 All right, I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm absolutely delighted to see so many of you here today. We have a fantastic guest on a very, very important subject and we have a lot of ground to cover. For the past year and a half, many people have been consumed with the idea that the pandemic and other events have imposed a great deal of trauma on academic populations, on students, as well as faculty and staff. And this has happened for a variety of reasons. Everything from job loss, to biological damage, to stresses and family, to the whole problem of trying to keep academia going during an incredible crisis. A lot of people are wondering how we can help cope with all of this trauma. How we can hope survivors of this proceed to help students succeed, to help faculty and staff do their work successfully without melting down. And there are a lot of people who are looking into this, but one of the great leaders of it is Dr. Valentina Itorbi-Lagrave. She's at the University of Denver where she's the Director of Inclusive Teaching Practices. She's written a whole series of articles looking into how we can best inform our teaching and support by thinking of trauma. And we are very, very excited to bring her on stage. So without any further ado, welcome Dr. Itorbi-Lagrave. Hi, welcome everyone. It's so lovely to be here. And I see all these little faces everywhere. And it's great that everybody's joining us today. Well, I'm so glad you could make it. I really appreciate it. And my first very practical question I have to ask, what's the weather like there in Denver? So it is very sunny and hot today, which is good. I know my children are probably appreciating it because they are outdoors today. So yeah, it's good, it's hot. Okay, good. Well, I hope you stay cool. I bet your kids are having a blast. Now, it's kind of a tradition now in the forum where we ask people to introduce themselves, but not by talking about their past, but about their future. We'd like to know, what are you gonna be working on for the next year? What lies ahead for you for 2021 and the beginning of 2022? What are you gonna be working on? What are the big ideas, the big projects? This is a great question. So I'm really excited for what's coming up in the next 12 months. We've done some incredible work at the University of Denver this past year. Our team worked triple time. And for this next year, I'm looking to broaden the impact that we've made in the institutional level and bring that to our surrounding communities and our national partners as well. So I will be publishing a book chapter, several articles. The Faculty Institute for Inclusive Teaching at the University of Denver might find home in different institutions and other institutions across higher education in the United States as well. We are developing and expanding the Inclusive Teaching Practices website, which is an open access resource that I created with an incredible team of scholars. And it's available to absolutely everyone in K-12 and higher ed. And we will be launching shortly in a couple of weeks a new module on trauma-informed pedagogy and healing centered engagement and what that looks like in real time. So again, my work is all about making the very abstract, very concrete and providing actual tools for people to do the work. I think often we get caught in these idealistic conversations around many heavy, heavy topics. But when it comes to being in the classroom with the students, people freeze and they don't necessarily know where to start, what the language to engage these types of frameworks and practices actually are. So focusing on that and developing all of that portfolio. That's a huge amount. And on behalf of the rest of the world that isn't at Denver, thank you. We're really looking forward to all of that open access content, which sounds terrific. Now, friends, if you're new to the forum, this is not an interview program in the sense that I'm gonna be interviewing our guest. I have a whole stack of questions I'd like to ask her. I'm gonna ask one right now. But the purpose of the forum is for you to ask your questions. So after my initial question, the floor is yours. So again, remember to click that raised hand if you wanna be here on stage and make your face not small but large. Or if you'd like to type in a Q and A, in the Q and A box, we'd love to hear your questions and thoughts. But I guess my first question, Valentina, is we're depending on numerous factors. We may be beyond the pandemic in the United States at least this fall. It may be the virus will still persist. No one's talking about extirpating it completely but that the incidence and infection rates will fall below pandemic levels. So maybe it'll be akin to something like the seasonal flu. How has this experience of COVID-19 traumatized academia? What does it mean to say we've been through a traumatic experience? I mean, this is a very basic kindergarten level question. What does it mean to say the students, the faculty, the librarians, the staff, the administrators have gone through a traumatic experience? So I'm gonna give you a three part answer to this question because it's a big one. It's a loaded one. I think we need to first define and understand trauma. There's many, there are several definitions out there and there's different types of trauma as well, right? But I would use the APA's definition would say that it's any disturbing experiences that results in very significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, and very disruptive feelings and emotions that are very intense and have a long lasting negative effect on people's attitudes, behaviors and really their functioning. So there's a lot of data out there that shows how trauma impacts the brain and it's so relevant to the work that we do