7 Consciousness Raising and Trauma-Informed Practice
Ashley Glassburn
Within the history of women’s liberation movements, consciousness raising has been a method for producing and evaluating claims about society, power, and personal experience. In practice, feminist consciousness raising often consisted of women meeting in each other’s homes or community centres and going around a circle sharing their experiences, thoughts, and questions (Combahee River Collective, 1986; Freeman, 1975; Haynes, 2017). As women learn about other women’s experiences, they can develop a more complex understanding of how their personal experiences are shaped by larger social and political forces acting on all of the participants in the group; in other words, significant learning takes place by grappling with the feminist significance of “the personal is political.” Today the intellectual work of sharing personal experience and drawing out structural dimensions of our lives continues in online spaces such as Twitter and Reddit (Bailey, 2021).
Consciousness raising is a foundational concept and feminist pedagogical method in my first-year general education course “Gal Pals: Women and Friendship.” I want students to appreciate that consciousness raising is an epistemologically legitimate and powerful mode for learning—students really do learn more when they connect the content of the course to the lives of their fellow students. Consciousness raising as pedagogy involves creating space and time for students to listen to each other’s experiences and drawing connections across these accounts to identify the larger structural forces at play. Within a face-to-face course, this can be hard logistically because doing it well takes up a lot of class time as well as a lot of physical space for students to meet in small groups and be able to hear each other over the other groups; these challenges make doing this for my class of 100 or 150 students nearly impossible. Doing this work online provides a sort of privacy and intimacy within the group that fosters student connectedness, but success depends on students who share their experiences with strangers, whose faces they might never see, and then engage with and respond to each other’s vulnerability and pain in meaningful ways. Rather than work with students individually, in this course I take on the role of working with groups as a whole to enable them to learn how to communicate their social needs with each other, which fits with the broader theme of friendship within the course.
Moving this first-year course online forced me to rethink significantly how consciousness raising was and was not taking place in my class before, and thus the challenges of consciousness raising as online pedagogy forced me to reconceptualize the purpose and labour of small-group activities. I wondered how to prepare students to engage in challenging conversations about gendered violence, sexual violence, racism, and abuse in unsupervised small groups, which take place in online break-out rooms. There are legitimate risks of exposing students to retraumatizing conversations on these topics that I was used to mitigating through personally facilitating students’ conversations. By working closely with clinical social workers to develop content for the course to prepare students to respond effectively when their friends disclose mental health struggles, current or former abuse, addiction, and suicidal thoughts, I came to appreciate more fully the significance of teaching how to respond to other’s pain and crisis as a basic skill of being a good friend. In addition to the students learning about local mental health and crisis resources, I wanted them to develop skills for responding to each other in caring ways across differences.
I began researching how clinical and medical communities were using trauma-informed practices to build safer, more trustworthy communities of care (Carello & Butler, 2014; Hitchcock et al., 2021; Sanders, 2021; Sherwood et al., 2021). I strategically developed class routines and co-learning communities based on the principles of trauma-informed practice to model and instruct students on how to listen, share, and care for each other. The results surpassed my expectations—a consistent 95% participation rate, 80% reading completion rate, and 98% passing rate when record numbers of students were failing online courses.1 Many students made the connection between consciousness raising and learning clear in the end-of-semester student evaluation survey with comments such as “the groups we were placed in were useful learning communities because it provided everyone equal opportunity to express themselves and opinions in ways that are not provided in many classes. The group environment allowed everyone to understand various perspectives and to gain more knowledge in this way about everyone’s different experiences in society.”2
Teaching Friendship: Aligning Content and Method
I inherited “Gal Pals: Women and Friendship” from my predecessor as a much-beloved course taught three times a year with 100–150 students in each part. As a first-year course in women’s and gender studies, it is an interdisciplinary exploration of friendship with practical application and political analysis, alongside introductory concepts of women’s and gender studies as a field. I teach it online using a synchronous flipped classroom model, which means that students complete readings and watch a prerecorded lecture before the class and then spend class time working in small groups on graded in-class assignments. I need students to embrace and engage in the group activities, or this model falls flat. The key to making this model work is to provide social and intellectual activities meaningful to students.
