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Trauma Informed Pedagogy
80 Plays6 months ago
In Episode 5 of Season 2, we're talking about trauma-informed pedagogy.
In this episode we hear from...
• Sharim-Hannegan Martinez, who discussed her implication of trauma-informed pedagogy and her learnings around the significance of trusted, caring and loving relationships
• Youth expert Tatiana who talks about the role of spirituality in her healing and what it meant for her in dealing with her trauma
• Educator, counselor, and parent Candice Rose Valenzuela, who sits down for our Mic Check..1,2,3! round table segment alongside educators Kenjus T. Watson and Jewell Bachelor who puts in conversation the significance of trauma-informed pedagogy and healing centered practices.
Drawing From The Well is hosted by Tiffani Marie.
The podcast is co-produced by Tiffani Marie and Jon Reyes with music by Jansen V.
DFTW is supported by Community Responsive Education.
Continue the conversation at youthwellness.com
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
Drawing from the Well is a podcast series from the youth wellness movement. We are educators, researchers, healers, parents, and community members striving to repurpose schools to address the critical wellness gaps in our youth's development.
00:00:19
Speaker
Founded by Community Responsive Education.
00:00:26
Speaker
My name is Shereem Hannigan-Martinez similar to a lot of folks, I come to the work on trauma as a result of a lot of my own experiences as a young person.
00:00:39
Speaker
So i grew up on the San Diego-Tijuana border, which is highly militarized place and the militarization of that place for me it a young biracial Latina who was a part of a mixed status family, had an immigrant mother, meant that I was often privy to and witnessing a lot of the violence that is associated with living in a border town.
00:01:06
Speaker
And as a young person, i didn't know how to make sense of a lot of those experiences. And i only knew that I felt a profound sense of rage that manifested in a lot of what trauma folks would call maladaptive coping mechanisms.
00:01:28
Speaker
And I actively refute that language, but it was really all of these different sensibilities and ways of making sense of and dealing with a lot of the rage that I wasn't allowed to verbalize in my household.
00:01:47
Speaker
right So one of the major sayings, and I think a lot of Latino families, but definitely in my own, was this idea, que la ropa sucia se lava en casa. and you don't air your dirty laundry.
00:02:00
Speaker
But what that meant really was that you weren't allowed to talk about things like trauma, like shame, like the way that all of these experiences were making you feel.
00:02:12
Speaker
And so I found other ways to externalize what I wasn't allowed to give words to. and it wasn't until many, many years later when I ended up working at a high school in Oakland that I felt like I saw all of these survival strategies I had engaged in.
00:02:39
Speaker
present in the lives of the young people that I was trying to work with. And I say that it was sort of etched in the desks, on their bodies, on the walls of our classroom, that it was sort of present all of the time.
00:02:54
Speaker
And it was really that moment when I saw these survival strategies mirrored back to me. that I became really interested in the phenomenon of trauma and really understanding what it was that had happened to me, what it was that had happened to my family, to my community, to so many people that I loved, and that was also happening to the children that I was working with.
00:03:17
Speaker
So the first thing that happened, I think, when I dove into the research on trauma, and this was, you know, lot of our mentors and folks, they were barely starting to talk about trauma. It was really new. And I was super young still, and I was reading all the same things that they were reading. And the first thing that happened when I was reading it was this sort of groundbreaking life shattering epiphany, right? Like I remember reading it and just crying like, oh, this is why i do this. This is why I say this. This is why i navigate my relationships this way. This is why I'm sick all of the time. And it was just epiphany after epiphany as I was reading, seeing myself in this literature that actually isn't even written for folks of color and still feeling like it was the first time that I felt really seen.
00:04:09
Speaker
and not judged even by myself. And so before I could even think about what it meant for this work to be applied in my own teaching, for this work to be applied with young people, it was really making sense of why does this matter for me?
00:04:25
Speaker
Why does this matter in my day-to-day practices? Why does this matter in terms of how I feel about myself, how I engage with other people that I love? And how do i start to practice these things?
00:04:41
Speaker
before trying to teach them. How do I really learn them? How do really learn to sit in my own suffering? How do I learn to listen to my body to make sense of my own feelings before I try to create what Francis Weller would call containers for them in my classroom?
00:05:01
Speaker
And I think a lot of folks hear about trauma and they hear the data on youth trauma and it is as alarming, actually more alarming than folks are hearing and there's this urgency to address it.
00:05:17
Speaker
And I resonate with that urgency. But I think in doing so, folks jump to worrying about other people's trauma before realizing one how their own trauma lives in their body, what responses they have developed to make sense of their own trauma.
00:05:35
Speaker
Menachem talks about it as trauma becomes a culture, and Stacey Haynes talks about it as we develop survival shapes. And then we start to believe that these survival shapes are the core of our identity. And so, so many of our identities, the identities that we have constructed are a response to the traumatic conditions and experiences we've had to navigate.
00:05:57
Speaker
And I think until we have started to make sense of those, that engaging in trauma work often means that we are not only complicit, but that we are often re-traumatizing the young people that we claim we want to serve.
00:06:13
Speaker
you
00:06:21
Speaker
What's up y'all and welcome to Drawing From the Well. I'm your host, Tiffany Marie. You just heard from my colleague and critical educator, Shereem Hannigan Martinez, who discussed her implementation of trauma-informed pedagogy and her learnings around the significance of trusted and caring and loving relationships. Next, you hear from youth expert Tatiana, who talks about the role of spirituality in her healing and what it meant for her in dealing with her trauma. And finally, on our Mic Check 1-2-3 segment, you hear from educator, counselor, parent and friend, Candice Rose Valenzuela, who puts in conversation the significance of trauma-informed pedagogy and healing-centered practices. There's been some controversy around it, and Candice helps us to make sense of and develop new ideas and theories around differentiating the two terms, but also just better understanding the role, the history, and the outcome.
00:07:40
Speaker
I feel like H2O really opened me to like my spirituality. like When we would meditate and you would do things like burn sage occasionally or when we would do yazuya and just small ceremonies.
00:07:55
Speaker
At first they were like nothing to me, but then like as I started like really feeling them, or I remember one time we were meditating in H1 and you were like, just see how far you can listen.
00:08:08
Speaker
And I was sitting by the window and I felt like I could hear the kids like down the block at Denman. And I was just thinking about like how close minded I've been to like really trying to grasp like all the things around me or like how I've always just been directed into like one way of thinking.
00:08:26
Speaker
But like sitting there and like meditating and really just like hearing everything kind of like woke me up. From there on, like to this I have an altar with like my brother and crystals and like every morning I'll take like 10 minutes to sit there and like meditate with them and like process. I feel like it's really calling me like not as tense.
