(Forever Ready Productions)
In December 2020, Shelby County Schools teachers attended a training to learn how to support their students through traumas.
Adverse childhood experiences or ACEs are events or circumstances that create major instability in a child's core relationships or environments. Traditional definitions include things like household violence, homelessness, and the loss of a parent to death, divorce, or incarceration. Newer definitions include things like generational poverty and pervasive racism.
Even more recently, researchers are asking if the pandemic is an ACE, given the major upheaval it's brought to many children's lives.
Related: "Is the pandemic an 'Adverse Childhood Experience'?"
In the training, educators learned how to help their students heal from traumatic events, cope with stress, support one another as peers, and combat digital fatigue.
Teaching Teachers: Memphis Educators Learn To Fight Trauma from High Ground News on Vimeo.
.
.
.
[This video is funded in part by ACE Awareness Foundation as part of a series on adverse childhood experiences in Memphis, including the people and organizations offering innovative solutions to protect and heal the city's youth.]
Enjoy this story?
Sign up for free solutions-based reporting in your inbox each week.
Cole Bradley is a native Memphian and graduate of the University of Memphis. Cole's worked locally as a researcher and community engagement strategist and began contributing to High Ground in Jan 2017.