Considering Trauma when Preparing a Syllabus

• Provide students with a detailed syllabus: A trauma informed syllabus goes beyond course schedule and assignment due dates. Include your standards and norms for behavior, classroom discourse. Consider the following questions (with a recognition that some of these questions may not have immediate answers and may need to be negotiated within your department or with other university resources):

• • Are you as a faculty member or employee respectful, encouraging and inquisitive. Are there clear and enforced expectations of civility in your classroom/working space?
  • Are there outlined expectations in your syllabus so you can turn around and go back to that to reinforce the outline?
  • Can a student have an option to choose who they’re going to work with on a project in case they’re paired with somebody who doesn’t feel safe?
  • Do you convey that you are approachable to students and have policies and office hours that make you easily accessible?
  • Are you masterful or even comfortable in addressing prejudicial or inflammatory comments that may come up in class. Are you uncomfortable with that and let them slide which may make other students uncomfortable or do you know how to negotiate such contexts and are you adept at de-escalation techniques?

• Discuss your syllabus in class and establish and maintain clear expectations but avoid rigidity including “no tolerance” policies. Be consistent and flexible within reason.

• • Acknowledge upfront that people can have varied experiences and that unforeseen events can happen. Give students clear instructions on how to communicate with you regarding emergencies, missed classes, late work, etc…
    
    • What can a student expect in terms of missing class and making up assignments or participatory activities?
    • Letting students know of any potentially triggering material that maybe in the class be it print, audio or video. There’s a lot of debate over trigger warnings in academic content (See: https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/trigger#:~:text=A%20trigger%20warning%20is%20a,clip%2C%20or%20piece%20of%20text.). An advangtage of using such warnings is that you don’t know how recent a trauma is for a student and where the student is in terms of processing it. Depending on the context it may be enough for a student to review the materials outside of the class ahead of time rather than giving them another assignment or excusing them from the assignment.This is a starting point. If you would like to have more discussions around this topic, please let me know.