00:08:47
Speaker
I don't want to just like explode on everybody. feel like I'm more open to like trying to understand what somebody is going through and like sitting there in discomfort or like if I'm having a hard day how can I make my day better for myself?
00:09:02
Speaker
What do I need to confront in order for my day to be better? feel like H2O really exposed me to that. Especially when we would have conversations and I'd be like, no, I'm okay.
00:09:14
Speaker
But then like I'll end up talking about It's like a release that I've been like taught to just keep inside me and like through a show off kind of released it while also like helping other people release what they're going through.
00:09:29
Speaker
Being exposed to spirituality helped me on my sacred journey.
00:09:52
Speaker
All right. Mic check, mic check. One, two, three with Kendis Jewel and Tiffany Marie. Today we're wrapping it up with the one and only Candice Rose Valenzuela. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you. How are you feeling, Candice?
00:10:07
Speaker
I am hanging in there. Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing okay. I feel it. Appreciate that honesty. We're so grateful to have you with us today, and we're hoping that you can tell us a little bit about yourself as we get started.
00:10:23
Speaker
Yeah. Thank you for having me. I'm appreciating being here and being invited. i was born and raised in Watts, California, which is in Southern California. Grew up there working class and ah part of a small Blacksican community. But back then I didn't know it was a community. I thought it was just me.
00:10:43
Speaker
Later on, i found out there's a whole crew of us Blacksicans. And then in my adult life, I've you know worked as a teacher. facilitator at different multiple intersections of healing education and justice won't list all of that resume stuff but that's my career and then as a human I'm just like really connected to nature and that's a lot of what guides my thinking my presence how I show up in the world feel like the plants
00:11:16
Speaker
and the earth are my biggest teachers. And besides that, I just try to have fun and try to enjoy life as I can within these confining structures that we live in. So, and not define myself by that. So I'm silly. i like to play. i like to, i actually really enjoy hanging out with my six-year-old. I feel like they bring out the best parts of me, the fun, the resilience, the quirkiness,
00:11:45
Speaker
And I think to sum it all up, I really just identify as like a quirky black girl. Nice. That's me. I love that. So we heard a little bit about nature and your child. Can you tell us a little bit more about like what do your days look like?
00:12:03
Speaker
Like what do you spend the majority of your time doing? Yeah, it's really flexible right now. i like it that way. It's not always easy, but it's how I function best. So my life is kind of split up into about three separate pieces. Most important is just being a parent and being a human, just trying to stay a human as much as I can, raise a person who also can be a human, that makes sense.
00:12:34
Speaker
Raising a sensitive, brilliant, wise, energetic child. and trying to keep up with them. And then the second, third is my newest venture right now, which is interning and working to become a licensed therapist.
00:12:51
Speaker
So i see clients in the evenings and I work right now exclusively with queer and trans people. And it's very, very rewarding and a lot of growing edges, but it's awesome. I wouldn't want to be doing anything else. I'm learning in the ways I want to learn.
00:13:08
Speaker
requires me to show up as my best self as I can in those moments. And then the final third is my paid work, which is, I think, kind of what brings us here, where I work as a trauma-informed facilitator.
00:13:23
Speaker
But sometimes I joke that I'm kind of like the Olivia Pope in schools, if you watch Scandal, because often it's like a school's going through some kind of crisis or trauma that they are having hard time figuring out. And they're like, somebody help us.
00:13:38
Speaker
and Somehow my name comes up through the networks and then i come in and I'm like, you know, I'm not I can't individually handle it, you know, like Olivia Pope would. But often I'm like, can be the catalyst to people having different kinds of conversations, holding each other accountable in different ways and bringing in different perspectives. A lot of times, you know, I believe that communities always have the resources that they need.
00:14:04
Speaker
to get through something, but you're limited by your own scope and capacity at that moment. So sometimes it's helpful to have somebody say, hey, did you notice that thing over there? And just help people see it from different perspectives and open up to new possibilities.
00:14:19
Speaker
Possibilities that were there already, but they had a hard time seeing. So that's why sometimes it's hard to describe my work. I'll call it trauma-informed, culturally responsive, all these things. But it's really just getting into the nitty gritty with people often.
00:14:34
Speaker
And it's also like using my therapist skills of like, what are you feeling? How's that showing up for you? And often that's the thing that adults want to avoid. But it's usually, in my opinion, was holding up the work the most because you have all these great ideas, but you can't actualize them because you're avoiding the knowledge that's in your own body.
00:14:54
Speaker
a
00:14:57
Speaker
It sounds like you have pretty extensive experience doing this, especially with the label of the Olivia Pope of trauma-informed work. Hopefully you weren't in there doing all other things that Olivia Pope was ah doing.
00:15:11
Speaker
not going to talk about that. I know Candace wasn't doing that. I'm just saying. we Maybe I need to qualify that as an ethical Olivia. Yeah, you got to put an asterisk next to it. Forget about that. Forget about the unethical things you did. She was doing a lot of stuff after hours too. extremely inappropriate. You know, I think she always comes to mind because my favorite snack is popcorn and wine.
00:15:40
Speaker
So we share a favorite snack. Mm-hmm. She made that dope. I remember that. I felt very uncool because I don't drink wine and I definitely don't have it with popcorn at the end of the day with Versace or whatever else she had I can't afford none of that, but I do feel very resourced when I have on a really nice like coat or wrap or poncho i think it might just be more the aesthetics and then that aspect of being called in to like that sorry something to fix that people feel is unfixable and i don't actually fix anything but i you know help them and it's like all hands on deck kind of and it's hard to like qualify that and everything's so like
00:16:25
Speaker
siloed buckets in our society and i'm like i don't even think like that so I just kind of pick the current buzzword and say alright you know but I gotta pick a new one because scandal's getting old and people are starting to forget who Olivia Paul was so I need a new one anyway so Shonda Rhimes got like four new shows out. I need to hope if you guys have recommendations.
00:16:48
Speaker
Don't do Bridgerton. well that Was that what the show's called? bridge Bridgerton? What would be that? That's some antebellum stuff right there. So Candace, were there any pivotal moments that brought you to this particular work?
00:17:02
Speaker
Yeah, too many to name, but the short answer is my own trauma, you know, being a deeply traumatized person and not having, you know, when I was growing up in the late 90s, there was no language about that. You know, when I was in school, it was just like you got good grades or you were a dropout. There wasn't a whole lot in between.
00:17:24
Speaker
And so the first thing for me was between those two options, I was doing everything that I possibly could to fit into that narrow line of, you know, the achiever.
00:17:38
Speaker
And I could do it because I have, you know, my brain can somewhat grasp onto, you know, the linear thinking that people call education. But it had a big cost on my body and I could only like repress that for so long.