A significant risk in using a flipped model online in feminist studies courses is that students become responsible primarily for moderating heavy conversations that arise from the texts and assignments on violence, oppression, and other traumas. Many colleagues whom I greatly respect as teachers avoid hosting such conversations in small online groups because of the risk that students will handle each other and the topics poorly. I take these concerns seriously, but I am also committed to consciousness raising as a liberatory epistemological method that requires trusting students to learn with each other (Hartsock, 1983; Hemmings, 2012; Moreton-Robinson, 2013). These dual political commitments forced me to address seriously the emotional risks of using consciousness-raising practices online. I turned to trauma-informed practice to guide me and my students on how to foster an environment in which people will respond to each other’s trauma in generous, caring ways (Ahmed, 2016; brown, 2017; Carello and Butler, 2014). The principles of a trauma-informed practice were initially developed for medical and other clinical service settings and include a sense of safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration, empowerment of voice, and cultural recognition of self. They became the guiding goals of designing group processes for the online course.
Building Trauma-Informed Community Online: Nuts and Bolts of Weekly Group Work
For the first 15–30 minutes of class, we meet as a whole in a live LMS video conference (Blackboard Collaborate), and I provide guidance on how to approach the group work for the day and respond to questions and comments submitted by students beforehand.3 Students then spend the majority of class time (2.5 hours) in assigned small groups (six–eight students) working collaboratively to complete the weekly group assignment.4 These assignments account for 44% of the final grade, and an additional 12% represents their participation in these groups. The weight of these assignments makes clear that the work students do within these groups is their central scholarly contribution in the course.5 Students meet online in small video chat groups within Blackboard Collaborate and work collectively on a shared document that I post for them in Microsoft OneDrive.6 At the end of the class, the work is submitted as a group assignment in Blackboard. I am available and communicate with students throughout the class through the group chat in Blackboard Collaborate. I answer questions publicly via text chat so that all students can see the response, and when requested I drop in to a particular group video chat to answer questions or check in if it seems necessary. Especially early in the semester, students want and need my presence as a teacher to guide them through the process of figuring out how to work so intimately and intensely with each other. Always being available gives them trust in me as the teacher, and clearly answering questions and posting the answers to the whole class through the chat board creates transparency. Later in the semester, privacy within the group—my agreement not to pop in to their breakout rooms without notice—is important for them to feel safe sharing with each other and their sense of collaboration and peer support.
If you go to the Digital Guide for Feminist Pedadogy for Teaching Online, you can find my Annotated Assignments for weeks 1 and 5 of this course (Glassburn 2024) Week 1 shows how I orientate students to the ethos and expectations of these group assignments. Week 5 is included as an example of the assignment once students are comfortable with the process. Follow along with these examples to see how the assignments enact the trauma-informed practices discussed below.
Building a Community of Students Who Really Talk with Each Other
The weekly group assignment is completed in class by the group as a whole and made up of six steps discussed below. Each step works to model ways of synthesizing individual experiences and thoughts with the bigger group discussions of power, privilege, and care. Through these steps, I want students to work toward the ideals of consciousness raising by learning to listen for differences within the group yet still learning to notice and name how social structures are shaping their experiences in common ways (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Step 1 is to volunteer for a role for the day. I choose roles that correlate with keeping the group assignments going smoothly and quickly. Each step includes an established time frame to complete the activity. The task master role is arguably the most important because creating a balance between socializing and intellectual work of the group is crucial to creating the conditions for co-learning to thrive. Too much socializing and the group will get frustrated with each other as they rush to finish assignments before the end of the class. Not enough socializing and the students will not learn to trust each other enough to have meaningful learning growth online.
Step 2 is the welcoming circle. Each activity labelled “circle” asks students to take discrete turns answering the prompts and actively listen to each other. Once everyone has shared, there is time for a group discussion and some written takeaways. The welcome circle follows a series of questions inviting students to move their attention away from the time before the class and shift it to how they are feeling at the moment. The questions are banal enough that there is no obvious reason for students to feel anxious about sharing or oversharing yet personal enough that they get to know each other’s personality and history within the circle. Importantly, the questions should gently invite students to share small (not traumatic) vulnerabilities because it is through sharing and witnessing each other’s vulnerability that they come to trust and care for each other. Such practices are important to have in place before heavier or more challenging topics arise in the readings or conversations.
