Author’s Note
Hello and welcome! I’m Katherine Schlatter and this is my “author’s note” also available in audio format. In the picture above, I’m on the left, and to the right is Andrea Patterson, who joins me as Co-founder at THENCE, editor and co-author of the supplementary material for this book. More on that in a little while. First I’d like to share that this nonfiction narrative graphic novel originated from a graduate class project that I completed for a course taught by Professor Sarah Dryden Peterson at Harvard University. The class took place in the spring semester of 2015 and was named Education in Armed Conflict. Prof. Dryden Peterson led us to focus on the educational experiences of children and youth during or following conflict. Some years later the Professor and her team got in touch with me. She and her research team had founded REACH, an institute for research, advocacy and policy development that centers children’s experiences and the challenges of interrupted education. I was flattered to hear that my original class project would be showcased on the REACH website.
After finishing my Masters degree at Harvard I went on to work with Native Tribal Nations in Montana as a technical advisor for a very successful Native owned and operated health center that became a model for plains tribes Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Programs. Outside of program implementation, the work there taught me a lot about children who have experienced trauma, as I often worked alongside mental health care providers. In those years, however, it was the practice of strength-based healing, by and for community members, as described by the many Indigenous scholars who proposed and informed the approach, which actually made the most lasting impact on the community. Watching this approach in action deeply influenced my doctoral research at Teachers College Columbia University, but also informed many projects beyond my doctorate.
As we all know, the global COVID pandemic disrupted our daily lives, changing many work and scholastic rhythms forever. In my personal life the switch away from work-related travel to remote full-time consulting was a saving grace for myself and my family. In those long lock-down months I also attained a key certificate for creating robust programming around health improvement. It’s called the MCHES Certification, and is issued by the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing. Fortunately, the pandemic eventually passed. And then there came a time when I started to feel unsatisfied with certain consulting projects. Eventually, I began to reformulate my business into a technology company that could quickly deploy learning solutions with an option to add platforms and generate community-based training content, mentor matching, and coaching for teaching, or care-provision improvement.
Fast forward to 2023, I was attending a conference in Geneva, Switzerland which highlighted the fact that a record 43.3 million children live in “forced displacement” of which 60% had been internally displaced by armed conflict and violence. Furthermore, a keynote speaker pointed to how global capacity to respond was under increasing strain, and the issues that children faced were often misunderstood. Digesting this it occurred to me that more approachable tools are needed to prepare staff for classrooms that offer a scholastic home for children following displacement. I discussed this with my colleagues at THENCE and realized that we could adopt my past project to champion curricula around trauma-informed and strengths-based perspectives. We chose to evolve my class project into a graphic novel as both a teaching tool and and as an example of “graphic medicine” a newish genre in the non-fiction, educational, public health world.
It was also at this time that a close friend and fellow educator working in the NYC school system became increasingly concerned about meeting the needs of new students, indeed there were fresh waves of young student asylum seekers entering into the schools in 2021. Anecdotally, there seemed to be a difficulty for harmonizing students’ immediate needs with the classroom’s broader educational goals. Andrea Patterson, actor and Applied Theater educator and myself joined forces in mid 2023 to try and create digital ways in which to present professional development as more accessible, timely, pertinent and interactive. Together we considered the question of who might benefit immediately from new, affordable toolkits with a trauma informed and strength-based approach?
Survivors of displacement are reinitiating their education with additional challenges of also having to navigate a new language, culture, and foreign social norms. Perhaps career and pre-service educators and providers of care, would be interested in our fresh approach to trauma-informed and strength-based perspectives. Students above the age of twelve may be mature enough to read our graphic novel, and discuss aspects of exposure to potentially traumatizing events, chronic stress, symptoms of PTSD, and feelings or anger, revenge, as well as resilience and commitment to long-term activism and change. The graphic novel format, the illustrative depictions of emotions, symptoms and behaviors, and the language itself is specifically designed for those acquiring English as a second language. Our true aim, in this regard, was not only for wider accessibility, but also that our professional training will ultimately benefit the children needing further support.
Patterson and I embarked on an experiment of figuring out how to couple an approachable narrative with layers of technology that allowed for brief iterative learning. Eleven months later this graphic novel, with its accompanying “TIGERS Tools” which stand for Trauma Informed Guides for Educators and Recovering Survivors was ready for testing. The result is a marriage between narrative drama and iterative, digital, interactive learning. Although you can hold the physical book and leaf through its pages, potentially reading it in less than an hour, we also built an entire digital ecosystem to facilitate discussion, critical thinking, and metacognition. Some of these tools are free with the book’s purchase. Scan any of the twenty-eight embedded QR codes and the user may instantly find specific educational summaries, concepts and material designed for acquiring knowledge and skills around trauma. Those leaders of institutions who wish to take a deeper dive may subscribe to our full trauma-informed strength-based curriculum at THENCE.us and know that we are always available to customize, and localize further training.
In phase two of what is now a major team effort spanning several continents, we are partnering with research institutes to test the benefits of learning about the trauma-informed and strengths-based approaches to education and care through narrative drama, and our interactive, iterative, study guides. The digital learning ecosystem will be tested for its usability, flexibility and influence on users’ attitudes, behaviors and beliefs relating to children who have experienced traumatic events and forced displacement. We have two more graphic medicine novels in the pipeline, and learning around these are currently being devised. For more on these efforts, or if you would like to become part of, or a contributor to the research for testing this interactive format contact info@THENCE.us