in higher education because it certainly impacts how our students are learning but also impacts how faculty are teaching and how we're showing up into these environments. But it can also be defined as experiences in which a person's internal resources are not adequate to cope with the external stressors, right? Like they're too much. And this is where I'm gonna give you the second part of the answer. I'm very devoted and interested in exploring pedagogical approaches to address the healing center engagement and trauma in the classroom. I myself, I'm a mother of four children. I have two boys heading to college this fall. And I have two in elementary school. One of my oldest sons is a two-time cancer survivor and the experience of trauma from the health and healthcare and you know, like life's are ending illness perspective. A scene through my lens as a mother of a child who was going through high school as he was battling this disease. It's very particular. It really opened my eyes to an incredible depth and new layers of complexity around how we set up curriculum, how we are designing our assessments, our classroom management, our availability to students and the resources that any one institution offers. But at the same time, I think that we are now in this place of serious community and national trauma that goes beyond the pandemic. I mean, we've experienced the pandemic. We are experiencing the pandemic and it's important to me that we speak about it in present tense. I lost my father to COVID-19. He lived in South America. He was a cardiovascular anesthesiologist in the front lines, intubating critical patients. And he passed, it was very fast. And I buried my dad over Zoom. And I share this information because this is a critical anchor to my work. I believe that every aspect of our intersecting social identities and positionalities at any given time are going to impact how we are working, researching, writing, publishing and how we're interacting with one another, our colleagues and our students. So that's to say, I think about many of my colleagues who have family living abroad in many other nations and countries where vaccine availability is not even close to what we're experiencing in the United States, where political and social and economic upheaval is really damaging and fracturing all of the avenues for healing, right? As a community and as a society. And then I would say that here in the United States, apart from having to go through the pandemic and experiencing this, we've also experienced the impact of climate change. I was recently doing one of these types of conversations with colleagues at the University of Arizona and their land was on fire, right? And so we are constantly having to navigate all of these stressors. And I think it's at an unprecedented rate. Quite frankly, I personally feel that we haven't fully processed one experience and we already are having to deal with the next. We also have shootings a few months ago in my town, I live in Boulder, Colorado. There was an active shooting situation that was incredibly painful for my community, right? And so I'm seeing all of these pockets of trauma unfolding real time. And how can we not think to have this in our context when we talk about higher education? And so the third part of my answer, Brian, is going to be there's community trauma, there's generational ancestral and historical trauma, sexual and gender based trauma. This we see in college campuses, right? There's racial trauma. And I would link that to racial battle fatigue syndrome. I would link that to microaggressive stressors that are taking a real time toll on students' wellbeing and their ability to learn. Disaster and comfort based trauma. We see this a lot with international students as well. And we see it at home. We're going to see this in Miami, right? These are conversations that we need to be having. And of course that there are traumatic events that are related to our own health. That is an incredibly rich, moving, thoughtful reply. I'm, first of all, again, on behalf of everybody in this forum, please accept our condolences for your terrible loss, mediated in such a cruel and humane way. I'm also struck by the way that you described trauma, thinking through trauma as a kind of defamiliarization of academia. It makes us rethink all these different systems. As you said, our research, our service, our teaching, our student support, all in new ways. That's incredibly, incredibly rich. You can see, friends, why it's so important to have Valentina as a guest this week. I have a couple of questions I'd like to follow up with, but I'd also really like to hear from you all. And again, if you have questions about the nature of trauma, if you have questions about what it means in academia, or if you have questions about what this means for structuring academia in the next academic year, this is the time and this is the place for it. We had a quick question from Elaine at Champlain College, and she is wondering what the URL is for the open access documentation and modules. I will post it right now. Great, if you do that, I can show you a few more. Okay, I'm going to post it. There you go. Great, great. And for everybody, that's inclusive-teaching.du.edu. And in fact, I'm gonna flash it on the screen right now on big, big letters so everyone can see it. There you go. Can't possibly miss it. Elaine, thank you. Thank you for asking. And we have another question from a longtime friend and supporter of the program, Tom Hames in Texas. And Tom asks, can you connect trauma with rationality? I've seen so many irrational, institutional responses to the pandemic. Can we connect this to the trauma of administrators? This is a fascinating question, Tom. Can you leave the question up, Brian? I can keep it for a little bit. Can