Abstract:

Trauma is a universal experience. People of all ages, genders, and cultures can experience trauma regardless of their social class or status. Traumatic experiences that start in childhood intensify the risk for long term effects. Mental health professional have developed methods which acknowledges the affect of trauma and how to provide assistance for recovery. Designers, educators and psychologists can work together to design schools that can help trauma affected students in feeling safe in their learning environments. This paper explores how educational environments can be designed to help students overcome trauma. These researchers employed mixed research methods including literature reviews, observation of educational environments and students, precedent analysis and survey responses from high school student to measure how they identify safety and comfort.

Through their research, these researchers found that designing public spaces in the schools, with clear sightlines to exists, unobstructed sightlines for easy supervision in long corridors, and views to nature can help students in feeling safe, and secure. Providing adequate privacy in restrooms, by specifying toilet rooms instead of stalls also helps students in feeling safe. Overall, the survey results indicated that high school students were interested in the trauma informed design solutions these researchers proposed; however, there were a few instances where they selected traditional high school design over what was deemed trauma informed. The limitation of this research is that these researchers only surveyed students in a medium income city in the Midwest. In the future, it would be beneficial to survey students all over the country from all economic backgrounds to see how cultural values and economic status’ effect students’ perception of trauma informed design.

Keywords:

Trauma, Trauma Informed, Trauma Informed Design, Architectural Design, Spatial Design, Space Planning, Educational Design, K-12 Environments.