Protecting Whiteness through "Trauma-Informed" School Social Work

Background and Purpose:

Typically framed as a way of identifying and supporting students who have experienced trauma, trauma-informed approaches are growing in Canadian K-12 schools. Despite claims to create more equitable and supportive learning environments, often ignored are the ways in which these trauma frameworks are embedded with whiteness, including how trauma is defined and assessed, who is identified as a trauma victim, and the kind of supports that are provided. School social workers often play key decision-making roles in the lives of students who have experienced trauma, being situated between education and mental health; the school and outside agencies; and students, parents, teachers, and administrators. While school social workers often work in these influential trauma-informed roles, no known studies have explicitly focused on how whiteness might be embedded in or resisted by school social workers’ trauma-informed work.

Methods:

Drawn from a larger study on whiteness and anti-Black racism in the trauma-informed school movement, this critical qualitative research study asks: How does whiteness structure how Canadian school social workers recognize, understand, and respond to students’ expressions of trauma in K-12 schools?

Nineteen in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with school social workers from K-12 schools in Ontario, Canada, and were recruited through provincial social work associations. The purposive sample is predominantly female (84.2% female; 10.5% male; 5.3% Two-Spirit) and white (68.4% white; 10.5% South Asian; 5.2% Indigenous of Six Nations of the Grand River; 5.2% Maroon and Carib-Canadian; 5.2% African-Jamaican American; 5.2% East Asian/Chinese).

Data collection for this critical qualitative study began with reading aloud four ‘snapshot’ vignettes about possible experiences of trauma (two about episodic trauma and two about chronic racist trauma). The vignettes were deliberately vague, providing no social identifiers for the students. Semi-structured prompts were used to debrief the assumptions participants had about these vignettes. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed.

Data were analyzed through Lawless and Chen’s (2018) critical thematic analysis procedure guided by critical trauma and critical whiteness theories and organized in NVivo. Data triangulation, member-checking, peer debriefing, and self-reflexive memoing were utilized to increase trustworthiness.

Findings:

The findings suggest some school social workers protect white students, staff, and themselves; use trauma assessments that reinforce whitewashed definitions of trauma; and may contribute to the protection of white victimhood. The findings also demonstrate how school board policies and provincial austerity measures encourage ‘technologies of whiteness’ to proliferate in trauma-informed practices, including pathologizing trauma through a neuro/biological lens; use of time-limited, self-responsibilizing and manualized behavioral interventions; and liability-centered decision making. Additionally, participants demonstrated the use of ‘wise practices’ (rather than ‘best practices’) to resist these pressures and meet the needs of racialized students.

Conclusions and Implications:

These findings deepen the theorization of schools as sites of racialized trauma and the role of social workers in protecting whiteness. Implications include the adoption of different trauma assessment tools; alternative training of social workers; policy advocacy for programming and funding; and future research areas.