Open Society

But I'm also a champion of trauma-informed education, something I came by through experience. As an elementary-aged child, I was sexually abused repeatedly by an older boy who lived in my neighborhood. I know something of trauma.I carried that trauma everywhere: soccer practice, the dinner table, school. And I behaved in perfectly reasonable ways for a sexually abused child to behave (Everstine; Everstine, 2015). I was restless. I passionately resisted being in confined spaces with adults.Teachers called this "acting up." They punished me for little behaviors that I now know were proportionate to my trauma (as, really, any behavior is for a sexually abused child). Then, because I received poor behavior assessments, I was punished at home. I can't recall anyone being curious about why I behaved the way I did. There was no root cause behavior analysis, just reactive rule-flinging.So, I'm all in on trauma-informed education—by which I mean I'm all in on what it can be if we commit to applying it mindfully and equitably.

The trouble surfaces when we apply trauma-informed education in ways that risk reproducing trauma or that ignore significant sources of trauma. It is in response to that trouble that I share three transformative commitments for trauma-informed education. My hope is that, by embracing these commitments, we might maximize the transformative potential of trauma-informed education rather than just layering it onto our program pile.

Attend to the practices, policies, and aspects of institutional culture that traumatize children at school

My biggest source of trauma is how I'm treated here. In every school, the first trauma-informed step should be mapping out all the ways students, families, and even we, as educators, experience trauma at school. When we skip this step, we render the entire trauma-informed effort a hypocrisy.

We must infuse trauma-informed education with a robust understanding of, and responsiveness to, the traumas of systemic oppression

Shari associated her trauma with racism and transphobia at school. Her story is a critical lesson on why we should shake free from the deficit-oriented view that traumas are mostly the result of students' home lives. This view obscures the traumatizing impacts of systemic oppression. If we're not responsive to these impacts, we're enacting a privilege-laden version of trauma-informed education.

Dislodge hyper-punitive cultures and ideologies

Bad ideologies are harder to break than bad practices. This might be why, in my experience, the hardest transition for most schools adopting trauma-informed education involves dislodging hyper-punitive educator ideologies and school cultures. Perhaps philosophically we recognize that avoiding reactive rule-flinging and responding to the root causes of student behavior is a trauma-informed practice. But to what extent do we apply this in practice? Hyper-punitive ideologies remain an education epidemic, even in supposedly trauma-informed schools.

Being trauma-informed means consciously cultivating space in our mental models so that, even if we know nothing about a particular set of circumstances, we avoid the temptation to mindlessly apply rules.

But if we're trauma-aware, we realize that the burden can't be on people—on children—experiencing trauma to educate those who created the institutional culture in which the trauma is happening. That expectation is, itself, potentially traumatizing.

Eugenics has influenced leaders across the world, including in the United States, and was—and still is—the basis for many racist, ableist, and xenophobic attitudes and policies.

James Baldwin’s prophetic literature The Fire Next Time was at the forefront of my mind. I’d been reading it a lot, carrying it around in my pocket. It became like my religious text. Baldwin speaks about things that are very familiar within the human condition, and the most revolutionary music to me — the music that changed my life — is the songs about the inner struggle, the commonality of being human.

In addition there are issues with the ideology of autism being used to support PDA, with it being a non-progressive medical model of disability (Leatherland and Chown 2015). For instance the demand behaviours of PDA are due to need to reduce anxiety (Newson et al 2003) and subsequently PDA is part of the autism, yet anxiety is not on the autism diagnostic criteria (American Psychological Association 2013; World Health Organisation 1992). Recently autism diagnoses are moving away from a categorisation approach to a dimensional approach, which PDA does not follow (Wood, 2017a); therefore it could be argued this recent research on PDA are not contributing to modern interpretations of autism. O’Nions et al (2014) and O’Nions et al (2016) are symptomatic of the underlying issues of Newson et al (2003) criteria, which were formulated in 1980 before widespread adoption of the triad of impairment and ignoring results from the exponential growth of autism research from the late 1990s (Lai et al 2014). More pertinently the recent PDA literature refers to the dated and mythical “typical” autism (Langton and Frederickson 2016; O’Nions et al 2016).

A key argument for need for PDA adjustments is that they are needed because individuals believed to have PDA display demand behaviours to avoid the anxiety caused by societal expectations. There is growing evidence from autistic academics and the autistic population that all autistic individuals’ mental health benefits from being in charge of their own lives, partially due to the pressures of conforming to societal demands (Milton and Moon 2012; Milton and Sims 2016; Stewart 2012; Woods 2017b). Autistic individuals also face additional societal pressures from psycho-emotional disablism (Milton 2013b; Milton and Lyte 2012; Stewart 2012; Woods 2017b), which factors into the higher suicide rates and potentially higher rates of self-harming for autistic individuals (Maddox et al 2017). The “need” for PDA is no more significant than the need for better support for the entire autistic population, which would likely benefit from experiencing PDA adjustments.

PDA could be blocking the development of more progressive social model inclusive education practices and therefore social justice for all stakeholders. This is as PDA is from a medical model of disability perspectives as PDA focuses on persons’ deviance from “typical autism” and the challenges this causes to other stakeholders (Langton and Frederickson 2016; Newson et al 2003; O’Nions et al 2014). Which is the opposite of the views of stakeholders in autism and wider inclusive education areas would like to see; more progressive social model adjustments (Dillon et al 2016; Hardy and Woodcock 2015; Milton 2013b; Pellicano et al 2014; Stewart 2012). PDA advocates are arguing for the use of a new label which is not needed to explain the actions of individuals (Dore 2016; Gillberg et al 2015; Langton and Frederickson 2016; Milton 2013a), this going against the notion that the UK education system is “needs-led” (Langton and Frederickson 2016). Subsequently PDA is fuelling the neoliberal infiltrated inclusive education discourse (Hardy and Woodcock 2015), further reducing the definition of the “mythical norm” (Milton et al 2016). In doing so PDA makes it harder for autism stakeholders to achieve social justice in education.

It can be argued that PDA is already a redundant label due to the lack of merit of a PDA diagnosis and vice versa; other labels describe its behaviours, it does not ensure understanding from individuals, support (Woods 2017a) or legal protection and its adjustments can already be implemented through other labels such as autism. It could be argued that if PDA was proposed today in the United Kingdom it would struggle to be taken seriously due to the fundamental flaws in the arguments for it. There are serious ethical concerns over the label, which have yet to be debated. It is my view that it is logical to support more adjustments & research for autism and other recognised SEND labels, including using PDA based adjustments for these labels.

This paper concludes by arguing that the label of PDA represents the medicalising and pathologising of behaviours that from an outsider perspective seem to be differentiated from what is deemed capable by autistic people, but could be seen as the behaviours of an autistic person who has gained a modicum of normative social skills and is simply asserting their agency. By pathologising such behaviour, one could unduly be blunting attempts at autistic self-advocacy.