interview published in Caruth, 1995) discusses a concept of “false witnessing” that we find important in considering the implications of the metaphors of testimony and witness for the “mundanely catastrophic” marginalization of particular students and groups of students in U.S. schools. Lifton describes false witness as a process in which a “suppression or numbing” occurs in relation to the traumas of others, even as the witness has experienced or understood particular events to be traumatic. In his view, false witness occurs when one group designates another as victims. He explains to Caruth (1995), “False witness tends to be a political and ideological process. And really false witness is at the heart of most victimization. Groups victimize others, they create what I now call ‘designated victims,’ the Jews in Europe, the Blacks in this country (the US)” (p. 139). Lifton’s explanation of designated victims is particularly useful for our argument. He describes designated victims as

the people off whom we [i.e., the dominant in society] live not only economically, but psychologically. That is we reassert our own vitality and symbolic immortality by denying them their right to live and by identifying them with the death taint, by designating them as victims. So we live off them. (p. 139)

Although Lifton is talking here about the false witness that occurs in extreme victimization such as the Holocaust, other war atrocities, and slavery, his idea of false witness helps us to think about the trauma of marginalization in schools and why it is allowed to continue across individual students’ years in school and for generations of students who share neighborhoods or particular racial and/or economic positioning in society. Awareness that some students are not afforded the same opportunities as other students in schools is clearly not enough and can be usefully formulated as a form of “false witness” that designates some students as victims in ways that allow more privileged students to be positioned as vital and successful in contrast to those who “struggle” and “fail” (and whose successes are framed as gratifying exceptions and proof that the system is fair and neutral). To counteract false witnessing, then, what is necessary in schools are critical witnesses who recognize students’ testimonies to their ongoing marginalization, critique the systems (both micro and macro) that perpetuate such oppression, and take action to see and listen to students, work with them, and intercede on their behalf.

Caruth’s (1996) use of the speaking wound analogy applies across the interrelated ways of conceptualizing what counts as trauma that we described earlier. She writes, “Just as Tancred does not hear the voice of Clorinda until the second wounding, so trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimiliated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (p. 4). Ongoing messages that crucial life events, challenges borne of poverty, or academic effort, potential, and desire to connect with content do not matter in school must surely “haunt” students in the relationships they attempt to build with schooling over time.

Trauma and the Imperative of Culpability

In the day-to-day life of classrooms, to acknowledge trauma in the ways we conceptualize it here reveals what is too often hidden: The fissures, that can become chasms, between what is present and deeply felt in children’s and youth’s lives and what is allowed to count in school are already present for many students. Carlton’s wound would have been there, under his t-shirt, whether or not he chose to share it with his classmates. He took up Christine’s invitation to share evidence of what he was going through, and in response, many of his classmates began to figuratively tug on their shirt collars too. Certainly, the messages Diego carried about his school struggles could have been, and too often were, taken as self-evidently appropriate based on his academic performance. Instead, Lauren recognized those labels as inflicted on him, despite his goals and his family’s support, and opened up a space in which to reposition himself as successful, as seen and heard and valued, in school. In our view, trauma studies provides productive lenses for conceptualizing the difficult as a path toward deconstructing taken-for-granted views of student experience and, thus, in disrupting corrosive normative discourses that remain pervasive in U.S. public schools.

Carlton’s and Diego’s experiences raise important nuances around the presence of trauma in classrooms. Although we argue that it was crucial in Carlton’s experience for Christine to acknowledge and incorporate his illness, we do so (as did she) knowing that the literal exposing of wounds in the classroom may not have been comfortable for all children. Such a revealing of the difficult—whether a literal or symbolic exposure of a wound—creates a fissure in the surface routines of school life (those routines, part of the cultural narrative of school, whose familiarity are certainly assumed to be a source of comfort and security for students). As Grey (2007) notes, trauma produces “severe ruptures in social cohesion and threaten[s] the stability of these cultural narratives” (p. 174). Words such as severe ruptures, threat, and instability point to the importance of recognizing that acknowledging challenging experiences in classrooms is far from benign and responses should not be assumed nor can they be predicted. For instance, not every child seemed eager to share a story in relation to Carlton’s illness, the literature Christine read to help children build understanding and connection, or their peers’ stories told in response to Carlton’s. Some children responded with attentive silence. Response to trauma, with its rupturing of the status quo, takes many forms.

