South African schools need a trauma-informed approach to the curriculum – Oprah Winfrey
Dineo Bendile
Media mogul Oprah Winfrey is on a mission to influence the South African education system into adopting a trauma-informed approach in its curriculum.
Last week Winfrey, through her school the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls (OWLAG), hosted a gathering of teachers and counselors in Midrand to discuss the impact of trauma on learning and strategies to support children.
The proposed strategies are based on the Neurosequential Model (NM) in Education, which has been in use at Winfrey’s institution since 2018 to address the needs of the learners, who come from disadvantaged and often traumatic backgrounds.
In an interview with Inside Education at the Gallagher Convention Centre, Winfrey dismissed any plans of opening another school in South Africa, and said her future efforts would be focused on seeing the rollout of the Neurosequential Model (NM) in as many local schools as possible.
“The work continues but no more brick and mortar for me,” Winfrey laughed. “The great hope is that, beginning with this conference, the word gets spread and we get more educators who are interested and have their own ‘Aha’ moment here.
“We are doing it [trauma-informed work], we are successful with it and we see the difference between the classes that have had it and the ones who didn’t. And we’re hoping that people will take this message, come to us for training and then spread the word,” Winfrey said.
At its inception in 2007 OWLAG, with its state-of-the-art facilities, was not a trauma-informed school. Consequently Winfrey, who had handpicked all the learners at the school, began worrying when the girls started to exhibit mental health problems.
Panic attacks, behavioral issues and disassociation, which can mimic chronic daydreaming, became common scenes inside OWLAG classrooms.
“I understood after so many girls being anxious and so many girls being depressed that we were doing something wrong. And there was something we needed to do that I wasn’t aware of. When we started, I just thought we just needed to build a good school,” Winfrey said.
“And then I realised that because these girls were so specifically from backgrounds that are challenged…unless you address that, you’re going to have major issues going forward,” she added.
Following this realisation she enlisted the services of neurosurgeon Dr Bruce Perry who explained that heightened anxiety, reduced concentration, and impaired problem-solving skills were among the many symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the learners due to their backgrounds and abrupt change in environment.
Perry proposed the introduction of the Neurosequential Model (NM) at the school, which encourages healing the parts of the brain that have been impaired by trauma, in order to return children to a calm state under which they can learn.
Some of the trauma-informed techniques used at OWLAG under this model include self-regulating activities such as going for walks, breathing exercises, music, meditation and other activities.
“The thing that disturbed me was that we’d gotten to the end of the six-year term and so many girls were still feeling this sense of unworthiness,” Winfrey recalled. “They didn’t even understand why they were there. NM helps you understand why you’re there. That what happened to you or your circumstances does not make you lesser than”.
The Covid-19 pandemic imposed great challenges on learners globally, as schools shut their doors during the lockdowns calling for the adoption of virtual lessons.
For many children, learning from home meant they did not have the comforts of the school environment to shield them from the difficulties in their homes and communities.
Winfrey said this was initially a concern for the staff at OWLAG, as many of the girls would have to leave their palatial boarding-school to return to their challenged environments for an indefinite period. However, their academic performance exceeded what teachers at OWLAG had expected, something Winfrey credits to the school’s trauma-informed approach, which could aptly anticipate learners’ needs.
During that period social workers were sent to the homes of every learner to monitor their wellbeing. Power-packs and Wifi routers were provided and staff members were available to attend to any technological challenges learners had.
While the hope is for the trauma-informed models to be adopted in other South African schools, the country’s public schooling system is burdened with systemic and infrastructural issues which threaten the ability to adequately address children’s trauma.
In addition to trauma in the community, many South African children experience trauma in their schools where pit latrines threaten their sense of safety and, in some cases, result in death.
Earlier this year the KwaZulu-Natal Education Department came under fire for irregularly awarding a feeding scheme tender to a service provider that failed to deliver food, leaving thousands of children without a meal that in many cases could have been their only one for the day. These are some of the examples of the plight facing South African children, which will require an overhaul of the whole system to address.
Educators present at the OWLAG conference in Midrand lamented fractures in the system which made it difficult for them to recommend or access psychological or social work services for children who showed signs of needing assistance.
This was one of the many challenges highlighted as a hindrance in the adoption of trauma-informed approaches in schools, which would require all necessary professionals to be on board.
From an educator’s perspective, the Neurosequential Model (NM) would also require teachers to undergo processes to heal their own trauma to avoid the use of punitive measures when dealing with wounded children.
OWLAG Executive Director Gugu Ndebele said the mission was to have this training become part of the curriculum at teacher training institutions.
“We are paying it forward by aligning with the schools nearby. And once the teachers in those schools get it, we don’t need [to influence] the system, the teachers will change things,” Ndebele said.
“Our biggest wish is for the [trauma-informed] work we are doing to be the core curriculum for teacher education. That’s why we have universities here. We want to see how we make it the core curriculum, so that every teacher that goes through the system understands”.
Speaking on behalf of the Gauteng Education Department, Head of Department Edward Mosuwe said his department had noticed worrying trends in Gauteng schools.
This year, Gauteng’s 24-hour hotline had received more than 50 complaints of bullying at school, nearly 30 complaints of physical bullying and more than 200 phone calls from learners complaining about abuse.
For these and other reasons, Mosuwe said the Gauteng Education Department would commit itself to implementing the OWLAG model of trauma-informed education in public schools.
“We want to work with the OWLAG team. I have been to the OWLAG school and I’ve seen what they do. How I wish all our schools could take these principles of trauma-informed schools as a phenomenon that begins to define the new South African school,” Mosuwe said.
Winfrey is no stranger to trauma herself. As a young girl growing up in rural Mississippi, Winfrey experienced multiple incidents of trauma, including sexual assault by a family member from the time she was seven-years-old all the way into her teenage years.
While there was no knowledge of the Neurosequential Model (NM) in her environment at that time, it was her school that afforded her the safety she needed in the world.
In particular, Winfrey said it was her Grade 4 teacher, Mrs Mary Duncan, who changed her trajectory. “Oh I will tell you what Mrs Duncan did…she saw me,” Winfrey recalled emotionally. “She saw that I was smart, she saw that I loved learning. She encouraged me and told me that I was pretty. She told me that I can be anything I wanted to be.
“And so school was my haven, it was the only place where I actually felt safe. That’s why I loved school and I hated when summer [holidays] came,” she added.
According to Winfrey teachers were one of the most important components of helping schools become trauma-informed institutions. She said it would be important for South African teachers to receive healing from their own emotional scars first so that they could become a safe haven for wounded children, the way Mrs Duncan was for her.
“It is so incumbent upon the teachers to see themselves, getting them to heal. Because if you’ve been through apartheid, you’ve been through war, you’ve been through trauma and there is just no way around it. [For both] black and white,” Winfrey said.
“So we [have to] work on ourselves first. You have to heal in order to share that healing with other people, and then you offer that healing in the most generous of spirits to others”.
INSIDE EDUCATION