00:17:51
Speaker
And I think if we had the structures in place right now, maybe I would have been identified for more support. But back then, i was really overlooked because it was like, basically, you know, I went to Lock High, which doesn't even exist anymore. It's a charter now, you know, that whole journey there. But I went to Lock High and at that time it was ranked as the like third most dangerous school in all of California. Right. So was like...
00:18:18
Speaker
Growing up in a place that's like renowned for that kind of stuff. And there wasn't a whole lot of education going on in high school. And so i got good grades because I wasn't fighting in class and cussing out teachers.
00:18:32
Speaker
So it was like literally enough. to just be quiet yeah and like sliped through the cracks and then like know how to read every now and then. That was like enough for people to say, oh, great, you know, that's excellence. And so those experiences motivated me to want to work in community and be a part of creating something different. And that brought me back to the classroom.
00:18:57
Speaker
And first off, I always knew that I wanted a different experience from my young people. And there's a lot of visibility to young people who resist in ways that are visible, right, and loud.
00:19:11
Speaker
And I think that's important. But having my particular experience, I had a commitment to also not ignore the quiet kids. Yeah. and not just bypass people because they could, you know, the way I understand it through a trauma lens is like, what's your trauma response?
00:19:27
Speaker
So the people who fight and flee, we understand that we might need to do something about them. There's either punitive responses or people who try to address what's ailing the child, right? But if your trauma response is fawn or freeze, then you're going to be really good at fading into the background because you're frozen.
00:19:50
Speaker
In our society that has so much weight on compliance, right? Compliance and respectability. you're you know a black kid in the hood, you get the star of approval. Great. You know how to do the thing that we think is important for you to survive in society, which is be compliant.
00:20:07
Speaker
But in my case, it was like be frozen, be deeply traumatized in this particular way. So that brought me to the classroom. That's like stage one. But stage two is like once I got into the classroom, I quickly recognized that my freeze and fawn response wasn't going to help me no more.
00:20:24
Speaker
That was not going help me. and In fact, I was going to get ate up. And if I wanted to be able to have the impact that meant so much to me, i had the choice either to quit teaching or to investigate further.
00:20:40
Speaker
quitting wasn't an option because it just meant so much to me. I think at that point in my trauma journey, I was really trying to find my worth as a human being. And we don't talk about that a lot. lot of people that get into activism, teaching or whatever, ay you know, it's for the right reason. And also, right, I'm not discounting that it's invalid if we do it for ourselves. I think it's both and because everything's interconnected. But also many of us are trying to find our sense of worth.
00:21:07
Speaker
In a world that's daily erasing that, right, and denigrating that. So I was on this personal journey of like, you know, why am I on this planet? How can I make this suffering make sense?
00:21:20
Speaker
For me, that means one to have this impact. But then there was a monkey wrench there. Like being in the classroom really showed me my wounding because I couldn't hide anymore. Yeah, i couldn't hide from those kids. Come on.
00:21:32
Speaker
Right? And so that, what I would say, started my lifelong trauma research. I don't claim or aim to ever get PhD. It's just, you know, I respect your journey.
00:21:45
Speaker
And in my body, like, I can't do it. Like, I have ongoing PTSD that goes in and out of remission, like a lot of us do. And for me, those certain kind of academic spaces just...
00:21:56
Speaker
really mess with me. But I feel like if we qualify people's work for what they actually do, i give myself an honorary doctorate in trauma research through my own self-work. That started when I was like, you know, first just trying to survive my own freaking childhood.
00:22:15
Speaker
And then really starting in a serious way when i was in the classroom, I'd say I was around I think I was like 24, like so young, you know, but I was in that bind. I was actually the first time that I actually truly felt suicidal because it was so difficult to hold. And so in making that choice to choose life, it was like that also means I got to do this work.
00:22:39
Speaker
Wow. That was like the internal component. And then I didn't start working in this sort of training capacity that you see now until I had already been teaching for like eight years or something. And I had been engaged in that personal process for that long.
00:22:58
Speaker
before I then went back to school for my first master's in psychology. I knew that I had ah the embodiment of the work at that point. Like I was already clear. i wanted language to talk about it with other people and I wanted space to explore that.
00:23:13
Speaker
So in that first master's was a non-clinical degree and I spent ah just that whole two years reading literature, comparing it to my own experiences, building my own lexicon to talk about it in a way that could reach beyond just like myself and the young people that I served. And then that's when I really started training. And it happened really organically. I'm not somebody who ever went on Instagram. Like I'm not that kind of, i was getting called to do the work. People are like, oh, you know that T, or people would observe my classroom. By the time I was into my teaching, i was getting observed a lot. Again, we didn't even have the language even then for trauma informed.
00:23:51
Speaker
I was like at the early part of it. I was just doing that self-work and that language was like not widely. There's a lot of trauma literature in the psychology realm, but in education, we weren't talking about it the way we are now.
00:24:05
Speaker
So I was like right at that cusp. And then people would come to my classroom and say like kind of low key rude stuff. Like, and what are you doing to engage the children? Like these like East Oakland children, are you drugging them? Which is kind of disrespectful when you think about it.
00:24:21
Speaker
People would regularly make those kind of comments like. Very disrespectful. Yeah. Let's talk about your like lens of the children. You know, it was their disrespectful way of saying how remarkable it was. And.
00:24:34
Speaker
For me, the key to that was actually me using trauma-informed practices before we had that language, if that makes sense. Right. And that was my methodology for how I was doing culturally responsive was through the trauma lens. We was doing mindfulness. We were doing all of that before it became a big you know industry.
00:24:54
Speaker
And then I went to school and then started allowing myself to have the confidence to actually teach other people. And then from that, I just kept getting called over and over to do the work.
00:25:06
Speaker
So then that's been about six years of me in this like ethical Olivia Pope-ish. um capacity, but I really waited until I felt like I had that inner confidence.
00:25:20
Speaker
I learned a lot from, you know, jumping into a classroom at, you know, 23 with no skills, never again. So I wait until I feel like I have the embodiment of something before I start teaching and training others.
00:25:35
Speaker
Hmm. What I love about what you're sharing with us is we're getting a real-time story of how you went from savior self-recovery.
00:25:47
Speaker
And so many of us go into the classroom as saviors because of our own trauma and unanswered, unresolved traumas. But what I love about how you're sharing your story, and I do believe that many of us experience this as well, is that we go into this self-recovery process.
00:26:06
Speaker
and you become an advocate versus a savior through that. Yeah, it was really kind of so powerful to hear that history and the way that you're framing your journey.
00:26:17
Speaker
And you mentioned something about the sort of honorary doctorate that you give yourself based on the work that you've done. and for me, I'm always like, as we're imagining something outside of this, I'm thinking about what you said earlier about sort of freeze responses.