you connect trauma with rationality in terms of I've seen so many irrational, institutional responses to the pandemic? And then can we connect this to the trauma experienced by administrators? I think there's a lot of disjointment, Tom, that's causing a lot of pain points and that has caused so much tension across the higher ed landscape in the past, over 12 months. And I think that trauma ultimately is experienced first by the individual. And then we're going to see that ripple through our community, unless it's in fact impacting everybody in the same way. But we know the pandemic impacted people very differently. There were inherent inequities to how the pandemic was experienced by individuals. So it was not experienced the same by a single mom, single-handedly teaching a class who is pre-tenure, who also has to take care of children at home in real time, as it was for perhaps a chancellor that didn't have those responsibilities but had many other pressures on them. And so I think that's where it starts to get really layered and complex that I don't think there's a one way. I think when we talk about rationality and academia, we're also talking about data, we're talking about best practices, what is the research saying? And for this situation, I don't think that any one institution had a very robust portfolio of action indicating where we should go next. It was incredibly fluid, information was coming from so many different places and it was changing so fast that I think being rational felt almost a challenge. And what people defined as, that was a rational decision might have been challenged by others. I think this hit the emotional core of enough people in enough different ways that it became seemingly insurmountable to be able to meet everybody's needs. I don't know if that's answering the question but that's to say, I have yet to see any one response that was so swift and quick and smooth by any institution of higher education in this country to say that was the rational thing to do. I think everybody did what they thought was rational at that time. So as of right now though, I do think we have quite a bit of data and research telling us how the future, how we come back to campus, what return to campus can look like, right? And we're seeing different trends. Harvard Business Review has published extensively in the last couple of months around the benefits of providing everybody in its staff administration, a lot of flexibility, also flexibility around our teaching and teaching modalities, which all of which are incredibly inclusive practices just inherently prior to the pandemic. So I'm glad to see them being adopted by institutions that had not actually adopted these types of practices before the pandemic. So I think rationality, it's still incredibly subjective. It's a deep question, Tom. And this is the kind of question that we expect from Tom and Valentina, thank you for a very thoughtful response. If you're new friends to the forum or to the Shindig platform, this is how the Q&A boxes work. So again, if you'd like to type in such a question, just hit that question mark button and type away. And even as I say that, people are typing away like, Matt, this is great. Patricia Anderson reminds us that long COVID is a very real and gritty way in which the trauma of COVID will continue to impact us. Yes, and we don't give that nearly enough attention. Valentina, you also have a fan in Amelia who reminds us of this phrase, trauma is a normal reasonable response to an abnormal situation, which is a very, very important one. We have questions that have come in and I wanna bring them up. One is from a great friend of the program from Dickinson College, Professor Ed Webb. And Ed asks, how can we effectively discuss trauma-informed pedagogy and policies with colleagues who see rigor as the highest value and as being threatened by adaptation to trauma? Good question. Okay. That's a great question and thank you for all the comments. Can you put the question up again, Brian, please? Of course, of course. In fact, I'm gonna bring up the time around it so I can stay up longer. So this is... So, right. First, I think, Ed, thanks for the question. I think the first issue with addressing this is, why would rigor be in question when we're talking about teaching and building practices and spaces that actually are known to further the engagement and deep learning potential of every single student in that institution, right? So this, I tend to see this quite a bit in the justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion world, these kind of misunderstandings around, well, but it's all about academic rigor. And it is about academic rigor, but what good it is academic rigor if our students can't learn the content and critically engage with it and remember it and apply it as a critical lens in and beyond their discipline and into the real world, right? So I would start there with colleagues and furthermore, who are we teaching? We're teaching whole human beings at all times and we know that we filter everything we learn through the identities that we claim at any given time. So when I am in a classroom, I am already making millions of connections in real time between explicit and implicit content and messaging and frameworks to my own experiential realities in the world because we're humans. We're not just, we're not computers, right? So I think the conversation starts with honoring the fact that we teach whole human beings and we ourselves as faculty researchers and scholars, we are whole human beings. So for me to come into a classroom, for example, at this time in history without telling my students on that very first day, hey, we've been through a lot. In however way I wanna say it and letting them know my door is open to you, my door really is open. I