teaching trauma

I just finished reading Shane Borrowman's Trauma and the Teaching of Writing and I'm struck by how underprepared compositionists are to deal with trauma. Okay, we're not therapists so there's a (sensible) line of reasoning that says dealing with trauma is beyond our scope and outside of our expertise. But as I made my way through Borrowman, I recalled Blitz and Hurlbert's Letters for the Living, a work that argues that teachers in general (and rhetoricians in particular) have an obligation to situate their work within the cultures of violence in which we work.

Sharing his 9/11 story, which consisted of "retreating" from what he saw as his duty to support his frightened students on the morning of September 11, Borrowman writes, "we teach through our own traumas, the individual traumas of our students, and the shared traumas of the nation." Among other things, writing is building a network of ideas and a network of multiple voices (voices of agreement, voices of dissent, etc.) and, in times of pain and war, in times of divisive public conversations, shouldn't the writing network that we teach provide means of responding to trauma?

After reading Borrowman, I went back and re-read Richard Miller's oft-cited CE article "The Nervous System." Miller articulates a version of trauma that negotiates the personal-academic divide in composition, concluding that "the lessons outlined above could be said to be basic to any composition classroom that conceives of revision not as the act of tidying up past transgressions, but as the ongoing process of entertaining alternatives." Engagement with trauma is more than engagement with the personal. More than engagement with critique. Writing through trauma is generative work, what Miller calls "entertainment," what Borrowman suggests is a discursive reflection on how national and personal traumas link.