00:26:35
Speaker
Freeze and fawning being those of us who get passed through. i have experience of that. myself and being passed through, right? And that being seen as, you know, you get the gold star, gold stamp of approval versus the flee or flight response.
00:26:48
Speaker
And it's like reminding me, it's coming up on my mind and heart around the ways that the sort of medical and psychological industrial complex of the plantation defined or described different practices of those of us when our ancestors who were enslaved are under conditions of capture.
00:27:05
Speaker
So like the mental illness part, one of the first frames is drapetomania, the craziness of wanting to run away, flying. And then the other part is stolidity, which is a term I saw in a plantation management book.
00:27:19
Speaker
They said the African people, unlike other people, unlike indigenous to Turtle Island folks or others, were well suited for enslavement and in fact may not respond as effectively to overt punishment because we had a penchant for stolidity.
00:27:35
Speaker
If you look it up, I swear to God, if you look this up on Google, for folks who want to right now, you can type in Stalidity, S-T-A-L-I-D-I-T-Y, and you're going to see a cartoon image of a Black woman.
00:27:48
Speaker
It literally means that you are without emotion, without resolve, when you should be, when there should be a response. And so like juxtaposing that and like thinking about those who get moved through, I'm hearing you say that essentially those of us who make it into these spaces where we become educators, where we get the stamps of approval, the certifications, whether that's pre to PhD, masters, et cetera, we have a lot of stolidity that is read as important.
00:28:17
Speaker
And I guess I'm wondering, you know, for someone who's trying to be on my own healing journey, yeah but also in response to trauma, not just healing, but engaging the trauma. Can't skip steps, right? yeah What comes up, I guess, for you in response to us educators who are trying to release, work through the stolidity that we have is become our coping mechanism and our culture, and then go into these other spaces of the work that you are helping us understand in such a deep way, profound way, the pedagogy part that comes.
00:28:47
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:28:49
Speaker
Before I answer, I just want say like, it's really hard to sit still right now. It was like Tiff asked us not to move around a lot, but my whole, everything started rushing. Like all the energy started coming and coming up when you were naming that question.
00:29:05
Speaker
I feel like my ancestors heard that. And I feel like it's part of what and just like as a human and a spirit, that's my work, you know, is like this unpacking. And I didn't have that term still at a T, so I thank you for that. Like, i feel like that is very much part of the generational wound that I'm healing in my line.
00:29:25
Speaker
And then what I offer in when I'm working with communities or clients. So when you ask that question, I think about the polyvagal ladder. Have you all seen that?
00:29:37
Speaker
Mm-mm. So it's a newer piece of research around trauma that comes from, I think his name is Stephen Porges. And it's a theory, you know, like anything, it can be debunked.
00:29:49
Speaker
But right now it's one of the newer theories around the nervous system. And he puts these responses on a ladder. So it's like fight, fight, freeze and fun. Right. But it's actually really for me, very instructive around how to heal.
00:30:05
Speaker
This is some of the recent learning I've had around trauma. So at the top of the ladder is social and engaged. Right. That's the. I'm going to mess it up. So if I get this wrong, please do your own Google search people.
00:30:17
Speaker
But I think it's the parasympathetic, right? You might say sort of where we're at right now, right? You're calm enough. It's not like pure calm, but your system is in a state of like feeling okay, feeling safe, feeling connected.
00:30:32
Speaker
And it's sort of like our optimal state, right? We can engage, we can think, we can love, we can laugh. It's a fluid state. It's not like you're just feeling good. It's a fluidity where you can engage some level of stress, but he handle it and like move on. Right. It's the day to day.
00:30:49
Speaker
If you're lucky enough to not live in a severely traumatized body. That's stuck in one of the other responses like where we kind of want to be as humans. Right now, if there's a threat, is it OK that I give you this little explainer? Because i this is how I understand.
00:31:06
Speaker
and So if there's some threat, severe threat to like bodily community violence. psychological emotional harm right the first response in the healthy body according to this theory is actually fight or flight it's actually the healthy one right you're gonna assess all right what do i need to do here if it's easily managed we don't go there we deal with it as a group but if it's bigger than that okay what do we need to do we need to run We can't fight it off. It's a tiger, whatever. We need to run. Right.
00:31:37
Speaker
So that's why our nervous systems are all interconnected. You get the homies. Let's go. kiley And I love all the jokes about black people in horror movies because I feel like it's actually an indication of our collectivity, you know, and our connection and our nervous system. What are you doing? Right.
00:31:53
Speaker
Right. Absolutely. um But if you assess that the threat is actually meetable, you fight and hopefully you successfully fight it off. So that's actually the first line of defense in a healthy body.
00:32:04
Speaker
Now, this is where it gets tricky. Let's say, you know, your homies are like elderly people and, you know, places where you don't have the capacity to fight off whatever the threat is, or maybe you're impacted, right? You can't run and you also can't fight. And that threat is not going anywhere.
00:32:23
Speaker
We have a backup generator system, which is the freeze and the fawn. Right. right where you fawn is i'm going to appease you
00:32:33
Speaker
pleasers yeah i'm faking it i'm take care of you i can't get away from this so maybe if i take care of the threat right and soothe the threat They'll settle down.
00:32:45
Speaker
Right. You're connecting it. And then we'll be all right. Right. And again, all of these responses are healthy in a short time span. Our bodies are not built to just live in these. They're not meant to be there forever, but they're meant to take care of us when we need it. Right.
00:33:01
Speaker
And so you soothe the threat. OK, maybe if we distract the tiger over here or whatever. Right. That doesn't work. We're going to all play dead. Right. Right. But again, it's supposed to be short term.
00:33:13
Speaker
Hopefully the tiger or whatever it is goes away. Y'all collect as a community. And this is a lot of the knowledge we've lost from our indigeneity is then you recover together. There has to be a somatic and a physical response to let go of all that trauma energy where you weep and you cry and you wail and you release the things you had to hold on. So if you're getting to freeze and fall. Oh, my gosh. You had to hold on to your fight and freeze.
00:33:36
Speaker
Your body ate that and it can't eat that and hold that forever and be well. And so that's why indigenous communities have these weeping and wailing ceremonies. You see that in so many places or like when the warriors came back from war. This is like all the twisted stuff we have in colonialism.
00:33:54
Speaker
You don't just bring people back from war. Yeah, they're living in trauma, fight or flight. killing people, watching these things. If you just bring that back to your community with no separation, you're bringing the sickness to your community, right?
00:34:07
Speaker
and So all the indigenous people a ceremony to bring the warriors back. They were quarantined sequestered. They weren't just brought back. You engage in this deep thing. We need to support you to heal and release that and reconnect to the energy of earth and that parasympathetic and then we bring it back to community right as you're tracking that you're seeing how much we've lost we don't have connection through the oppressive system and so when we're talking about trauma in this context
00:34:38
Speaker
We are talking about chronic right and generational experiences of not having been able to release that survival energy that was absorbed.
