Towards culturally responsive, trauma-informed education: Navigating social complexity in Australian schools
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2025
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Critical Conversations in Teacher Education: Contemporary Australian Perspectives
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Emerald Publishing Limited
Melbourne Authors
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Melbourne Graduate School of Education
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Langley-Freeman, M., Greig, J., Brunzell, T., Gannaway, J. & Hogarth, M. (2025). Towards culturally responsive, trauma-informed education: Navigating social complexity in Australian schools. Stokes, H (Ed.). McLean Davies, L (Ed.). Critical Conversations in Teacher Education: Contemporary Australian Perspectives, (1), pp.79-98. Emerald Publishing Limited.
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Abstract
Culturally responsive education (CRE) seeks to dismantle systemic barriers by situating school-based learning within students' lived experiences and broader cultural frames. These approaches explicitly acknowledge the strengths and values inherent within students' own cultures, alongside the impacts that colonisation, systemic racism, and educational inequities can have on student wellbeing, learning, and academic achievement. This chapter examines the confluence of CRE and trauma-informed education (TIE), and the ways in which they can fortify each other. A relatively new paradigm with promising results, TIE provides indications for healing-focussed strategies appropriate within the context of schools (i.e., increasing self-regulatory capacities and repairing disrupted relational attachment) in addition to strengths-based, wellbeing-focussed strategies. A trauma-informed approach that primarily responds to individual experiences and traits without looking towards the broader context of culture, systemic inequity, or intergenerational trauma is not enough. By considering these approaches together, educators can proactively address the emerging needs of both the individual student and the collective student body within superdiverse schools. This chapter will set the grounds for a conceptual meeting place of CRE and TIE, as well as explore critical conversations that educators can engage in to strengthen emergent practice at this intersection. These conversations support two goals within both TIE and CRE. The first, to assist classroom teachers and school-based practitioners to meet the complex behavioural, cognitive, and relational needs of all students in schools. The second, to centre the foundational rights, needs, and strengths of diverse students and families so that our educational systems can move towards becoming actives site of cultural inclusion and structural healing.