ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how to work with the trauma of oppression in Social Justice courses. Examining how ongoing systems of oppression create daily harm for marginalized students and how higher educational spaces can be unsafe for some students, the chapter explores Trauma-Informed pedagogy that can help minimize the harm of teaching about oppression while also supporting students to reconnect to their innate and collective resilience. Drawing on politicized mindfulness and somatics in our pedagogies can help students deepen awareness of what they are experiencing, develop resources to support them to stay as regulated as possible, and help students learn some practices for healing. Since any given classroom also likely includes students with learned superiority, this chapter offers some strategies for meeting a range of students where they are in the learning process while hopefully minimizing the harm some students’ learning process can create for others. It also considers how internalized oppression can deepen the harm of wider oppression and provide barriers to healing. Mindfulness and somatic practices, when integrated with Anti-Oppression pedagogy, can offer ways to unlearn those limiting ideologies and open pathways to individual and collective healing and resilience.
Anti-Oppression pedagogy
Trauma
Oppression
The trauma of oppression
Healing
Embodied Healing
Somatics
Mindfulness
Internalized Oppression