00:34:52
Speaker
And then that becoming a culture. And this is like Resma Manikin. That's his specialty. He talks about how that works. becomes culture. So that's where we teach our, you know, we hit our kids. We teach our kids that silence is the way as discipline. Actually, that's not discipline.
00:35:11
Speaker
You're literally taking your stolidity response and saying, you got to do it too to live in this box. And so going back to the original question, i feel like in terms of healing it, what I've experienced in my body, right?
00:35:29
Speaker
Number one, i was born in a family, of very solid, it if that would be, don't know if that's the correct, like... verb form, Black people and Indigenous people, right, who trained me culturally to walk in these ways.
00:35:44
Speaker
As a young person, you're experiencing those systems also firsthand. It's not just generational. I was in foster care. going to save y'all all of it, but my childhood was deeply fractured.
00:35:55
Speaker
And so then i had to use those mechanisms at a really young age. My mom died when I was five years old. I learned to not feel at five.
00:36:07
Speaker
I was frozen and it was nothing I could ever get away from. right it was a state that my body learned to live in. And I praise it and I thank it because it kept me here.
00:36:19
Speaker
Perhaps if I didn't have that response, wouldn't be here today, right? And it is not a state of wellness, right? To be trapped in that for life. So on my healing journey, a huge part of that for me is actually reclaiming my fight and my flight because that's what I had to skip.
00:36:39
Speaker
And that's what I had to eat all in my life. And so Tiffany seeing this in action, right? And sometimes I don't have the capacity to like break down the research and why I know this is the right thing to do, even when it's making everybody really uncomfortable.
00:36:55
Speaker
But if I go somewhere and it doesn't feel good to my nervous system and I'm not being humanized in that space, ah leave. And for me, it's a huge reclamation. It sounds simple, but it's not.
00:37:09
Speaker
For Black people that have been raised in this validity and then had to reinforce it and live it year after year and day after day. you Sometimes, are even when I work with my clients, sometimes we don't actually realize that we have the option to leave because that's the generational memory, right? can just We couldn't just leave the plantation. You couldn't just leave, right?
00:37:30
Speaker
So you did what you could to further the next generation. so and that's how I also kind of, for me, repay my ancestors. It's like, if there are places where I can actually leave and they didn't get to leave, I'm out.
00:37:44
Speaker
That's why I don't run my work the way other people do. I don't follow. Often I feel like in this work, there's like false urgency. We got to do it all right now. Like we got to strike while the iron is hot.
00:37:55
Speaker
Who's iron? What are you talking about? You know? I always want us to strike irons. in Right. What we talk about, what iron? Get to it. You know, I'm listening to my body, right?
00:38:09
Speaker
I'm going at the speed of my nervous system's ability to regulate. And that doesn't discount that sometimes structurally that's not possible, right? We human, I'm not immune from a system.
00:38:20
Speaker
Those times happen like the pandemic. I can't get away from it, right? But learning the attunement and the awareness, right, to understand when I can walk away, though, not as an automatic response, as a choice.
00:38:36
Speaker
And then utilizing it is very reparative to me, especially when it's culturally unacceptable. So give you some examples. I'm in graduate classes right now. Again, this is my second master's so I can license because did the non-clinical first. So now if I want to be a therapist, I got to do this other degree.
00:38:53
Speaker
So I'm doing that. And as soon as I'm in the graduate environment, immediately I feel the social pressure around respectability, being nice, being you know, avoiding conflict. I'm like, oh, Lord, what are we going do with these therapists that are afraid of conflict?
00:39:12
Speaker
Right? And so I just break all those rules. Not like spitefully, but just commit to being myself. So I'm in a classroom. This has happened multiple times.
00:39:24
Speaker
Teachers not hearing me, they're erasing my experience from the classroom. They're tokenizing black people for the teaching of everyone else in the classroom. I'll give them one shot. I'll be like, I don't want to name that this is happening, yada, yada.
00:39:38
Speaker
If they're able to hear that, cool, we engage. But so many times I've been gaslit and I'm like, my nervous system is rushing. My ancestors are screaming.
00:39:50
Speaker
I get up and walk out. It makes people very uncomfortable. But that's their stuff. That ain't mine, right? Because it's like I have to it's my life. Like that's how I feel sometimes. Like it's life or death for me. That's how it feels in my body. yeah I'm not overusing my fawn responses because I've used them so long and so much that when I over and i fall back into that pit, it's unlivable for me.
00:40:19
Speaker
I won't list it for you, but it's deep layers of symptoms that I experience that I think a lot of black people, especially, you know, assigned female at birth people probably normalize.
00:40:31
Speaker
I've seen that, you know, and the only way I've been able to unlock that energy and feel more alive and get out of that solidity is to actually learn from our more um reckless cousins and just walk away, fight back.
00:40:46
Speaker
Tell people to fuck off. And for people like me, it's really important, I think, to not get into educating people as well when you're setting a boundary, because people will be like, bye-bye and all this extra stuff. And then what happens is if I got I'm in a state of duress. I'm in a state of stress. My body is not okay.
00:41:09
Speaker
Right. And it's so plain to me when I'm in grad school or like just these like white spaces that, for example, you know, we all talk about white tears. When the white girls cry, everything stops to take care of them.
00:41:22
Speaker
When I cry, educate me. Fuck you. That is so dishumanizing. ah In my pain, right? And that's the other part of the salinity, Kendra.
00:41:33
Speaker
One is that like we can embody the flat affect, but often we don't. People project that onto us. I can be showing all the affect all day. You're refusing to see it. You're refusing to see the emotional responses that my body is showing because it would ask you to relate to me differently and stop exploiting Right.
00:41:53
Speaker
So that's the other part. I feel like whoever wrote that, they'd be lying. We do show emotion. Right. Come on. You know? And you don't want to see it because it would disrupt your exploitation.
00:42:05
Speaker
And so, you know, and so when I see that and I'm like, I'm crying, I'm upset and you keep asking me questions, either I'm walk away if you don't let me walk away, you're going to get this 500 years of ass whooping that I've been holding on Come on.
00:42:22
Speaker
In whatever way that I can and I don't think you want to see that because I don't want to see that. It scares Yeah. Listen, I don't know if this was a podcast or a therapy session. Sorry, that's... I am fully in it. No, you're teaching me that my triggers saved my life.
00:42:43
Speaker
yeah Do you know how much shame... i mean, I'm sure you do. You do this work. And I'm like, how much shame that releases and how much shame that could release from so many...
00:42:54
Speaker
Other Black, queer, femi, female gender. Oh my God. All of these things. I'm like, wow, my triggers saved me. How I responded to things is why I'm still here.
