On a rainy day in April, Gav Bell entered their 12th-grade American history class to find two long tables pushed together in the center of the room with black fabric hanging down covering all sides. The teacher entered the room and promptly directed students to “get down and crawl under the tables together”. Once Gav and their fellow classmates were in the dark under the tables, squeezing their knees tightly to minimize unwanted physical contact, their teacher began to read them a passage describing conditions on the slaves ships transporting Africans through the middle passage: the voyage which brought over captured Africans to North America to be sold at slave auctions. Gav Bell is my best friend and this was an entry lesson in their highschool class’s unit on slavery.
School curriculum, such as teaching how systematic injustice worked in the past, can create confusion and erasure adding to students’ trauma when present realities aren’t addressed and the links between past and present are not made explicit. Paul. C. Gorski, founder of the Equity and Literacy Institute and EdChange, notes that trauma-informed teaching must address the school’s role in the trauma, specifically when working with children who are traumatized by systemic injustices, without doing so “role-play can be more harmful than helpful.” A large proportion of school children are affected by systemic injustices and as history has built the present world, acting out these events can create this type of retraumatization. However, there are lots of other forms of trauma students are dealing with that isn’t so easily pinpointed.
The Adverse Childhood Experience Test, administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), is used to gauge the number of traumatic experiences people have. The test results in 2019 showed ⅔ of their initial 17,000 person survey had experienced an adverse childhood experience resulting in trauma. Trauma is defined, by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), as an experience that threatens life or physical integrity and that overwhelms an individual’s capacity to cope. Trauma is not always caused by big life events that are easy to point to as traumatic. Trauma can be caused by events that look slightly upsetting or even mundane to a third party viewer. When people experience trauma, a fight, flight, or freeze response will take over. Teachers of traumatized students often describe students as withdrawn, distracted, and emotional. Sometimes these students can be prone to outbursts and sometimes will become quiet and reclusive, none of which are constructive behaviors for learning.
In 2017 a White student dressed as a plantation owner for his school’s civil war day approached his Black friend and classmate telling him that he was his slave. The mother of the black student, who holds a Ph. D. from the Department of Education Policy at Georgia State demanded the school apologize to her and her son for the racism in their Civil War day simulation and remove the simulation from future Civil War day curriculum and lesson plans. Davis says “you never reenact activities where there is a power dynamic. When students are at their desks you have simulated this activity rather than taught it, when people take their outfits off they’re still thinking like that.” The power of play to educate students, including addressing trauma, has been vastly documented. School’s role-plays, however, are far closer to simulations than true play. Davis is right when she says school’s simulations are not effectively teaching students about history and marginalization but rather reintroducing these patterns and discrimination and trauma.
Role-play and simulation is a powerful teaching tool, but just like all tools, it has its time and place. When teachers are deciding whether to use a role-play in a lesson they should consider the SAMHSA qualifications for trauma-informed teaching practice. According to the SAMHSA, a trauma-informed practice must meet four requirements: realizing the widespread impact of trauma and understanding paths for recovery, recognizing and responding to the signs and symptoms of trauma in students, teachers, and all other members involved, fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices and seeking to actively resist re-traumatization. Simulations like the role-play used in Gavin’s history class and the Civil War reenactment might’ve recognized the trauma involved in what they were teaching, but did not recognize its far reaching impacts on the students involved and was not responsive to all the members involved.
The Zinn Education Project is an organization dedicated to supporting the teaching of “people’s history” by creating history curriculum, including role-play, and making it accessible to educators all over the country. What makes the Zinn Project’s activities stand out from poor uses of role-play are their appropriate content chosen for simulation, the distance at which they keep children in the simulation from recreating the traumatizing event, and the urge they have for educators to tailor the activities to fit their own class (addressing the second point of the SAMHSA’s guidelines for a trauma-informed practice). While I would like to see the Zinn Project address Gorski’s points and include a follow-up activity (not role-play) about the effects of the event on social systems today, their activities are a positive step in the right direction. Play has been vastly documented as a powerful teaching tool and is one educators have at their disposal. However, with great power comes great responsibility and educators must think about the specific needs of their students and the ripples into the modern world of material they teach.
Works Cited
Bigelow, Bill. Zinn Education Project. The Cherokee/Seminole Removal Role Play.
Washington DC. 2020
Bigelow, Bill Zinn Education Project.Reconstructing the South: A Role Play. Washington
- 2020
Cross, Mary. Tulane University. Safe Schools NOLA offers hope to trauma exposed
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Flannery, Mary Ellen. NEA Today. Inside a Trauma Informed Classroom. July 10 2019.
Gaffney, Carrie. Teaching Tolerance. When Schools Cause Trauma. Iss 62. 2019
Gray, Peter. TheGeniusofPlay.org. The Evolutionary Importance of Self Directed Play. Martin, Jeff. APNews. ‘You are my Slave’: School’s Civil War Day sparks mom’s ire.
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National Child Traumatic Stress Network. Child Trauma Toolkit for Educators. October
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Onion, Rebecca. Slate.Com. What it Felt Like. May 20 2019.