Cultivating Trauma-Informed Spaces in Education to Support Educator Wellbeing

Educators regularly encounter stories of trauma and oppression from students and colleagues, all while navigating their own complex lived experiences. These ongoing exposures can deeply affect educator wellbeing, often leading to compassion fatigue, empathic distress, racial trauma, re-traumatization, and vicarious trauma. Applying Trauma-Informed Education pedagogical approaches and strategies reduces the risk of new trauma, re-traumatization, and vicarious trauma faced by students and educators alike, supporting a collective wellness strategy that benefits everyone working and learning in education. Drawing from a community-based, qualitative research project, this chapter offers insights, promising practices and evidence-informed strategies to help educators, employees, and educational leaders cultivate inclusive, responsive, and healing centered environments across micro, meso, and macro levels of the educational organization. Ultimately, this chapter is a call to action for educational organizations to proactively reduce trauma and re-traumatization and cultivate learning and working environments that prioritize learner and educator wellbeing.