00:43:07
Speaker
But it doesn't have to be the way that I live my full life.
00:43:12
Speaker
You're taking clients.
00:43:16
Speaker
it Y'all can handle that via email. So you raise a lot of intense points, Candice, and that segment just now was its own episode.
00:43:27
Speaker
don't know. Part of what came up for me way earlier was this idea of schooled people. I'm not going to educated, but schooled people. And Kendra and I have argued this for a while, is that those who we consider, and and I'm not going to talk about white folks because there's but extensive research on how wounded white people are.
00:43:49
Speaker
Maybe not enough, but we've read enough and there's been enough for me. I don't want to talk about that right There's enough of everything with white. i There we go. I'm like like, we have enough of it. I feel like there's enough explaining away of white people's issues. What was fascinating to me, which I don't think we engage enough,
00:44:08
Speaker
in this capitalist society that uses schools, particularly for social reproduction. We don't talk about the harm of folk of color. A lot of what people talk about in doing this work is let's just infiltrate the schools with more folk of color, more Black people. And don't think we're doing enough to engage. If you have been successful,
00:44:28
Speaker
according to this society standards, then you are some of the most harmed people. You've had to not protest. You've had to not, to your words, respond to in the probably the most healthy ways. And the people that we in classrooms particularly see as the most disruptive are often not given the credit that they deserve as some of the most healthy young people.
00:44:50
Speaker
So it's these folks who have endured the most, who have been silent about it the longest, who are the most wounded, then are supposed to be the ones who go back into classrooms and help young people to access their healing and wellness. And so i appreciate you bringing that up.
00:45:05
Speaker
I think that circles back to this idea of trauma-informed anything, but particularly pedagogy. And a lot of times how we see it used is for children.
00:45:15
Speaker
It's like, well, we're going to use this for children. exactly And I've been blessed enough to sit in some of your workshops and that's not how you engage it solely.
00:45:27
Speaker
It's more of a reflexive process. It's more fluid. Can you talk a little bit about what's the point of this and what happens? like What is trauma-informed pedagogy?
00:45:38
Speaker
What's its purpose? And what do you envision happens when we actually engage it effectively? I just want to say, like i I couldn't agree with you more. And like how you outlined, you know, schooled people and framing them.
00:45:52
Speaker
I very much see it that way through a trauma lens that actually are young people who are resisting. When I'm working with teachers, I try to take time in every single session. You've probably seen this.
00:46:04
Speaker
where I'm celebrating and uplifting youth resistance. And I'm making it the adult's problem to deal with what comes up for them when youth resist them.
00:46:15
Speaker
Like, what's going on with you? Not only is this appropriate to the oppression that they're facing, it's developmentally necessary. yeah it is literally defined in the stages of human development.
00:46:28
Speaker
Wow. Right. And it's over defined in white psychology. But mean, Bill, the idea of individuation, of finding out who you are through exploration. Right.
00:46:39
Speaker
And even within a collective society that has and important place. But somehow our young people are supposed to, again, just skip that, come to class, sit down and shut the hell up. And that's seen as success.
00:46:51
Speaker
That is an adult trauma response. For me, in the most basic way, trauma informed means living my life, doing my work, and engaging with the world and others in my work as traumatized people who are healing from legacies of colonial trauma.
00:47:16
Speaker
So that's not necessarily what you're going to see books. but that's what it means to me. And that's why I do the work that I do. Just asking me about my story highlighted, I think, all of the key features in terms of how I see it and why I think it's important.
00:47:33
Speaker
From that perspective, when I hold my own story, my own truth, there's no walking away from it. There's no getting around it. And I don't even think we can actually define or engage with healing without a deep recognition of trauma and its legacy in our lives and in our world, and in all of our institutions.
00:47:53
Speaker
For me, the trauma lens changes everything. So I'm on Facebook and I'm tagged in this post and I check it out. I go click the link. It's this article that Candace has put out and I'm reading it and I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. i mean Oh, snap. I come across this paragraph and it was kind of like the 90s where like,
00:48:19
Speaker
Ice Cube put out a piece and then another rapper would come back. You better check yourself before you wreck yourself. Nah, being like no Vaseline or something. was like, wait a minute.
00:48:29
Speaker
What is going on? And then I go back to the post in like 10 minutes and it's like, what, like 60 comments or something on there. And it's, you know, folks is going back and forth.
00:48:40
Speaker
I was like, did Candice just do what I thought she did?
00:48:46
Speaker
Did she just pull in conversation with some of the best? And so I want you to talk about, i want you to about this piece that you put out that I don't think it's that bad, but why I was gasping is that I think what you did in terms of creating critical discourse, it just doesn't happen in our work.
00:49:04
Speaker
I think folks are like, they disagree. doesn't. Something out, that's the language we're going to use. So Candace comes in and brings in a critique of a very popular framework, which is what scholarships should be. Arguably one of the most popular right now.
00:49:21
Speaker
ah Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about what was going on for you. Why you do that? What's Talk to us. I love the framing, Tiffany. Thank you. I feel very seen right now.
00:49:34
Speaker
Man. So that article was some like two years in the making or something, because when Jen White first put out the piece, I read it and I was honest to myself.
00:49:46
Speaker
I really like it. It wasn't really doing it for me. I was like, I don't know Jim Wright very well. I respect him because other people respect him. He's an elder. yeah i must, but you know, hold my peace.
00:49:57
Speaker
I was like, that's cool. There's room for all of us. Right. But for me, I was like, what is happening here? This didn't feel like he was adding a whole bunch. But when it blew up, that's when I became involved.
00:50:10
Speaker
Everywhere I would turn, you know, I'm in these spaces. You know, I'm not a one of these well-known folks. Like I said, I don't have those kind of degrees and things. And so I'm in the spaces, but I'm not necessarily, you know, there's a cult of personality, honestly, that I experience a lot in these spaces. And I'm not a part of that.
00:50:30
Speaker
So every time I would give a workshop, this article kept presencing more and more. Not your article, the Healing Center. No, the Healing Center Engagement. Thank you. Okay.
00:50:40
Speaker
And then I had my misgivings, but again, I was holding my peace. And it's so funny how like everything is full circle in this conversation because my approach to the article was very much the exact healing method that I'm talking about today.
00:50:56
Speaker
I'm noticing my body's response to this article. I don't personally resonate with it But I'm not going to just pop off like let's have a dialogue. um But as it's going on, finally, I find myself in a very public talk that I won't you know name, but a very public, well-known teacher space. And I'm like, I think I was like a keynote or something. i was giving some talk.
00:51:22
Speaker
And my title for my talk was, I think it was like decolonial mental health or something. And I was talking about a lot of this information, but tying in eco-psychology and earth-based healing, right?