The Magic Is in Building a Sense of Trust and Safety
The speaking and writing prompts in the assignment are geared to encouraging students to be present with each other and to honour what is shared in the circle. Some might fear that such speaking circles take up too much synchronous class time (20–40 minutes for a group of five–eight students) to justify the activity on a regular basis; however, through this routine exercise, students come to see each other and feel seen by each other. This is a crucial step for building a sense of safety, trustworthiness, and voice central to a trauma-informed practice. In significant ways, it is only through this level of bonding that the students learn to hold space for each other when issues of trauma or world-shifting transformation arise. Without prompting, it is common for students in women’s and gender studies courses to disclose abuse, addiction, and other traumas. I want to do my best to prepare the class members to respond to each other when one person speaks up, and I am not there to facilitate the conversation given the online structure. Also, online learning can feel alienating. Many students mentioned in their evaluations that they looked forward to the class all week because it was the most meaningful social event in their lives, especially during the long isolation of COVID-19 closures in Canada. Scholarship on friendship explains this as a need for a kind of intimacy often absent in even the most cherished relationships with parents, children, romantic partners, and close friends (Cronin, 2014; Nelson, 2016). One student wrote in the evaluation that “I felt very valued within my group which made me excited to go to class.”
Step 3 is the reading check-in circle. Although it might be enticing to combine the welcome circle and the reading check-in, I keep them separate so that the welcome circle allows students to enter the class as they are, without any external narrative of shame regarding preparedness. The reading check-in is where they share with each other what they have done to prepare for class, the often emotionally heavy reasons why they are not prepared, and what they could have done better. This is also a powerful way for students to communicate with me in a pseudo-anonymous format about what they need to be fully prepared for the class. In the written text box, I learn how students struggled with the reading because of the length, style, emotional content, and so on. I also learn when students are particularly excited about the material and want to talk about it. Within this particular class, I teach five core friendship skills. The first one is “Know Yourself!” I use this language in the class to frame the purpose of the reading check-in—it is about being honest with yourself and your group mates about where you are in the work and thus how you can contribute to the collaborative effort. Throughout the course, I tried to align the supportive principles of trauma-informed practice, the core friendship skills, and an analysis of the social structures that shape our cultural notions of friendships and friends.
Sharing circles model how to make space for each member to speak and be heard. There are always students who approach me before the first day of the class because they are concerned about the social pressure to share within groups and reveal their struggles with social anxiety. I do not fully understand why these practices work, because I am not a clinician, nor am I trained in human behaviour. However, the structured nature of these sharing circles seems to alleviate the social anxiety with which many of my students wrestle. Even my most shy students seem to appreciate how sharing and listening create the grounds for feeling seen and heard, crucial for creating a sense of belonging within the group. Many students feel anxious about being asked to come up with something interesting about themselves. Writing the questions matter-of-factly so that students simply can respond with a memory or an observation reduces social anxiety that many students associate with introductory group activities. Thus, “share something that recently made you laugh” does not produce the sort of social anxiety of “tell us something about yourself.”
The reading check-in circle is significant in another way because the collaborative work of the group depends on a sufficient number of group members who have done the reading and are prepared. In response to an evaluation prompt—“This particular part of this course had remarkably high rates of reading completion. What is it that you think got students to show up having completed the readings?”—one student summed up what most of the respondents wrote: “The pressure of having other people hear what you learned while reading and watching the lectures for sure would have us do the readings.” Another student simply wrote that “nobody wanted to be the useless group member to let the others down.” Part of why the quality of learning is so high in this course is that the social pressure to do the readings is built into the structure. Students seem to be consistently surprised that, when most of the group members complete the readings, they are then able to have nuanced, complex discussions of the readings and lectures with their fellow students.
Feeling Safe Is a Precursor to Intellectual Risk and Growth
Step 4 is the core scholarly work of the day. During the first week, students use this space to dream up the ideal group dynamics, including expectations of active engagement and tech crisis backup plans. More commonly, this is where students break down the readings and in some way come up with collective interpretations or applications from the readings. One common way that I use this space is an online version of pair and share in which there is a series of questions, and each student is expected to write a response in a distinctive colour or font.7 The first set of questions in the online pair and share generally focuses on individual interpretations or reactions to the texts—fairly easy, low-stakes questions. Students can then look over the responses of their peers before moving on to the group discussion questions. This stage serves double duty by exposing students who might be behind on the readings to the general contents of the texts, providing some crucial background to allow them to participate in the group discussion (Garrison et al., 2001).