understand that there is a million external factors that are going to influence and impact your success in my course. And if I can help and support in any way, shape or form, I want to do that because ultimately, I'm not in that classroom to further my own prestige, but rather ensure that they are all having truly transformative, impactful learning experiences. And so it's not so much about us, but really about how do we create these spaces for students who've experienced tremendous loss, who are fearful. I've had students who have been survivors of sexual and gender violence, of devastating loss, political trauma and violence who've been immigrants in this country, all kinds of things. And their needs are specific and most of them are not knowledgeable in how to ask for what they need. And as faculty, we're not trained to be psychiatrists or psychologists, but we should recognize our students and see them as whole, entire beings at all times. I mean, that's foundational to the work that I do and to critical and inclusive pedagogies in general. That's a perfect answer, Valentina. And Ed, thank you for a question that's gonna be on everybody's minds, I'm sure, in different ways. I especially wanna make sure that people get that first part of Valentina's answer about trauma negatively impacting people's ability to learn. So that's straight up for someone concerned about rigor, that's going to be a problem. We have more questions coming in and a few more comments. Lisa Durf says, comment, we won't get rigor unless we relate first, which is a really, really good statement. And we have a question from Elaine at Champlain College. Professor has this question, she's honestly worried about teaching in person this coming academic year. How can I be there for my students when I'm still processing my own experiences being in isolation and lockdown during COVID? Just a quick shout out by the way, Elaine's coming from Vermont, which is the state that did best in the pandemic in terms of infections, death rate, and vaccinations. Absolutely, Elaine, I'm right there with you. This is a question that is front and center in my very own mind as we're talking about return to campus and that's why I shared previously my own experiences with the pandemic and how I am still very much grieving the loss of my father whom I spoke to almost every single day. He was my number one guy. Don't tell my husband, but he was and he's gone, right? And I'm trying to breathe and process this and I'm learning that grief is a very long, deep journey to navigate. It will never end. I just haven't arrived to a place where I know how to do everything in my day and everything in my work that my work demands without having moments of pause where I feel incredible crushing sadness, right? And I'm able to come out of that, but it's happening to me and it's happening to many of my students and even colleagues of mine who lost more than one family member during the pandemic to COVID. And so I think the way I'm gonna do it, I think that's my best answer to you and the most honest one I can give is I'm going to be as genuine and intentional as I can possibly be with my colleagues and my students and just let them know that we are going to be processing a lot of things together. There will be a lot of triggers along the way. This journey has been full of unknowns. And all we know at this point is that as Brian said early in the introduction, we don't know enough. We don't know what the next five, six months actually look like in relation to this virus and we're incredibly hopeful. I think we should all be. But at the same time, I don't want to anchor anything in false positivity, right? Around, hey, I know we're out of this and let's go back to normal. We will not ever be back to normal. We're in a new reality and it must be framed and valued as such. So that's what I plan to do is allow for my students to know that I myself am processing a lot of what happened this year and a lot of the taxation of the year. And you mentioned isolation. This has taken such an impact on folks and then the demands of caretaking. Anyone with children who was doing that and their work and their research, we have data around the impact this has had on women in academia and their publication records. And I am very worried for junior faculty in pre-tenure who might have lost a year and our institutions actually paying attention to that and building new policies and processes and review structures, right? To honor that fact, because as I keep saying, we are whole human beings and we need to, in higher education, I think we really need to start having these very honest conversations a little bit more. I have it right now, I think we are. Thank you again, Elaine, for a fantastic question and Valentina for such a breath of an answer. We have all kinds of comments coming in, people echoing this on Twitter. More than a few comments in the chat. Barbara Hall mentions parents whose children are ineligible for vaccination for young children, for example. And Vanessa Vale offers the fantastically sharp comment. Perhaps this question of rigor is how faculty manifest trauma. And I just wanna make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask all of their questions because this is so important and we need, as you say, to have these conversations, even if this feels like it's never ending. Professor Pam Mack at Clemson University has this question. She asks, in an ideal world, what criteria would you use for faculty raises to reward those who did so much care work during the last 18 months? My university apparently plans to use their usual merit system. Pam, and I'm sad to say I'm seeing the same. I'm actually not seeing any new and novel patterns that are going to reward the significant emotional labor that faculty did