00:51:34
Speaker
And tying it within the context of colonization. And right at the end, some very young teachers of color asked me in front of like 200 people are whatever, how do we push back on trauma-informed teaching in schools?
00:51:51
Speaker
Mm-hmm. I'm like, I'm confused. What, what? Why are we pushing back on it? I said, we're pushing back on it. I said, we don't. We don't push back on it.
00:52:02
Speaker
We haven't even done it yet. We ain't even done it. Right. And I just saw the confusion in the room because people are loving this healing center stuff. It's resonating for them.
00:52:14
Speaker
and then they're loving what I provided. But it seemed like they didn't actually have a frame to integrate it, that the two discourses weren't engaging each other. Right. And they couldn't internalize it.
00:52:26
Speaker
And them being young. Right. And being the schooled people that you're talking about, Tiffany, who are deeply wounded themselves and probably early in that savior stage around why they want to teach. Right. And they're telling me that they want to push back on trauma informed.
00:52:45
Speaker
I said, the hell you don't. And so I went in there and I gave a five minute rebuttal. verbally, too healing-centered and why it was so that they, nothing would be healing. It's like, Sealy color purple, I'm like, nothing.
00:53:01
Speaker
the finger of my you with a finger if yeah was there yeah but you know and they're trying to integrate and what was also really interesting to me was that there were a couple old heads in the room like colleagues of jen right and i could see them sort of doing the like i know y'all can't see my face in the podcast but i'm making this face like is this okay like this uncomfortable like she's confronting this person for that face Let me provide it. Let me try to provide it. Okay. wasn't stolidity. That wasn't the basis of stolidity.
00:53:38
Speaker
ah Anyway, so I got off the call and I was just full of fire. you know I was full of fire. i didn't want to have the like ninety s ether tone to it, but it was there. I was on fire. I have to be honest about my own body.
00:53:53
Speaker
I was lit up. I was indignant. And so I said, I'm going to ahead and write this. And for me, it was my own trauma healing process, because, again, i was refusing to what I believe is something of a fond response in these cults of personality that if an old head says something and a foundation grants it, we all have to agree.
00:54:13
Speaker
And I'm like, what happened to criticality? At least when I was coming up, I was taught that liberation came through dialectics, through the push and pull and that we learn more.
00:54:26
Speaker
i feel like there's so much decompensation, if you will, in the actual what we call movement, because we don't have enough of that push and pull. We scared to actually speak truth and say, I don't agree with it. You're scared to get called as like you're not woke or whatever.
00:54:43
Speaker
And then the inverse of that is then, oh, cancel culture. We're not going to talk to you no more. There's no learning in any of that. Right. You're just like erasing people from the dialogue or you're saying we all got agree to be on this boat over here.
00:54:58
Speaker
That's a very clear duplication, in my opinion, of traumatized and oppressive dynamics. Now, what came up for me was my own shit. Like, who am I?
00:55:09
Speaker
Who are you, Candace? You ain't nobody. You don't got a PhD. You don't got two books out. Nobody knows your name. Who gives a fuck what you got to say about this issue, you know? And everybody's on this healing centered boat.
00:55:22
Speaker
And who are you? no one's even going to read it. This is my inner dialogue that's coming up around The discomfort when you try to break out of the fawn, right? Because it's been there for so long, you're going to have all these spirits or whatever you want to call them, voices inside of you.
00:55:36
Speaker
They're going to try to keep you there because that's what's kept them safe. You can't do that. What you mean? You can't do that. You can't back against this elder. You can't, you know. And finally, I said, OK, I hear y'all.
00:55:48
Speaker
We scared. That's OK. And then you called them into a family embrace. That's how I deal with my I call my inner community. My inner circle is all of these, all of me's.
00:55:59
Speaker
And I'm like, we're going be all right. I hear that we're scared and that's OK and that's normal. And this matters because it matters to me. And it matters because I matter.
00:56:11
Speaker
And there's a lexicon of knowledge in my body. And if nobody reads it, I don't care because I'm a read it and I'm somebody. And that's my whole thing, you know. And if three people read it and they get something from it, great.
00:56:24
Speaker
But I did it for me. I didn't do it because of anything else for Renowned or anything. It was just like... This matters to me. and my body is feeling the resonance of how unseen this particular shape. Right.
00:56:41
Speaker
People that are very sensitive and aware to their legacies of trauma in their generations, but in their lived life and their day to day. The opposite of the numbing is hypersensitive. Right. And I was numb for so long because I was hypersensitive.
00:56:57
Speaker
And that was only way I knew how to cope in the world as a hypersensitive person. So when I take off those trauma responses and I take off all that fawning and freezing, what's left is a really hypersensitive person. And so I have to take care of that if I'm going to do this work.
00:57:11
Speaker
And as soon as I numb all that down, all of a sudden I don't have my knowledges anymore. I can't actually do the work that helps to heal myself and others. So that's a cost I can't pay. right, individually.
00:57:23
Speaker
And so that was where the article came from. and it was for me and wanting to have the experience of speaking back just in myself. In a lot of ways, it was like a letter to myself and the work that I'm doing and its validity and the frameworks that I sit in and then inviting other people if they also wanted to learn from that, if that makes sense.
00:57:45
Speaker
You know, my nutshell is, you know, the heart of Healing Centered is beautiful. And at least in the way it was articulated in that article, I think it has shifted and grown through people's praxis, as all things should. Right.
00:57:59
Speaker
But in that beginning article, I think it missed the mark in several important areas. Number one, the definition of trauma was extremely narrow and it was white centered. I was like, come on now. How are going to talk about healing centered and your stuff is white centered?
00:58:14
Speaker
hmm. OK, so it was like very narrow definition of trauma. Old, too. We're not even using that no more. And then I'm like, if we're talking about healing, we let's center BIPOC people.
00:58:27
Speaker
Let's center QT BIPOC people. We're the experts on trauma because we live it. So I need to see us in this article. Right. First and foremost.
00:58:37
Speaker
Yeah. It's all there if people want to read it. But part of the, I think the key framing of Healing Centered is positioning trauma informed as a deficit pedagogy. And that's fundamentally wrong.
00:58:49
Speaker
I can't even push back on that. going say it's fundamentally wrong because of what we just broke down, Jewel, today. If your trauma responses are why you are here, that cannot be wrong.
00:59:02
Speaker
So the trauma in and of itself, in the most recent research that I've engaged and also learned from Black Indigenous writing and teaching, the trauma mechanism itself is a mechanism of healing.
00:59:17
Speaker
yeah It ain't no nothing deficit to it. The deficit is living in this upstructural society that doesn't let you fully embody your trauma responses.
