Trauma Informed Andragogy In Turbulent Times

Teaching and learning scholars have documented how identities of instructors and students, and campus demographics can shape classroom dynamics and strategies for approaching lessons on social inequality (Pittman, 2010; Garland-Thompson and Grumet, 2012), including managing resistance in the classroom (Parrotta & Rusche, 2011). Less is known about how instructors address these issues in turbulent times.

This session calls for papers that highlight strategies instructors have adopted to teach sociology during turbulent times in a variety of settings reflectively and ethically (Piacentini, 2026). For example, how do instructors respond to state censorship, executive orders, political unrest, war, student encampments? We seek to curate a diverse panel of instructors who are teaching in a range of institutional settings, to a variety of students (traditional and nontraditional college aged students), in different geographical locations to reflect how they have adapted their teaching practices. Papers drawing on autoethnographic lived reflections, analysis of class activities or projects, or reflections on successful and unsuccessful attempts to implement trauma informed approaches are sought. How have you sharpened students’ sociological lenses and critical thinking skills to illuminate generic social processes that reproduce inequality in their lives and institutional settings in turbulent times?