throughout the pandemic. I have yet to see any institution roll out any formal messaging or communication to let their faculty know. I think the flip side of that from the administration is how do we know, engage where the disparities were? I think in some roles that it's easier to assess than in others. And so there might be issues of unfairness and inequity that arise from any one of those approaches. I'm not sure how people are going to go about it. I do know that we tend to have these conversations at the University of Denver around the emotional labor that underrepresented members of the global majority have in their departments as they take on extra mentorship of students that are validated and feel comfortable and honored by them, right? And we also see the disparities along gender in academia and some of the needs of students just coming into office hours all the time and expecting us to fix so many things and help them with so many things, which we try to do, right? You know, in the past, our institution has done more of kind of like awards to let people know we see you, we've seen the work you're doing, but certainly I think this needs to become institutionalized in the sense that when we do yearly reviews, whatever system the university is using, there should be a place for faculty to actually share this important critical narrative to their well-being and frankly, I mean, this is why many faculty leave certain institutions at different times, right? This lack of recognition and extreme taxation. So I would say that yearly review must include a space for this to look at and even upload artifacts, right? Around the work that faculty have done in these areas beyond the campus, because frankly, I see faculty who do it not just on campus with students, but in the community setting as well. And this has immediate ramifications to campus culture and the well-being of that community. So I don't think it's just one way, but we certainly I think need to create the structures and until we create new structures and systems, I think we'll keep having these kind of pockets of conversations. Well, this is a great answer. And first of all, Pam, thank you for the very, very precise question which really digs into so many different topics. We have Valentina, we have a stack of questions that kind of hit us from different angles. So some of them may overlap a little bit. So I just want, these all have to do with a very practical nature of support. And we start off with David Hull at National University who asked a question about a completely under, criminally underappreciated population. How do you envision collaboration in campus-based veteran student services and other campus departments regarding learning from the PTSD experienced by military veterans? Great question, David. David, this is a great question. At the University of Denver, we have a robust office dedicated to our veteran students and they do quite a bit of work around PTSD as well. And I think this is the time, the time is perfect timing to start and highlight these experiences in these offices on campus and bring them to the broader community. I mean, we're so siloed and decentralized by nature in higher education that veterans and their experiences might be completely, it's something that nobody talks about and faculty are completely unaware of that they have students in their classrooms who in fact have PTSD. But then the flip side of that is, and this is something of concern to me when I see students who don't actually have a robust understanding of what trauma is, of what PTSD is, of the physical, physiological, psychological impacts of this kind of effect on people. And they just kind of throw it around loosely. So I hear so often, you know, people that say, oh, you know, I, something very small and say like, oh, I have PTSD from that, you know. And honoring the fact that so many of our students and faculty and so many of us, period, right, have had these experiences over time and how that's impacting our interactions in the classroom and how we're triggered because the triggering happens in a second, in a split second in that classroom and faculty might not know how to react or where that's coming from, right? Like, so why is my student so angry all of a sudden? Well, if you'd known your student a little bit more beyond their name and pronoun, you know, there might have been contexts there for you to deal differently with whatever educational artifact you decided to share with the class. And this is a classic one, right? It might be a film that we're showing a song that we're playing, a text that we're reading that immediately brings our student there. It's incredibly triggering. It paralyzes a lot of the learning that was occurring in the first place and the student didn't have a headset, right? And I think historically in higher ed, we've talked about that more like, quote unquote, trigger warnings and then that devolved into a conversation around censorship and censoring and, you know, you know how it goes, right? Because we deconstruct everything. It starts as one thing and ends up being something completely different. And at the same time, I feel the last couple of years have added some more texture to all of these conversations. They've been politicized, all of those things. And so I think it would be an amazing time to have veteran services and experts in the field approach the community at large. So at the University of Denver, what we do is we publish blog posts around the impact this has in the learning of our students and why faculty, as faculty, we care, we should care, right? And then we actually provide tools. That's one way I would say weaving that into campus communications coming from the chancellor, the vice provost for faculty affairs or your provost, whomever, just