00:59:29
Speaker
Right. Or forces you to freeze into certain archetypes. Right. That's the harm. But trauma itself, to me, is actually quite beautiful when you get into it.
00:59:40
Speaker
There's many other things. So that was my key you know bone to pick was the framing of trauma was off the centering of white voices in the definition of trauma. I'm like, why is Maria Yellow Horse not there who defined historical trauma?
00:59:54
Speaker
She should have been in that article. Thirdly, when he posits like a an answer to trauma informed, again, that also was white centered.
01:00:05
Speaker
Like you're talking about positive psychology. I myself really don't like positive psychology. I'm not a positive person. I'm a huge disruptor of toxic positivity. I don't think positivity or negativity are helpful frames in our world actually at all.
01:00:22
Speaker
It's not positive or negative. It just is. And how to restore the balance. Right. And so want it to see black and brown voices uplifted, both in definition of trauma and in its responses.
01:00:35
Speaker
And then in my article, I wanted to much as I could to like name drop other sources that people could look to. People to learn about, you know, healing justice. People learn about black and brown indigenous voices who are doing the work and living the work.
01:00:50
Speaker
And so, you know, when I define trauma, I can't say that that's how the mainstream is talking about it. But I can say that for people of us, our people, this is our conversation.
01:01:01
Speaker
And I think it needs to be centered that way. And if I had my perfect worlds, there would be like an update to healing and centered. that would be rewritten and re-spoken to, to fold in these pieces.
01:01:14
Speaker
And whether that happens or not is not my work, but that would be my wish of all wishes. And I think that there's a few folks that have reached out to me that have shared that they're teaching it my article alongside that article.
01:01:28
Speaker
And I think that's a nice way to hold that discourse of like letting people just be exposed and into their bodies and then come up with their own theories. So if you really want to get meta with it.
01:01:43
Speaker
Come on, get madder with it. Okay. When I'm reading Healing Centered, I'm saying, okay, how much of this is an adult desire, right, to avoid?
01:01:55
Speaker
And the mental health stigma around having a mental illness or having some kind of, right, yeah the fact that we're framing trauma as deficit is part of that mental health stigma package, right?
01:02:08
Speaker
And we just need to blow that shit up. How are you going to be healthy in an unwell society? Ain't none of us healthy. Period. Right. It's ableist. That's what I'm, you that's it, Kendra. That's what I was looking for.
01:02:22
Speaker
That was my, amongst all the things when got down to it as I was writing the article, I felt that it was very ableist to focus on healing. Not all of us can actually even access healing and healing towards what and defined by who?
01:02:36
Speaker
Right. And so in this whole thing, we're not going to be there's no healed. In my opinion, it's moving towards collective responses to harm and justice.
01:02:49
Speaker
To me, that's just all there is. But also, if you're not decolonizing how you're defining healing, that's a trap, too, because right now. White people are basically talking about healing. Well, that in and of itself is a whole taxonomy, right, of ableism, white supremacy. Healing historically has been defined as just getting closer to white people.
01:03:08
Speaker
And so, again, if that's not in the Healing and Centered article, what are we doing?
01:03:16
Speaker
That was it for me. And You know, Tiff, I feel really seen by you just sort of just a lot of things you pulled out around like schooled people and why we can't turn away from this dialogue.
01:03:29
Speaker
Whether or not you agree with all the things that I've said, we are nowhere near in our society, in our structures or in our discourse to be ready to stop talking about trauma.
01:03:41
Speaker
Candice's P, social justice education needs trauma informed care now more than ever. A Response to the Future of Healing, Shifting from Trauma-Informed Care to Healing-Centered Pedagogy by Dr. Sean Jenwright.
01:03:56
Speaker
Last question. We spoke with some other folks in previous episodes. It's really about understanding schools as they exist now, not having the ability to actually do most of the things that we want to do, not having the infrastructure to support a trauma-informed pedagogy.
01:04:12
Speaker
What do you see as necessary in the future of these spaces to really actually center education?
01:04:19
Speaker
and want you here. I want you here. What's necessary is, you know, is a total and complete revolution in everything that that requires. I want you here.
01:04:37
Speaker
Miana, you can't do that. They're not going to be able to use the footage if you keep doing yeah That's the words from young people saying what they want to hear. This is completely grounded. I'm ready for spirit to do it.
01:04:53
Speaker
Yeah. That's, I mean, you know, and that is that is a lot. That is a lot of work. It is generations of work. um May not take as long, actually, if we as we think it as it would if we just doubled down and actually did it.
01:05:06
Speaker
You know, part of the reason why um I think social change can take so long is because we always you know flitting around and just like you know so indifferent and ambivalent we got to work through our own stuff but um liana if i can't take out the headphones that i do then they won't hear me yeah that's why i'm keeping my head no they won't hear us at all because my computer does the sound doesn't work can you sit down please Thank you.
01:05:34
Speaker
Nope, sit all the way down. This interview might be over, you guys. We got it. We appreciate it You know, that's a short answer. And I think everything else is like, how do we survive?
01:05:45
Speaker
It's our
01:05:51
Speaker
Y'all heard it here. This is, it's a wrap. We want to thank Candace for showing up today and showing out. We appreciate you. We appreciate your child coming in with the cameo.
01:06:04
Speaker
And we leave it. We leave it. Most of this audio in here. Cause this is the future of education right here. Candace said, when it's time to I go.
01:06:31
Speaker
Today's episode brought me back to the 90s. I think where things are a little more real. I'm sorry for the younger people who listen and have no idea what I'm talking about, but you can thank us folks from the 80s who informed the fashion and style and culture of the Y'all welcome because all of, I shouldn't say all of, but a lot of what you wear in these days, lot of what you think in these days was informed by us. No, but real talk, what I appreciate about today's episode is what it means to be a conversation with each other around how certain theories and practices resonate with us and in the parts of those that we don't agree with.
01:07:13
Speaker
the parts of those that we challenge out loud. I remember when Baldwin and Malcolm Beggs and Audre Lorde and critical scholars would be in conversation with each other and it wasn't so taboo.
01:07:27
Speaker
I think about Gloria Lassen-Billings saying, you know, what is CRT doing in such a nice field like education? I appreciate the sarcasm. I appreciate the challenging because we need to be in critical conversation with each other.
01:07:41
Speaker
Around the implementation, the ideas of these texts, of these theories, of these practices, of these ideologies. And regardless of what you agree with or what you don't agree with, let's make sure that youth wellness is at the center.
01:08:10
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode of Drawing from the Well, brought to you by the Youth Wellness Movement. I'm your host, Tiffany Marie. This podcast is co-produced by yours truly and John Reyes, with music by my boy Jansen V. Drawing from the Well is supported by Community Response of Education.
01:08:31
Speaker
Continue the conversation at youthwellness.org.