Blair has been a faculty member in the Criminal Justice Program at Camosun College for about 15 years. “I teach criminal justice and the law and legal policy for first-year students as well as case management. I also teach a course called Mental Health Addictions and Trauma (211) for second-year students, which has evolved over time to adapt to the reality of the people our students will be working with when they become practitioners.” Before coming to Camosun, Blair received a degree in criminology with an extended minor in psychology followed by his Master’s in Adult Education. “At that time, I was doing a lot of teaching in both federal and provincial prison systems, so my masters focused on education of people in prison.” Then one day Blair received a phone call from the chair of our Criminal Justice program asking if he would be interested in teaching an introduction to the criminal justice system course. While he had not considered teaching at a post-secondary institution before, Blair found he loved the experience and was happy to come on board full-time a year later after another instructor left for public office.
I asked Blair what he loves most about teaching, and he said, “I like seeing students grow, preparing them for the realities of the work they’re going into, and teaching them how to always keep the whole picture in mind to succeed as a criminal justice practitioner. Some situations they will face can be very draining, for example re-offending clients or client suicide attempts; you need to be able to step back, look at the big picture, and keep in mind those clients who leave and don’t re-enter the system instead of only focusing on the clients who return.” Blair was reminded of a poem about walking a path differently over time as you learn and grow, Autobiography in Five Chapters by Portia Nelson, and he told me that this is the goal of anybody working in the criminal justice system. “Working with people who have experienced traumatic lives and expecting an untraumatic-life version of success is unrealistic. Students have to learn what success looks like through the eyes of their client, not through their own eyes.”
This led nicely into my next question for Blair, which was how he integrated trauma-informed pedagogy into his teaching. “I work with trauma-informed pedagogy in my 211 course which started out as a ‘criminal justice perspectives on criminal behavior’ course. This is my favorite course to teach – we sit in circle and talk about whatever is coming up that day. For example, we talk about anger and where it comes from as well as the interplay between fear and anger and how to understand how people think and behave, so you can react and help them in the best way possible.”
Blair explained that a main tenet of the course is that if you expect somebody to modify their behavior in a criminal justice setting by, for example, abstaining from drugs and alcohol, then you also need to know what it feels like to change your own behavior. “I ask them to choose something they want to change about themselves, for example an entrenched habit like smoking, and track it over the course of the semester. It’s a difficult assignment and whether they get an A+ or a C has nothing to do with the change they’re making, but with their reflection on and insight into the hard parts of that change. Students create a goal statement and a number of objectives to help them achieve that goal. Then they decide on an externally imposed punishment if they lapse, which is not how we would do things in the real world but is what happens in a criminal justice system, and outline how that punishment would be enforced. This is all designed to give them some insight into how hard it might be for somebody to change something that may have been a part of their life for a long period of time.” Finally, Blair asks students questions like: What did or didn’t work for you? Did you have to change your plan? Did you have to change the outcomes?
One of the things students learn is how complicated it is to change your own behaviour without adjusting other things in your life. “I’ve had some students try to curb their drinking behavior, for example, and realize that they also needed to consider how friend groups fit into that behaviour – those are the insights that help them understand how best to help people within a criminal justice system, and those insights can be emotionally draining for some students.”
Because students have conversations about anger, fears, different types of behaviours (criminal and otherwise) and how we react Blair noticed that students were finding it tough to discuss some of the subject matter that was coming up. “I was losing some students because they found the course too emotionally draining.” So, while this course started as a criminal behavior course, a few years ago Blair changed it to a mental health addictions and trauma course to better match with what was happening in the classroom discussions. “Because I was losing students, I explored ways to teach the class differently, for example considering how much trauma is too much to introduce, and what would be useful in preparing students before they go into a system that has a lot of trauma in it.” So, Blair and a colleague at UVic who works with grad students around trauma started talking about trauma-informed practice. “Then, during COVID, I began to ask students to develop a trauma plan early in the course, before getting to the heavy topics. Now, we first have a person from Camosun Counseling come and talk about trauma, how it can affect people, how to identify when things aren’t going well for you, and to provide resources and advice for how to deal with things. Then I ask students to come up with a plan based on what they just heard, a plan for how they will deal with things that trigger them. The plan is private and not shared with me, but every third week we will revisit their plans so they can identify how they are feeling and if they need any supports. If I see anyone struggling during that process, we sit in circle to talk about what they are struggling with. I also tell students on day one that if anything becomes too much for them during class, they can get up and leave, no questions asked, to get some emotive distance so they can look at the subject in an analytical way.”
Since implementing the trauma plan, Blair says that students no longer drop for reasons related to the emotional impact of the course. “This course is like a capstone, because it’s usually at the end of the second year of the program. So, while students know a lot about the justice system, the course is designed to help them learn how people react in different situations by examining their own reactions to challenges.”
I asked Blair what advice he might have for faculty working with students and trauma. “We should not handle it ourselves. I’m not a counselor, and I actually think it’s a disservice not to refer students to professionals. What I can do is make students aware of supports they have access to, which I do on a regular basis, usually at the start of term then around mid terms when things are getting really heavy. I reiterate that they have access to resources, and that if things are getting to be too much, which is just the nature of post-secondary education, I ask them to please take the time to utilize those resources even if they need to take class time to get to an appointment.”