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| Edition 38 · September 25, 2026 | |||||||||
| Building Connection, Choice, and Trust | |||||||||
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Dear Colleagues, Welcome to the 38th edition of Weekend Reads from CEPI. With higher education’s attention pulled toward AI, one part of our work can slip out of view. That part is helping students feel safe enough to learn. Most syllabi say little about it. When safety appears, it is usually a required statement near the end, written by the institution, about mental health support or disability accommodations. Our learning management system can tell students when an assignment is due and what it is worth, but it cannot tell them whether they can ask a question here without fear of being judged. Few assignments invite a student to ask for help before submitting. When one does, the line tends to read “for questions, email me at,” which feels more like a statement than an invitation. Some faculty do say it plainly in the first class, post it at the top of a module, or raise it in a hallway conversation. Safety and the classroom are rarely spoken about as if they belong together. Trauma-informed teaching asks us to join them. It means teaching in a way that accounts for students who have lived through serious harm. In December 2023, India Bryce and her colleagues searched three academic databases for research on trauma-informed teaching at university. Their search returned 667 results. Removing duplicates left 350. They kept only full-text, peer-reviewed studies in English, and read each title, abstract and method section. At the end, 17 studies were left. They then read the 17 side by side and grouped what they found into three themes. | |||||||||
| 1 · Connection | |||||||||
| Community and Connection | |||||||||
Fourteen of the 17 studies pointed to community and connection. Picture an ordinary class where this is in place. A student walks in knowing where to go if something is wrong, and who they can ask. They have had enough small exchanges with classmates to recognize a few faces. The instructor knows what support exists outside the classroom and does not have to invent a response in a crisis. The review describes this at several levels, from peer support groups to the institution around the class. Instructors know the referral pathways before a student needs them. The review recommends an institution-wide understanding of trauma, so no instructor carries this alone. The review also treats safety as something that differs between students. What feels safe to one student may not feel safe to another, and the authors ask for attention to culture and to students’ overlapping identities. | |||||||||
| 2 · Choice | |||||||||
| Student-Centered Practice | |||||||||
Thirteen of the 17 studies pointed to student-centered practice. It covers choice. Students can decide whether to take part in certain discussions. They can decide how to engage with difficult material. In some studies, students help design the curriculum and the assessment. In one, by Friedman, students valued flexible due dates. Instructors give content notes before hard material, with a reason for each one. Students then know what is coming and can decide how to engage. | |||||||||
| 3 · Trust | |||||||||
| Relational Approaches | |||||||||
Ten of the 17 studies pointed to relational approaches. Much of this happens in ordinary exchanges, which makes it easy to miss. Picture an instructor who notices that a student who usually speaks has gone quiet. A hard topic is introduced so students know what they are being asked to do. A student makes a mistake and the first response is curiosity. | |||||||||
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| An instructor notices a student who has gone quiet. | |||||||||
| Image credit: Concept by Anzar Khaliq | Center for Empowerment and Pedagogical Innovation (CEPI), San Francisco Bay University | Visuals created with ChatGPT | |||||||||
The review ties this to empathy and trust. Instructors treat strong feelings about hard material as normal. They watch for their own implicit bias. They also watch for microaggressions, the small, repeated slights that damage trust. None of this asks an instructor to become a therapist. | |||||||||
| An Example from a Communication Course | |||||||||
At SFBU, two of these themes are already part of how we describe good teaching. Our PERS framework asks courses to be Personalized, Experiential, Relational and Student-Centered. Bryce and her colleagues found the same two ideas by studying trauma-informed teaching. The course design for How to Communicate in Global Context includes a Feedback Care Label. Students use it to say how they tend to react to critical feedback and what helps them use it. The label is meant to shape how instructors write feedback on major assignments. | |||||||||
| Limits of the Review | |||||||||
The review rests on 17 studies. Eleven were conceptual or theoretical papers, six were qualitative studies, and none were quantitative. Most came from the United States. Most studied courses in the helping professions, such as social work, nursing and medicine. If you teach computer science or accounting, treat these findings as a starting point for your own course. The authors call for new research in more fields and more countries. | |||||||||
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Wishing you a reflective and restorative weekend. Warmly, Center for Empowerment and Pedagogical Innovation (CEPI) © 2026 CEPI. All rights reserved. |