ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the tragic ramifications of zero-tolerance approaches to school policies, and dimensions of gradual desensitization to trauma in the lives of urban teachers. Cultural and spiritual practices are explored through the school community’s tragic loss of two students, and the differences in conceptualizations of death and life in this transcultural community’s two different sets of cultural histories and formalized practices. Grieving and loss are explored as direct results of forced migrations and transnational economic survival, and trauma arises also from insensitivities in US culture. The teacher confesses to tensions of imbalance in learning exchanges between teachers and students, and explores the dimensions of urban teaching that are restorative and responsive, while also invisible to mainstream conceptualizations of the teaching profession and its required labor. The teacher examines regret and redemption in the fallibility of high-stakes contexts for learning, and narrates levels of school responsiveness required for trauma-informed care (TIC). Learning as healing is complexified within classroom communities as well as across professionals in a shared school setting, and the individualization of caring for trauma-impacted students is explored in different pedagogical and policy choices.
