Skip to 0 minutes and 1 second It’s not unusual for schools and early childhood services to have to deal with complex, challenging, and persistent behaviours from some children and adolescents. This type of behaviour can affect the classroom experience for many young learners, as well as the personal and professional well-being of teachers, school leaders, and other educators. Here in Australia, at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, groundbreaking work is being done to address these concerns for when these behaviours are the result of complex childhood trauma.
Skip to 0 minutes and 33 seconds My focus area for many years has been trauma-aware education, and that’s helping schools and early childhood services understand the impact of complex trauma on developing bodies and brains and how this impact can influence the education experience for kids who’ve lived through complex trauma. Judith believes every educator in every school needs access to trauma-aware knowledge and skill development in order to effectively address the concerns experienced by trauma-impacted young learners. We know that there are about one in every 33 kids who are under the age of 18 have experienced this type of harm. I’ve spoken to many educators all over the world, and they’ve let me know that, in many countries, the prevalence is actually much higher.
Skip to 1 minute and 17 seconds So this is a growing concern, and it’s a concern that has global interest at the moment. Teachers will tell you this. There are children sitting in their classrooms who they know there’s something wrong, but they’re not necessarily connected to child protection. Trauma-aware education is a rapidly growing early intervention process that is having positive social impact and is changing the futures for some of our most vulnerable and victimised young learners. It is a shift away from some of our more traditional ways of managing behaviour that often just don’t work and end up with kids being kicked out of school or becoming disengaged from school.
Skip to 1 minute and 52 seconds It is a shift towards methods that are grounded in neuroscience that are far more likely to be successful. Just knowing about this stuff, just being able to work in a trauma-aware way is such a great investment. People often say to me they wish that they’d go to that University because it would have been very different for them and for a lot of the kids they taught. QUT offer online postgraduate pathways in trauma-aware education, which has become a more viable study option for educators who require flexible, at-their-own-pace professional development. Want to make a bigger difference in the classroom? Contact QUT for your professional development, and take your teaching to the next level.