from the top down, saying we are aware of these experiences, we see you and we're doing our best to learn tools to manage and support the complexities of trauma in this space. Thank you. That's a terrific answer and for a really, really important question. Thank you. We have a few questions, Valentina, that turn on specifically teaching. And one of them, I can't display, so just came in by chat, let me just read it out loud. May I ask, this is from Jennifer Jackson. May I ask how Valentina imagines faculty could somehow teach the many somatic hurts caused in multiple traumas? As an English prof, I use writing prompts to explore re-narrating trauma, but students are suffering physically and somatically as well. Yeah. You know, I don't have one answer and one tool for that. I love to engage a lot of formative assessments for deep reflection throughout the entire academic quarter semester to kind of gauge how my students are doing in the class. Something I've been recommending lately is the critical incident questionnaire and rewriting those questions a little bit. So the CIQ, I can link up to that. You can get that answer. Okay, so it's from Press School. And what that does is it gives the students a moment of pause with what's happening in the classroom and you might do it as an anonymous paper. If you're in person, just have them write it out for a minute, but if you're online, just have them open an email message to you, time them for one minute, have them write their answer to the question. And it might be, you know, was there anything that anyone said or did in today's class that challenged your thinking or made you feel confused and it starts to get at how they're feeling with the content that they're learning. So we're starting to get a better read for the temperature in our classroom as they're progressing. And so absolutely prompts. I love, let's see, Jewel and Durand published a book last year. That is, I consider it to be like a 101 primer on anti-racist teaching, but it's so approachable and beautiful and simple. And they have one deep reflection exercise that asks students to think about being on a lake altogether, but everybody's on different vessels, right? Some people might be on a speed boat, some people might be on a canoe, they get to choose as they think about where they are in this shared space. And as you're moving through the course, you start to ask them like, where are you in relation to other people? Like, how are you feeling? And what I have found is that some students might surprise me and say like, I'm drowning. I can't keep up. I mean, this is going way too fast. I might be lacking foundational knowledge or a shared baseline understanding around some of the frameworks and some of the concepts that my classmates are using here. Some might be like, oh, this is too basic, right? And so we start to get a better read for how they're doing. One, my dear colleague at the University of Denver, Amelia Gentile Matthew, I think it's on this call. She is an instructional designer in my office, in the office of teaching and learning, and she has devoted her entire career to trauma and trauma-informed care. And she's amazing and she's going to be sharing with the world a lot of actual tools like the three Rs and how we do this in the classroom. So when you look at the website, our inclusive teaching practices website, be sure to check back in about a month and the new module will be up. And she created a lot of downloadable toolkits for everyone. So the three E's is empathize, educate, and empower. And she actually gives you questions and she gives you the sample language of what this sounds like in the classroom. Like what you could say to your student because I sometimes feel we can keep having conversations but I need to know an example. I need to know what this sounds like, what it feels like. And ultimately, whatever you're comfortable doing in your own space, do that. Thank you. Your answers are so generous and so detailed. I'm very, very impressed and very happy with this. Terry Brandenburg asked a related question. I think you may have just anticipated it. She asked, what specific learning activities would you recommend on my instructors to foster greater inclusivity and belonging for their online students? So I think some of the ones you described really work for that. Yeah, I have been really thinking about something that I call the faculty biography and student biography. So I wrote a series of prompts and this is in the University of Denver OTL website. There's teaching an inclusive teaching toolkit in there where I included all of the questions. And before the students coming to that environment or once they do, I think one of the first assignments is really getting to know them and building community there. And so for the faculty member to write a paragraph biography of themselves that answers some of the questions that I use. And those include, what is your educational history and what was your educational journey up to this point, but not just from where did you get all your degrees, right? What were the hurdles that you had to face to get to where you are? So on and so forth. And then emulating that, so that students then write their own biographies. You provide the same prompts that you had that you used for your own and have students write in their own words, whatever they want, and have them share that with the class. I think if you're teaching online, whenever you're designing your LMS space, I would definitely create a module that is kind of like the housekeeping aspect, the human aspect of the course where you can include the biographies are in there. If you are co-creating community agreements that should go in there. These are living and breathing aspects of teaching, right? The critical incident questionnaire