Introduction
Welcome! I'm so glad you're here. Your commitment to showing up for your students through continued professional learning speaks volumes about your character as an educator. Your students are so lucky to have you.
It is important to note that the information and strategies in this book can be effectively implemented in any classroom and across all strands of student demographics. However, to create the deepest level of understanding and to facilitate the most significant impact on students, we'll need to align ourselves to a specific, targeted, and shared goal.
Therefore, let's establish our central purpose. Together, we'll explore the effects of student trauma, with a focused lens on recently arrived populations, and develop a comprehensive toolkit of strategies to mitigate the adverse experiences these students often face as they transition to a new country and school setting.
Naming Our Purpose
This book isn't exclusively about trauma; it's about restoring power. The distinction is critical. Focusing on the trauma or traumatic event roots us in the past. Restoration of power moves us forward.
Unfortunately, many students have or will endure adverse life experiences, and recently arrived students are particularly vulnerable to risk factors associated with exposure to trauma as they acclimate to a new country (Anderson, Hamilton, Moore, Loewen, & Frater-Mathieson, 2004; Gichiru, 2012; Hoot, 2011; Kreuzer, 2016). Trauma—whether it is caused by a singularly overwhelming event or the presence of persistent, ongoing aggravators—can be life- affecting. Significant stress has the remarkable capacity to restructure a young person's neural networks (Malhotra & Sahoo, 2017). This "rewiring" can, in turn, disrupt essential patterns of communication and functioning of the brain, with discouraging implications for both short- and long-term socioacademic outcomes (Bremner, 2006).
The physical aspect of transitioning into a new space and place can also spur or exacerbate stress. Change. Uncertainty. Feeling like an outsider. These are the kinds of words students often use to describe the overarching experience of arrival.
For many culturally and linguistically diverse newcomers, arriving can feel like an especially complex undertaking. In this context, entering a new school or classroom means situating oneself within a new context of language, culture, community, and shifting personal identities. Unfortunately, when viewed through a historical lens, the U.S. educational system hasn't done a great job of supporting newly arrived multilingual students through the processes of integration.
Recently arrived emergent multilinguals who are unsupported or insufficiently supported through socioacademic transition are at a higher risk for integration challenges. That is, they may have less agency in making decisions that affect their lives, less control over their education and social trajectories, and less confidence in their existing funds of knowledge (including cross-cultural and linguistic expertise). These elements, and others, speak to students' innate power. Transition—and to a greater degree, transition shock—can contribute to a sense of diminished power.
In serving our recent arrivers who may be affected by trauma, we must take these dynamics into account. We must recognize that trauma can threaten to drain a person's reservoirs of self-knowing and resilience—and that this may be compounded by the experience of recently arriving anywhere, including our schools and classrooms. We'll call this power interruption.
If a reservoir can be exhausted, it can also be filled. Research informs us that resilience can be taught, learned, and expanded (American Psychological Association, 2019). We can have an active role in empowering (or repowering) our students. This, we'll call power restoration.
Let's back up for a moment, though. When we talk about empowering our students, it's important to remember that the power isn't coming from us. It belongs to our students, and they've owned it all along.
Therefore, this is a book about restoring students' power. As educators, we're signing up to facilitate that process.
Who Are Recently Arrived Emergent Multilinguals?
Recently arrived emergent multilingual (RAEM) students are those who are new to our school districts (having been enrolled in U.S. schools for less than 12 months), who have come from countries outside the United States, and who have been identified as emergent bilinguals or multilinguals. The U.S. Department of Education clarifies:
While about 75 percent of the nation's nearly 5 million ELs [English learners] are U.S.-born, many are the children of immigrants or are immigrants themselves. Recently arrived ELs represent a growing yet often underserved subpopulation of ELs. As with all ELs, RA ELs are diverse in their levels of initial English proficiency, prior formal schooling, primary language literacy and age/grade on entry. (Linquanti & Cook, 2017, p. iv)
Centering in Student Identity
Trauma doesn't exist in a vacuum. Neither does resilience. When it comes to academic instruction, we talk about meeting our students where they are, and this also holds true in our efforts to ensure a trauma-informed learning experience.
Two individuals who are present in the same moment of adversity will process the event in separate and unique ways. Each person's brain interprets and responds to the information differently, and when exposed to the same stimuli, they each have separate capacities for restoring power (what some refer to as returning to the status quo). In short, each has a different shot at demonstrating resilience. Why is this so?
Trauma works in tandem with identity. We can't address one without acknowledging and embracing the other.
Throughout this book, trauma-informed practice might look like something you haven't seen before. Yes, we aim to restore power through trauma mitigation strategies, but the key is that we should never neglect, forget, or discount our learners' identities. From this point forward, we're centered in the idea of identity—specifically, the identity of every RAEM who walks through the doors of our classroom. Culture and language are critical aspects of this identity, and we'll focus on this space. But we need to do some work to get there.
So What's the Plan?
The first three chapters of this book lay the foundation for what is to come. They build background and forward momentum, so by the time we leap into Chapter 4, we'll have a clear understanding of
The four pillars of transition shock and how they affect learning.
How RAEMs see themselves and how the cultural aspects of their identities inform our work in mitigating transition shock.
How social-emotional learning (SEL) links to trauma-informed practice.
Then we move this knowledge out of a book and into your classroom, which leads us to the remaining chapters. We'll spend time bringing the elements of culture, transition shock, and SEL together to create learning spaces that are at once culturally responsive and trauma-diminishing.
In Chapters 4–7, new information is presented in a predictable pattern. Each chapter aligns to one of the essential pillars in approaching transition shock—connect, protect, respect, and redirect—and provides a structural backbone for our learning. Chapters begin with a deeper analysis of the target pillar before diving into a series of classroom-ready strategies aligned to the topic. Every strategy introduced also includes culturally responsive cues and suggested supports for emergent multilinguals. Finally, chapters close with several SEL recommendations that correspond to the target pillar of care.
In the process, I hope you discover that these seemingly separate pedagogies are inherently linked. In order to achieve the desired outcomes for our trauma-affected RAEMs, we must consider a new approach: one that capitalizes on students' unique cultural reference points and engages their cognitive and noncognitive growth in linguistically supportive ways.
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