Faculty Publications and Research

This chapter introduces Lessons from the Pandemic: Trauma-Informed Approaches to College, Crisis, Change, a collection of narratives about trauma-informed approaches to teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, this chapter posits that COVID-19 has been a wake-up call on crisis in higher education and describes two main lessons learned: (1) that college teaching has always encompassed crisis and (2) that college students and educators are resilient. Next, the authors describe the rationale, aims, and intended audience of the book, highlighting the importance of amplifying diverse voices and representing multiple methods of meaning-making on the road to resilience and healing. The next section summarizes the book’s contents and helps orient readers to format and style differences among chapters. Lastly, the chapter concludes with a call to action.

How do we as college educators describe our course syllabi: a contract, an instruction manual, a roadmap, an invitation, a collaboration, a waste of time? What do our syllabi reflect about our teaching style, our authority style, the type of relationship we hope to have with students? What do we mean when we direct students—literally and figurately—to “Read the syllabus”? What explicit and implicit meanings do our syllabi convey? Do we secretly—or not so secretly—want students to like us, respect us, fear us, revere us, understand us, need us, pity us, remember us, leave us alone?