Trauma-Informed Social Work

In this required course, students will address key knowledge, values and skills that support trauma-informed approaches to social work practice. Students will learn core concepts of trauma-informed social work from an EcoBioEevelopmental framework. This framework will assist students in understanding the impact of adversity and traumatic stress on health and wellbeing across the lifespan. Throughout the course, we examine how risk and protective factors shape the impact of traumatic stress on individuals, families, and communities. Connected to the strategic foci of the GSSWSR, this course builds on foundation level content in our curriculum, including an emphasis on power, privilege, and oppression.

This course is comprised of six modules that are connected by key concepts of trauma-informed social work. Module 1 focuses on the definition of trauma and traumatic stress, differentiating amongst levels of stress and clarifying unique elements of traumatic stress. In this module we examine research on ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and how this work supports our understanding of how early life experiences of traumatic stress shape developmental and health outcomes across the life course. Module 2 focuses on the interrelatedness of trauma and “intersectional” identity-based oppression – the accumulation of multiple forms of related subjugation (for example, based in racism, homophobia, transphobia, other gender-based oppression, and socioeconomic classism) that can cause and/or mediate traumatic experience. In Module 3 students will identify and explain some connections between individual and collective trauma. Module 4 prepares students to develop a grounding in assessing the trauma-informed capacity of their field agency, as well as for the promotion of trauma-informed principles in agency structure, policies, and in the organizational climate. Module 5 examines how cross-cultural perspectives on trauma are key to knowledge, values, and skills relevant to local and global models of social work practice. This module builds upon a perspective of trauma that moves away from its conceptualization as a natural category to embrace the cultural and ecological systems that shape human experience and model ways of coping and meaning making. Module 6 explore pathways to trauma healing and particular implications for social work practice across system levels and including Macro and Clinical Practice.