The second set of questions, which requires a single written response from the group, shifts toward analysis and application. This dual structure allows me to ask more challenging questions than I would ask a student individually because the pressure of the challenge is shared by the group. Sometimes this is about naming the argument in the text, and at other times I ask students to think about applying the texts to the world around them. For instance, in the attached sample, the first set of questions asks every student to write in response “for you, what did the siren’s voice articulate about Black womanhood in Canada today?” This question elicits a wide variety of responses strongly depending on how the student relates to the category of Black womanhood. When the students read each other’s response, they observe this variety and generally talk about it at length. The group question that correlates with this topic asks students “What did the fear and control of sirens’ voices articulate for you about women of colour activism in Canada? In a Canadian context, are there other marginalized groups that may feel affinity with the sirens of this novel?” These questions ask students to apply their analyses in a variety of ways—shifting the national context of the novel (Morrow, 2020) from the United States to Canada, expanding the racial category of analysis from Black womanhood to women of colour, and then hypothesizing how other marginalized groups might feel affinity with this dynamic or not. Students in this course are racially diverse, so there are various racial positions represented in each group.
The group question pushes students to reconcile their various interpretations to identify a single shared response with which the group is comfortable. The goal here is to set up a robust conversation about the text and its limits. For this reason, part of what I comment on in the group assignment is how well students work to come up with a collective response that attends to the variety of individual positions in the group. A listing of various positions gets points taken off because the challenge of the assignment is precisely to address the challenge of developing a group analysis. The language that I use in the grading rubric to guide students’ understanding of this goal is as follows: “In addition to understanding the readings and lectures accurately, your responses illustrate the richness of analysis that comes from combining multiple viewpoints and types of life experiences.”
The reading activities are not always as straightforward as the pair and share discussions. In one week, I have students develop a casting call for the characters in the novel. In another week, groups brainstorm which sort of social club they would be willing to join and develop a flyer for it shared with the class. The point of the scholarly aspect of these assignments is to foster meaningful intellectual conversations about the texts that engage the various social differences of the group members. In other words, I design conversations that elicit reflections on “the personal is political” and reach toward the epistemological goals of consciousness raising.
Addressing Resentment and Freeloaders
Step 5 is always the least popular because it is where I ask students to evaluate each other’s participation. Students hate this and always work toward giving everyone equal credit even when they explicitly talk about uneven labour elsewhere in the assignment. I frame the narrative of this exercise around two of the friendship skills taught in the class: “Set Boundaries!” and “Address Conflict!” These two skills are hard to learn when the stakes in our lives are high, so I urge students to find low-stakes situations (e.g., participating in class) to practise establishing boundaries and addressing conflicts before feelings of resentment begin to arise. Despite resistance to this process, this stage is crucial because groups that do not learn how to assess and adjust the workload of reading preparation fall apart mid-semester because of anger at and resentment of freeloading. What I am working toward by making this part of the weekly group process is establishing a normal and expected routine for students to communicate when the small-group dynamics are not working well for them. Additionally, when groups successfully work through conflict, they become more bonded because such reparative work involves acknowledging and responding to each other’s needs and boundaries. I think of this step as an extension of the student modelling practices that many first-year courses do—in this case, I want to model healthy practices for communicating needs and expectations in group dynamics.
Step 6 is the closing circle, which—like the welcoming circle—provides a sort of transition between in-class time and afterward. When groups have a hard assessment conversation, the closing circle is also an opportunity for the members to reconnect with each other in a caring way before they leave. Depending on the texts and the friendship skills addressed in the class, I might ask students how they are going to apply some of the class content in their lives. At other times, I use it to model time- or stress-management skills, in accordance with recommendations for first-year courses. Carello and Butler (2014), who warn of the many risks of feminist pedagogical appropriations of trauma-informed practices, note that explicitly giving students instructions on self-care and mental health resources is important for developing a safety-first, trauma-informed pedagogy. Groups that finish early sometimes hang around and chat until the end of the class because they value the social space created online through the group work. At other times, they join me in the main video chat room to ask questions about the readings or just hang out. Students often long for ways to create meaningful social interactions online and revel in them when they work. Chatting with students in this way allows them to have live interactions with me and keeps my online contact time with them restricted to actual class time.
