Chapter 18: Teaching Upstream Toward Resilient Learning: Trauma-Informed Strategies and Theory for Adult Higher Education

How do adult educators identify trauma among students? How do we recognize resilience, and create mirrors to help adults see the strengths they already possess and their capacity for growth? How do our lived experiences and social locations shape our approaches? I was driven to investigate these questions by the intersections of my experience as a public health practitioner, educator, and trauma survivor, along with my responsibility as a White teacher to interrogate my racial identity. Eventually, I had the opportunity to conduct field research with educators from adult basic education (ABE) and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) programs for a project called “The Teaching Upstream Study.” These partners were integral to exploring an understudied problem: the deep gap in knowledge about perspectives and practices among ABE/ESOL educators working within the trauma and adult learning context (John, 2016a, 2016b). The Teaching Upstream Study used multiracial, feminist, qualitative, and grounded theory methods to place ABE and ESOL educators at the center of inquiry. The project uncovered 27 teaching strategies described by participants that resulted in the development of the theory of resilient learning (Wilson, 2018).