However, along with trauma studies scholars, we point to the importance of disrupting seemingly smooth discursive surfaces, in this case, of school routines and expectations. For, it is only in the face of what cannot be ignored—the unanticipated eruption, the sudden disruption—that the myth of security and predictability in social cohesion and cultural narratives is revealed. As many critically oriented researchers have emphasized, destructive myths ever-circulate in schools: Fairness is treating all students the same, class-privileged experiences are the norm, students choose to disengage from school; and, we would add, the assumption that certain life experiences, particularly difficult experiences, are inappropriate for school (see also Jones, 2007). As our case stories illustrate, both Lauren and Christine strove to disrupt these myths through the decisions they made and the priorities they enacted. For instance, Lauren was unapologetic about devoting more time and energy to those students who she felt were positioned in challenging ways in relation to race, class, sexuality, and language in her school and the wider community. As she reflected, “And so thinking about it, I think my relationships are stronger with the kids who need more help. You know, or the kids who ask it of me.”

In her case, Christine was committed to modeling to her students that they did not have to leave any of their important life experiences outside the classroom door, even though it upped the ante in the emotional investment required of her teaching. She explained, “Sometimes I don’t know how to process all of these stories, because comparatively my stories are far different. Yet, while I cannot relate to those experiences specifically, I can relate to the feelings that surround them: confusion, anger, frustration, and loneliness.”

Viewing students’ struggles as wounds inflicted by the institution of schools on children has to shift the stances taken in relation to students in schools and classrooms. Children and youth do not have the privilege of hiding behind a shroud of invulnerability. Students’ wounds, when experienced, are often represented in the cumulative files that follow them, each year inscribed with a different and mounting interpretation of what has occurred and how it constructs them in relation to school. At the same time students’ lives are chronicled for them, students provide their own ongoing testimony to their lives and relationships with school. Children and youth are everyday documentarians, providing an array of evidence of their experiences and how they are positioned in classrooms, evidence that speaks, but not often loudly, and demands a critical witness who will listen and take action as part of a structural analysis of the inequities of power within the institutions in which students and teachers are located (Dutro, 2009, 2011).

In his analysis of racism and sexism as traumas in literature, Forter (2007) argues for the importance of moving beyond accounts of trauma as so engrained in human existence that they are inevitably repeated and recirculated “through our talking and listening, our reading and writing—in short, our very being-in-language” and toward attention to “more systemic accounts of trauma” that work to “open up rather than foreclose a space for acting on the systems that traumatize” (p. 282). Indeed, owning culpability in students’ relationships with school involves moving from behind the shield of distanced lenses to recognize both the subtle, accumulating wounds experienced in schools and the difficult events that can be pointed to in students’ lives. These interwoven ways of thinking about what counts as difficult experiences must, as the dictionary definition of “to matter” suggests, be of importance to what occurs in classrooms, must be recognized as significant.

Drawing on our central metaphor, the various ways in which the difficult speaks in schools and classrooms—those wounds carried into and/or inflicted by school—requires a particular relational pedagogical stance, that we have termed critical witnessing. Such a stance forges connection through two moves. First, reciprocity is at the heart of how testimony and witnessing is viewed in the context of classrooms. Reciprocity is not about adults imposing their woes on children and youth, but it is about purposefully allowing students to glimpse shared human plights and respond with empathy and connection as part of carefully considered pedagogy. Second, critical witnessing requires structural analysis of and resistance to the systemic injustices that inflict injuries or allow them to fester and infect children’s and youth’s opportunities to invest in the institutions designated as both the symbolic and material evidence of success.