Strategic Modelling
In an online course in which students spend most of the class time in small groups, the weekly assignment documents become my pedagogical voice, guiding student interactions and raising intellectual curiosities. Thus, it is even more important in this setting that my documents illustrate transparency, honesty, and trustworthiness. I do this by writing a robust syllabus in my own voice and using direct language such as “I” and “you” to make the roles and responsibilities in the course clear. I use the weekly “questions and comments” assignment to keep a clear mode of communication open with students throughout the week in a way that seems to be manageable to me, and I explain that rationale to the students. When I respect their learning needs, I model for them how to respect my teaching needs (e.g., fewer individual emails). It is then important that I make sure to address all comments and questions submitted to me, even if it is to say that “someone asked this, and I don’t have an answer right now. I will get back to you on this before the end of class today.” The online nature of doing the sort of teaching in which I ask students to be open and vulnerable, willing to stretch themselves intellectually, means that every interaction I have with students in this setting needs to reinforce the online space of the course as a place where I can trust them and they can trust me. This is a central way in which I model the foundations of trauma-informed practice through my presence in videos, text chats, and documents that I create for the course.
Lessons Gleaned and Some Caveats
This model was born from the distinctiveness of the course content on friendship, clinical social worker friends with whom I consulted, and the pressure of trying to foster consciousness raising in an online feminist studies class. There are lessons about building co-learning groups that I think are applicable to other courses, but there are also significant limits and drawbacks to this approach.
- Successful online co-learning groups need ample socializing time to build rapport, or the “learning” is replaced by a rush to finish tasks that feel like busy work.
- Students need a combination of “carrots” and “sticks” to be honest with each other about their reading practices and to work actively to improve their reading preparation.
- Be intentional about the sort of personal information that you ask students to share with each other. Ask concrete questions so that students do not have to perform their uniqueness. Never ask students to share something that might make them feel exposed or forced to offer truly vulnerable information.
- Break up the class into chunks with different goals and ways of interacting. Moving among sharing circles, writing assignments, and small-group discussions keeps the conversation varied and helps to prevent Zoom fatigue.
- Writing good online pair and share questions is an artform. Each semester save the best ones and revise the others. Eventually, you will develop a great set of prompts.
- Required synchronous attendance is crucial for this model to work, which limits accessibility for students with lives or bodies that do not abide by regular schedules.
- Observing and intervening in unhealthy group dynamics comprise a crucial role for the instructor in this model. Successful groups must maintain open communication with members about what is okay and what is not okay within the group. It is better to dissolve a group mid-semester and reassign students to other functional groups than to let a dysfunctional group struggle to the end.
Safety, trustworthiness, transparency, peer support, collaboration, and the power of one’s voice are the central tenets of trauma-informed care. Use them as guiding principles for each aspect of your assignments and courses. Your students might just amaze you when you trust them to do the hard work.
Key Takeaways
- To build community online, students need space and time to socialize and meaningfully get to know each other.
- Use classroom assignments to model for students how to listen to each other and hold space for responses and experiences different from their own.
- The principles of trauma-informed practice provide useful guidance on how to build robust online learning communities that prepare students to handle big conversations, such as those on sexual assault, racism, addiction, religion, and abuse.
Notes
1 These rates come from the grade book for the Spring 2021 term. The rates for Fall 2021 were similar.
2 Anonymous student evaluation survey, WGST 1200, Intersession Semester, 2021, University of Windsor.
3 The weekly questions and comments are set up as an optional assignment for students to submit, and it is the primary way that students communicate with me about the course, grades, and assignments (as opposed to email).
4 I assign groups and post them before the first day of class. In week 5, students complete a mid-semester evaluation, which includes a question on whether they want to change groups or not. Students can request to leave a group, but they cannot request which group to join. Students rarely switch groups because most groups bond significantly before then. I urge students to meet with me that week to talk about any emerging concerns.
5 In addition to the weekly group assignments, students complete five individual journals (25% total), a final exam (15%), a syllabus quiz (2%), and a mid-semester evaluation (2%). The 40% total of the individual journals and final exam means that individual understanding of the materials still has a significant impact on the final grade.
6 Blackboard and Microsoft OneDrive are platforms paid for by my university, which is why I use them. I could choose among Blackboard, Teams, and Zoom for the online meeting space, but I stick with Blackboard because students can navigate their way into their assigned group, whereas Teams and Zoom privilege randomized group settings, which would not work in this case.
7 Font colour variation makes reading the document easiest unless there is a group member who is colour blind. In that case, I instruct the groups to use font variations instead.
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