This blog was written by Lopa Shah, founding director of ELICIT, a social organisation driven to design alternatives for education in conflict and crisis-affected regions, involving armed violence.
Technical terms are often shaped within academic discourse and can become disconnected from their deeper, lived meaning. A more inclusive language would pair terminology with lived experience – somethings practitioners possess in abundance.
This blog attempts to question terms that we have coined, borrowed or repeatedly employed in our work. Trauma-responsive is one such term that deserves closer examination.
Taken literally, the term simply means: that which responds to trauma. Yet it is in the answers to a series of questions about this seemingly straightforward definition that context comes alive. These questions are what make trauma-responsiveness truly contextual:
- What history is the trauma rooted in?
- How is the trauma manifested or made visible today?
- What conditions exist for a meaningful response?
- Does the response, in any way, reflect or reproduce the systemic injustice or threat that the community has endured?
One way to answer these questions more simply is to ask:
Does the response end up perpetuating the drama triangle? In other words, does it ultimately seek to rescue, victimise or persecute?
Or alternatively:
Does the response shift the community’s role within the dynamic? Does it create opportunities for a different experience, offer challenge in service of growth, or provide coaching and accompaniment without taking over?
In a recent conversation, I spoke with an educator who is also the founder of a community school in a conflict-affected village in a remote part of North-East India. She shared that she was looking for someone to serve as a second-line leader – someone non-local, equipped with leadership skills, proficiency in English, and knowledge of effective teaching methods. As she described it, this person would help ease her workload, which has become increasingly difficult to manage as she oversees a growing team of teachers.
On a practical level, the decision makes sense. The need for leadership is urgent, and a non-local recruit may arrive with readily deployable skills, whereas a senior local teacher may not yet meet the expectations associated with the role. The team she hopes to support through this recruitment consists of local teachers who are hardworking, committed, and coachable, but who require stronger direction in delivering the language curriculum. Pragmatically, the rationale is compelling.
The educator-founder in question is a well-intentioned leader who has relocated to a remote and challenging context, co-built a school from the ground up, and continues to hold multiple responsibilities within it. She has committed herself to the mission of strengthening English-language fluency among the children in the community.
Alongside her is a co-founder, who is a local youth, powerful in his own merit for having gained visibility for the community. Together, this partnership lives on the school campus, investing little to nothing in their personal comfort. They work tirelessly to raise funds from donors who believe in their vision of social change and channel those resources back into the school, building their dream one brick at a time. But beyond the intentionality of the structure, the journey begins to reveal itself. In ambitious and critically important pursuits, such as establishing a safe and contextually-relevant school environment for a community living in traumagenic circumstances, it is the choices embedded in the nuances of everyday practice that must be held to a non-negotiable standard of sensitivity.
Leaders carry the responsibility of prioritising the reduction, and where possible, the reversal of injustice through both small and significant decisions. These decisions give rise to patterns, and patterns, in turn, coalesce into systems. When a pursuit is rooted in context sensitivity, good intentions alone do not exempt any decision from scrutiny. Every choice must be examined for whether it is genuinely empowering and potentially trauma-reversing, particularly when made by someone who is not native to the context.
In the case described above, the decision of a non-local school leader to recruit another non-local leader to work alongside her warrants closer examination. The decision emerged as a response to the need to accelerate the school’s growth and ease the workload carried by the founders. Yet the building blocks of this choice reveal a more complex dynamic: bringing in a significantly higher-paid, non-local professional to supervise a team composed entirely of local teachers.
To unpack this decision, let us return to the trauma-responsive questions discussed earlier:
What history is the trauma in the community rooted in?
– Systemic erosion of identity, violent displacement and land conflicts.
How is the trauma visible today?
– Hyper-focus on preservation of the tribe’s history, multiple militia outfits, isolated living.
What conditions are available for a response?
- Great school campus, dedicatedfounders on their growth journey as leaders.
Does the response in any way reflect the systemic injustice/threat that the community has endured?
Yes. Non-local authority validates the locals’’fear of erasure and displacement. It also validates the non-locals’ belief that meritocracy is fair and that it is enough to be generous to the locals, while holding a sytematically higher position.
Does the response end up spinning the drama triangle, i.e. does it ultimately attempt to rescue, victimise or persecute?
– Yes, in subtle ways, there is a belief that it is necessary for the growth of the tribe.
Alternatively, does the response change the role of the community in the game? i.e. does it choose to create an alternate experience, challenge towards growth, or coach without taking over?
– Not yet, because the indigenous agency is still not at the centre.
I asked her whether she had considered the hierarchies that can subtly reproduce systemic oppression and contribute to the gradual erosion of identity. She was quick to grasp the nuance. The weight in her voice was unmistakable when she replied, “But I can’t let my programme collapse.”
Yet it is often through the longer route – the alternatives, the never-before-attempted, the scarcely imagined, and the ideas that are difficult to explain to donors – that radical and joyful change takes root. We explored some of these possibilities together: imagining second-line leadership as a collective rather than an individual role, with both local and non-local educators learning the practice of leadership alongside one another; inviting experienced non-locals to spend a year shadowing and learning from local leaders before assuming leadership positions themselves; or building a local-language leadership programme that creates conditions for greater fluidity in positions of power.
In a follow-up conversation, we spoke about power more directly. I introduced the role of the rescuer and explored how a saviour framework can shape leadership, often in ways that remain invisible to those enacting it.
Leadership journeys that involve significant sacrifices of privilege and distance from family are emotionally volatile. They can become entangled in a passionate attachment to a linear understanding of action, change, and transformation. This is where trauma responsiveness offers a critical intervention.
It is also important to recognise that trauma-responsive education is not a fixed methodology but a living, contextually-rooted and critically-sensitive ecosystem of ideas working in concert toward healing. Such healing emerges from intangible and often invisible experiences. It cannot be attributed solely to the efforts of an authority figure who, consciously or unconsciously, seeks to facilitate transformation through service. Leadership, like design, is an iterative process – one that requires continual reflection, adaptation, and humility.
The central question this blog seeks to emphasise is: How can educational systems stop reproducing the very conditions of injustice that made intervention necessary in the first place?
