Monthly Spotlight
Lori Caudle
Describe your project:
The Social Emotional Learning Trauma-Informed Preschool Studies (TIPS) is a research-practice partnership led by university faculty from UTK (Dr. Lori Caudle, Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Early Childhood) and Western Carolina University (Dr. Cathy Grist, Professor and Clinical Psychologist, Birth-Kindergarten). This community-engaged work supports early childhood educators in the implementation of trauma-informed, culturally-relevant interventions through play-based learning, STEAM-focused projects, responsive caregiving, and proactive classroom management within Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS). The partnering preschool is nestled in the Appalachian mountains and primarily serves young children and families who have experienced environmental, historical, chronic, and complex traumas. The core team includes graduate and undergraduate research assistants, certified preschool teachers, educational assistants, and the program director. Hannah Thompson, doctoral student in Child and Family Studies at UTK, has been a lead research assistant in this partnership since 2022 and works closely with Drs. Caudle and Grist. TIPS uses a relationship-based research-practice partnership framework that prioritizes educator well-being and learning through a holistic, sociocultural approach. This work is built from an understanding that effective interventions are place-based, situated, and emerge from the characteristics and needs of educators and children within their local contexts. Collaborative activities and data collection occur within professional learning community meetings, one-on-one wellness check-ins, book studies, classroom observations, pre/post interviews, child assessments, teacher surveys, and informal communication. In this partnership, the university team members use strategies that center educators’ voices and provide dedicated time for reflection, negotiation, and meaning-making as they support children’s social-emotional and cognitive development and learning.
What’s your why?
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, conversations and initiatives related to trauma have become more frequent, but tend to focus on short-term workshops, modules, and trainings about trauma-informed practices with little focus on educator well-being. Educators’ well-being impacts how they establish and maintain relationships with children and families, facilitate positive learning environments, and respond to children’s academic, social, and behavioral needs in the classroom through trauma-informed, culturally relevant pedagogy. Higher levels of teacher burnout and stress have been linked to higher levels of stress hormones in children. As children become more stressed, they engage in more challenging externalizing behaviors. These behaviors are intensified for children with disabilities and those who have experienced trauma. As educator burnout and turnover are on the rise, there is a need to provide sustained social-emotional support for educators as they navigate complex classroom realities. One effective way to provide this support is through relationship-based, trusting partnerships that embed research-based interventions within ongoing supports. Policy changes in early childhood education have also led to less time and dedication to play-based learning and project work, which has serious implications for children’s social-emotional development and academic outcomes. Through partnerships, educators can learn how to integrate multimodal learning experiences into existing curricula, thus providing opportunities for children to develop self-regulation, communication skills, STEAM knowledge, and a host of other social emotional competencies.
Important lesson learned for people who are doing this work.
Research-practice partnerships are complicated, yet extremely rewarding. They require a unique level of transparency, trust, risk-taking, and reflection in order to be successful. Partners should be equitable members of the teams, which allows for reciprocity in the learning process and ensures the voices of community members are central to the work. Partnership teams are also fluid, not only because membership changes regularly, but also due to individuals adopting varying roles and responsibilities over time. It is essential that infrastructures built within partnerships allow for leadership to emerge within the local communities to support sustainability.
Impact made on UT and the community.
As with most community-engaged scholarship, the impact of TIPS is difficult to measure, but is best understood through both practitioner and research lenses. The educators have grown in their knowledge of social emotional competencies and STEAM education in preschool. Further, their classroom practices are becoming not only trauma-informed and culturally relevant, but are moving toward being trauma-reducing and culturally sustaining as well. The educators’ well-being is improving and they are growing in their confidence in implementing STEAM lessons, individualized interventions, and responsive caregiving. The educators are becoming leaders in the region and some are now formally mentoring educators at another local preschool who is beginning a similar partnership. Child outcomes are still being measured and evaluated, but preliminary results have shown positive growth in both cognitive and social-emotional domains. The university partners have received valuable feedback from educators about what works and what does not work in this particular partnership and this has allowed for the co-construction of classroom activities and professional learning experiences. University faculty and students have also grown in their understandings of how to build relationship-based partnerships that include a balance of structure and flexibility. The university graduate and undergraduate researchers have been given a unique opportunity to implement participatory research methodologies while also building lasting relationships with community members. Future plans include expanding TIPS to include preschools across rural regions of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee. Broader implications for policy/system changes include an emergent, trauma-informed, professional development framework that can be replicated in a range of early childhood educational settings.