should probably be in there as well. And co-creating with students and glossary as well. So I tend to add all of the things that I assume my students know, but I didn't actually assess it. I didn't assess whether they actually have a very clear understanding of what this one concept means or that concept means. So I create a glossary that goes in there as well. So for all online classes, right? Like this is how we are going to be defining prejudice. I don't know, systemic racism, whatever it may be. And these are open to change and they will change. And these are the top scholars that I'm reading about it. What do my students have to say? And then when we are in conversation in the virtual space, we have a shared understanding. And I know more about them than, again, like I said, name, pronoun, area of study or interest, so on and so forth. This is, we're digging deep into this. And this is really powerful. One quick recommendation and one quick question. Participant Pam Mack shared a wonderful blog post she did about returning to campus. So I just put that in the chat. But also we had a quick question, Valentina, for the primer. Oh, no, no, no, we already got that. It's okay, nevermind, got that in there. Oh, we have more questions coming in. And this is one from Peter at the Associated Colleges. And Peter asks, could you discuss the impact of the disruptions at the secondary level for social and emotional learning? And how the result of trauma will affect the incoming class this fall? So I think we can absolutely talk about the disruptions in the secondary level. I think we're going to see very serious and egregious disparities in how well our students can manage the next step up in the curriculum, you know, at the secondary level. I think that there are a lot of gaps that are going to emerge after this year and there will definitely need to be quite a bit of remediation, but I don't think that it will be attainable as an individual approach to individual students, though that might also be necessary. I think that the way we will succeed in doing that is again, systemically, there has to be built into the curriculum an entire review of the critical foundational baseline understanding and concepts and theoretical frameworks that we expected students to have mastered last year and we want them to apply them further this year, right? I think we're going to be seeing huge gaps in that. And then the inequities that are inherent to this experience, you know, I had two seniors in high school, but my seniors in high school had tutors that were available to them and coming home and working with them and AP classes and they continued, you know, but that was not the experience of every single child and every single student. So how are we going to make that happen? You know, the school districts are definitely going to need some support, I think from the federal level as well, in how we are able to provide a lot of after school support, tutoring support, one-on-one support, but also how teachers are building into the curriculum for this year and into their assessments, you know, a lot of flexibility. And we can't also, we can't keep talking about this from a deficit-oriented lens. In fact, I think, you know, we need to recenter that child, recenter the human experience that that student had and for the secondary population, I mean, the mental health crisis amongst very young children and young adults, it's crippling the nation right now. So that really concerns me quite a bit when we talk about the incredible disruption the pandemic had in K-12, in the K-12 setting and how well-prepared our faculty and our teachers and administrators and support staff and school counselors are going to be in handling all of these aspects of what they experienced. Good question, Peter. And we're gonna really good answer, Valentina. And we're running low on time. Oh, no. So I've got a couple of more questions that are coming up and Valentina, you can be as precise and even terse if you need to just so that we give everyone a shot. This is from Peter Wallace at the University of Wisconsin Continuum College. And he asks a really important one. Thinking about infrastructures and individuals, how do you divide between what an individual teacher can do to implement trauma-informed pedagogy versus what the institutional responsibilities are? Very good question. That's a very big question. I mean, there are in fact institutional responsibilities and all of the offices that are providing care to students and psychological support, counseling services, so on and so forth. Everyone at this point needs to know where they are and who they are. I think faculty are better equipped at identifying and assessing student need in real time because we pick up on the physical cues, the verbal and non-verbal cues of our students. We see decline in our students' engagement wellbeing, like physical demeanor in real time. And so what can you as a faculty member activate? At the University of Denver, we can activate through an online system, a care report where we activate all of the campus resources around mental health, physical health, wellbeing for students in real time. And then those resources are deployed to our student in a very gentle and formative and supportive manner. So I think our responsibility is there, right? And then that institutionally is definitely tied to mandatory reporting around other issues. But when it comes to inclusive and trauma-informed pedagogy, it's caring. Honestly, it's just caring for your students and letting them know that it is hard and it does matter. Their experiences matter. Thank you. And it really does. There's a related question. So this is almost the same, but not quite. This is actually very related to it though from Professor Sarita Shukla at the University