Abstract
Schools may provide stability in the midst of family and community challenges. Unfortunately, education in many places suffers challenges stemming from neoliberal reforms that serve to govern teachers’ and children's behaviors rather than support them (Brown, 2009; Lee, 2018; Moss and Roberts-Holmes, 2022; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2014; Sims and Waniganayake, 2015). As one way to help contemporary educators address children's needs, Travis Wright, who has been an experienced counselor and teacher in the USA for more than 20 years, guides educators through new understandings of children, families, and themselves in his book, Emotionally Responsive Teaching: Expanding Trauma-Informed Practice with Young Children. Wright provides a dynamic and sensitive approach to seeing children and the complexity of their lives, and then using these newfound understandings to create change. He introduces his readers to the framework of emotionally responsive teaching, which is explicitly focused on humanizing the school environment, searching for goodness, understanding how teachers and children are understanding the world and themselves, and co-constructing the teaching and learning process so that children and teachers may feel seen, heard, and valued. (24)
In emotionally responsive teaching, traumatic stress cannot be fully defined by the instruments that educators and counselors might administer. Indeed, a group of children experiencing the same event may or may not each have the same experience as individuals. Moreover, sometimes traumatic stress is internalizing, such that children feel deficient but cannot tell adults about what they feel. In describing the messiness that children from all demographic and identity categories might experience, Wright “unties the knot” of discomfort or anger that can define the relationship between teachers and counselors when educators are positioned to fix young children with an eye to their academic outcomes and counselors are positioned to focus on progress toward social and emotional goals. His conception of emotionally responsive teaching uses critical perspectives on resilience that acknowledge the privileging of societal norms in perpetuating stereotypes. These discourses challenge the notion that children from high-poverty communities or minoritized backgrounds necessarily experience trauma and those who are not from these backgrounds do not experience it.
By examining the complexities of young children's emotional states and the contexts in which they are positioned, Wright provides a theory and discourse of emotional responsiveness that can influence how teaching can become more humanizing for children experiencing messy lives and deep fears that prohibit them from learning. He thoroughly scrutinizes stereotypes of race, class, and gender that do not take into account the social context in shaping children's behaviors to reveal how the stereotypes may distort educators’ abilities to see and support children.
There are now quite a few books to support teachers to better understand young children and families going through trauma. What makes Emotionally Responsive Teaching: Expanding Trauma-Informed Practice with Young Children a unique contribution? First, Wright has an immense capacity to touch readers with the authentic beauty of his life stories of being a counselor, teacher, father, and partner. He breathes life and hope into school stories and home stories, and the stories lift off the pages with uncommon grace. Second, by providing a new framework for trauma, he makes an important contribution to understanding young children. Additionally, Wright shares a plethora of fresh approaches to teaching and activities tested through his experiences that help children reconstruct continuous and coherent life narratives when they might be too afraid to learn, affected by terrifying moments such as accidents and the deaths of loved ones, violence, mental health challenges, social stigmas, and inequities. Ultimately, for educators “[t]o truly empathize, validate, and understand the child who is struggling, it is essential that we recognize in a deep way that they feel threatened—uncertain, unsafe, and perhaps already hurt—in their bodies and in the world” (97). The book guides readers to understand many signs and symptoms of traumatic stress for younger and older children. It pushes against behaviorist paradigms that require children to earn their “freedom” or incentivize children for exhibiting particular behaviors that the teacher deems normal. This sort of hypervigilance on the part of teachers usually backfires and ignites fears rather than extinguishes them.
Seeing the self and the world as bad impacts a child's learning in negative ways. However, undoing this damage is possible in classrooms in part by engaging in activities that promote personal-narrative sensemaking, critical thinking, and communication skills, as well as acknowledge their best selves and recognize them for who they are as individuals. Trust is the key in emotionally responsive teaching. According to Wright: Learning to trust that I will be okay and accept my best even when I failed or the situation did not get better has freed me to love, take risks, and embrace the possibilities of life with more courage and abandon. This is the deepest promise of this sometimes challenging work, I cannot guarantee that every moment in an emotionally responsive approach will be easy; there will be moments of doubt, frustration, and even brokenheartedness. But I can promise that if you decide to open yourself to the possibility of this work, doing what you might simply because it needs to be done and even when it is difficult, your view of yourself and the world will be transformed. Knowing that you have made a difference in the lives of others will forever be a source of pride and protect you from the regret that perhaps you wasted your journey. And I know that you will find space in your heart that you never knew existed. (184)