These dimensions of listening to how wounds speak in schools thus hold implications for the stances and practices we advocate in teacher education. Based on their experience, teachers with whom we collaborate underscore the importance of immersing new teachers in frameworks grounded in the inseparability of critical social analysis, emotional and personal connection and investment, and providing opportunities for students to engage with the skills and content crucial to accessing educational opportunities. Invested in recognizing connections between emotion and academic content, accountability, and reciprocal relationships, and engaged in ongoing analysis of their students’ navigations of institutions and social policies, Christine, Lauren, and other teachers positioned themselves as allies and advocates for their students within the systems that worked against some children’s and youth’s efforts to connect with school.

As illustrated in our case stories, our data also suggest that critical witnessing involves concrete pedagogical moves that new teachers can study, practice, and hone to demonstrate to students that all dimensions of their lives can productively and supportively reside in school and be contexts for deep engagement. For instance, Christine used challenging experiences of deep import to her life—her parents’ separation when she was a child, her beloved grandfather’s death—as the context for modeling writing and connection to text. Her testimony effectively proffered invitations for children to bring a full range of their experiences—including loss of family members and homes, threat of family members’ deportation, illness, and parents’ job instability—to their classroom literacy practices, deepened engagement, and fostered a sense of connection to teacher, peers, and crucially, academic skills and content. This is one example of how routines of instruction can be harnessed to demonstrate that significant life experiences are part of, not apart from, school.

In addition, documenting Lauren’s classroom interactions over time revealed many subtle but crucial ways she served as critical witness to students around the edges of formal instruction—the talk and laughter as students exited and entered the classroom, the questions asked about students’ lives inside and outside of school, the attentive “are you ok?” when a student seemed out of sorts, the literal locating of her body nearest those students who had histories of being positioned outside of what counted as successful in school. In turn, it was clear in interactions that many students knew details of Lauren’s life outside of school—her toddler’s milestones or the family gathering for her husband’s birthday—and some students knew that her own journey through high school had been rocky and she related to feeling lost and confused while navigating school. Adopting and enacting the stances and practices Christine and Lauren illustrate is not straightforward or simple and made all the more complex by policies that constrain teacher autonomy and morale. However, through close collaborations with teachers and students who breathe life into abstractions in their daily interactions in classrooms and schools, we are learning valuable lessons about the promises and complexities of critical witnessing of the difficult.

Certainly, the pedagogy of testimony and critical witnessing we describe resonates with the many calls for more critical, equitable practices in schools that place care, connection, and seeing students at the center of pedagogy, including those we have cited and many more. However, precisely because trauma figures prominently in circulating narratives about students in high-poverty schools, teacher education must provide opportunities to confront the tensions of attending to students’ positioning in relation to wounds and how they speak in classrooms. Although we are decidedly not advocating that teachers assume students arrive to their classrooms having experienced pain, loss, or other personal traumas or with injuries to their relationships with school, we do contend that teachers should presume that serving as critical witness to students is always necessary. Theoretical lenses from trauma studies help us to think in new ways about classrooms as spaces in which the personal, emotional, academic, and professional are blurred, without the boundaries—at turns comforting and devastating—that policy rhetoric is so adept at constructing. When the goal is to intervene in systemic inequities and move toward more emancipatory educational practices, the theoretical stakes are high and the field of education, as all others, needs new metaphors and conceptual roots through which to reenvision long-standing dilemmas of practice and inexcusable consequences for some students.

Tancred stabs Clorinda, even if unwittingly; the wound she suffers is at his hand and as he listens to her wound he feels his own wounds opening. This connection is forged through their shared humanity, a humanity in which others’ pain should be felt and felt deeply and prompt one’s own to speak and demand its witnesses. But hers is also a pain for which he is responsible. As deep as their connection may be, he is not the one who in that moment has been wounded. This simultaneous connection and disconnection within metaphors drawn from literary trauma theory is key to the pedagogy of the speaking wound we are conceptualizing and studying with teachers. Like Tancred, educators and policymakers may not intend to be perpetrators of violence, but trauma as a lens on student positioning points to culpability, no matter how unwitting, and raises the stakes in stances and actions.