of Washington, Bethel, who says, supporting students while taking care of yourself is a delicate dance. Might you've seen examples like assignments or policies that were indicative of the support? And then she asks, what about late work? And I think that's just an example of the policy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've seen this change quite a bit and depending on how much you're able to change your assessments. And you control your classroom space and your class. And so being as flexible as possible but also understanding that you can't be, if you yourself are going through a very difficult time, maybe assigning four research papers with a lot of citation for a class authority might not be sustainable for you to do this semester. So how can you rethink the assessment pieces and how can you rethink the deep engagement with the content? So maybe I would say like scaffold it so that you're not in fact losing any rigor. You might actually be deepening engagement by doing that. So breaking it up and telling students, instead of a one day hard deadline, the deadline is between Monday and Friday of this week. And students will submit as they can and as they see fit. So I don't think it's an all or nothing. I think we can build environments that are more conducive to people being human and handling the challenges that come with that and also really succeeding in school. And so that's something that I highly recommend. I mean, think about, do a quick review of your syllabus of your curriculum and your assessments and your goals and then break that up. Great answer. Friends, I just put on the chat also a link to a previous session we did on work-life balance which is part of this. And we are almost out of time, which means I get to take the moderator's privilege and ask one question looking forward. And that is if the trauma doesn't end, if the pandemic in the United States settles down below pandemic levels, but if we still are dealing with this and the trauma from other events, including military experience, including climate change, what does a campus that takes trauma-informed teaching and support seriously, what does that campus look like say five years from now? How, I was a different from what we have now. The campus would be different because we would see students and faculty staying on that campus and succeeding on that campus. Yeah. We would see students with very challenging personal narratives and experiences say, yeah, I went there. And we're seeing some of that in the media, right? Recently at Harvard, so on and so forth, not to say that the way they're doing things is the only way, but I'm really drawn to that question from the student perspective. And I'll share again more personally, Brian, for me, I think about my own son who was exposed to lifetime doses of neurotoxic chemotherapy during his most formative years and the kid got into Berkeley, okay? And how do you do that? It's because the systems that were provided to him were flexible. They were flexible to recognize his needs in real time, to recognize the fact that he couldn't meet a hard deadline on this one specific day but he needed a longer amount of time to work on something. So I think that that's what the campus looks like. It's one where we'll start to hear almost, these kind of mind blowing impossible stories and life narratives of students that are coming to the world incredibly well equipped with sophisticated skill sets ready to change the world. What a fantastic, fantastic point to end on. It is Valentina with almost infinite regret that I have to wrap things up. Thank you, thank you so much for being a splendid, splendid guest with so much, so much to offer. What is the best way that we have for keeping up with you for following your new work and following your module? How can people stay in touch with you? You will know what I'm up to on my website, ValentinaLagrov.com, it's up already and running. But there's a lot more coming at the end of the summer with that website, so be sure to check that out. There's quite a few publications, blog posts, also around trauma and around how to address institutional legacies of racism, so on and so forth. Honestly, Google my name and you will find some of my tools and things that you need to. And yeah, you can also always reach out personally if there's a request for institutional support or programmatic support. Fantastic, thank you, thank you so much. Thank you so much Valentina, it's really been the grave. Good luck and we will be in touch to keep in touch. But don't go away friends. We have just notes about what's coming up next. And I want to thank everybody for fantastic questions along the way. Just looking ahead, we have sessions coming up on digital reading, on equity for black students, the history of personalized learning, that's next week. Augmented in virtual reality, the educated underclass, how academic mergers work. If you'd like to learn more about those, just go to forum.futureofeducation.us. If you want to keep talking about all these different dimensions of trauma in the forum pedagogy, please head to Twitter and just use the hashtag FTE. You can tweet at me, at Brian Alexander or at Shindig events. And of course, my blog will be hosting all kinds of conversations as well. If you'd like to go back into the past and look at sessions on work-life balance, on teaching, on racism, on all kinds of issues, just head to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. And we have a lot of content there. Make sure you subscribe. And in the meantime, please everybody as the fall semester starts looming closer and closer, please take care of yourself. I'm delighted to be in conversation with all of you. It's great to think together with all of you. Take care and we'll see you online. Bye-bye.