This paper explores the role of a positive education paradigm in mainstream and specialist classrooms for students who have experienced complex trauma resulting from abuse, neglect, violence, or being witness to violence. Existing trauma-informed education focuses on repairing regulatory abilities and repairing disrupted attachment in students. However, a dual-continua model of mental health suggests that repairing deficits is only part of the education response needed to nurture well-being in trauma-affected students. Traumainformed education can be conceived from both a deficit perspective (e.g., what deficiencies or developmental struggles does this student face?) and a strengths perspective (e.g., what psychological resources does this student have to build upon for future success?). This paper develops the strengths-based trauma-informed positive education (TIPE) approach which proposes three domains of learning needed for traumaaffected students: repairing regulatory abilities, repairing disrupted attachment, and increasing psychological resources. It is argued that the three domains support each other via synergistic interactions which create upward spirals to increase psychological growth. The TIPE model will make a contribution to research in positive education, positive psychology, and traumatology, with the applied context of assisting classroom teachers and school-based practitioners to meet the complex behavioral, cognitive, and relational needs of students struggling in schools.
T he National Child Traumatic Stress Network in the United States reports that up to 40% of students have experienced, or been witness to, traumatic stressors in their short lifetimes. These include home destabilization, violence, neglect, sexual abuse, substance abuse, death, and other adverse childhood experiences. The effects of trauma on a child severely compound the ability to self-regulate and sustain healthy relationships. In the classroom, the effects of trauma may manifest as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, reactive attachment, disinhibited social engagement, and/or acute stress disorders. In this article, we contend that the classroom can be positioned as a powerful place of intervention for posttraumatic healing both in the context of special education and in mainstream classrooms that contain traumaaffected students. The current landscape of trauma-informed practice for primary and secondary classrooms has focused on teaching practices that seek to repair emotional dysregulation and fix broken attachment. In working for more than a decade with mainstream and specialist schools, we have discovered that positive psychology has a role to play in contributing to trauma-informed learning. We argue that combining traumainformed approaches with positive psychology will empower and enable teachers to promote both healing and growth in their classrooms. This article presents scientific and practice-based evidence to support our claim. We present education interventions aimed to build positive emotions, character strengths, resilient mindsets, and gratitude, and show how these can be embedded in the daily routines of classroom learning to assist struggling students.
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