Summoned to the topic

In the early part of the 2008/2009 school years, I was approached by special education colleagues in the school board to take a particular role in a follow up activity to an initial training session for Edward — an educator working in a program for homeless youth — and the other members of his team. This training session was the first of about a half dozen presented over the course of the school year from an empirical model, which is generically described as 'trauma informed practice.' Trauma informed practice, in the context of education, is defined as the ability of school staff, educators, and administrators to recognize, identify and respond appropriately to students who have been traumatized. Preventing secondary trauma (the risk of being traumatized by working with those who are traumatized) is also part of trauma informed practice ("Creating Trauma-Informed Child-Serving Systems", 2007).

The particular model we were being introduced to is based on the concept of 'best practices' as progress along ten building blocks within three levels or main areas of focus. These three areas are: attachment (theory), (self)-regulation, and competency, in that order of progress. The zenith of the model is to have traumatized students function in life at the appropriate developmental stage for their chronological age (Recently, the zenith of the model has changed, and now the goal of the model is for the 'client' or student to have healthily 're-integrated' the trauma experience into a coherent self-narrative). The model was built from the outcome of a meta-analysis of current trauma research findings (Blaustein & Kinniburgh, 2010; Kinniburgh, Blaustein, Spinazolla, & Kolk, 2005).

For this follow up activity I was asked to sit with Edward (as one of several smaller break-out groups with the trainers for the model divided among frontline staff) and share my experiences as a former Special Education teacher for 10 and 11 year olds who had been identified, according to government standards, as having severe social and emotional difficulties. In particular, I was asked to speak to the importance and effectiveness of building predictable and consistent routines for students: one of the first building blocks of 'best practice' in the model.

When I was asked to have this conversation with Edward I immediately believed it was a wise decision to have me support the training in this way and I felt I had solid experiences to share. At the time of this conversation I had been out of the classroom for three years and was working as a Behaviour Strategist, travelling from school to school and assisting learning teams to work with students who displayed severe social and emotional challenges.

I began our small group conversation by focusing on the benefits of a consistent schedule and routine as I saw this unfold for my students, previously. I assumed the same benefits would arise in working with street youth. As an effective practice in my particular past, I pre-supposed it would be an effective practice with all students who had severe social and emotional issues.

Edward agreed with the idea of consistent and predictable structures and routines in principle. However, in the instance of scheduled routines he was quick to point out the youth in the program did not get bussed to the location as students would in most other specialized programs, and in most cases took public transit or were transported from various group homes, some youth walking from shelters or the street. In short, the youth did not arrive at one consistent time each day. There were other reasons for this for example, the youth often had mandatory court appearances, meetings with social workers, specialist's appointments and other events, some unforeseen, which arose as part of being without a home and connected to several institutions.

Most importantly, depending on who arrived and the particular evening or day they were having, the start of the day in the program needed to adapt and flex. What was predictable was the idea that the youth coming to the program lived very unpredictable lives, more so than most students in other school programs, who tend to follow highly structured routines and schedules. Theory and practice looked different. Edward and I agreed that how we responded to this unpredictability needed to be fairly predictable, which was perhaps one of the main points of the first block of the model. Regardless, in this instance, as we talked about predictable and consistent routines, other considerations came to the fore.

…the theory of structures and routines work so well, it sounds great in theory, it really does and we all know that that's what a kid needs…and (these kids) are like a 4 or 5 year old who needs routine: needs to know that you go to bed at this time every night; that when they get up mom will give you breakfast; when you come home at night dad will be there. So we need structures and routines but at the same time that theory which says that the structures should look like this and the routine needs to be 'this' falls apart when you get kids that although we know them to be 4 they think they are 14 or 15 and making choices and those choices are horrible choices but they are making their own choices. So when they leave (the site) those structures actually become confrontational. They (structures) kind of, to some degree, fly in the face of we want(ing) them (youth) to be attached, but we impose some kind of structure on them. And that was very much the feeling we had (in the meeting) and now that a year's gone by and we see some of the structures that we have put in place…it's finding that balance that works for a kid, and again, what works for that individual kid. After all, I mean when we say there's a structure where it's math for 45 minutes and a kid can only work on math for 20 minutes, if I become that typical teacher that says it's only been 20 minutes and you better get on your math and start looking at my watch and walk away and treat that kid like they're not doing something so there's a bad person, have I not just created more trauma and dissonance in that person's life versus going 'You know what? You worked very well for these 20 minutes.'? And 'Would you like to do something else? Go down to the gym or something?' and it's that balance… (Edward, personal communication, November 17, 2009). (Parenthesized words are my addition.)

Edward's explanation was not terribly surprising. When I was a Special Education teacher I often had similar situations arise: students would come in without having had breakfast or a decent night's sleep, and the two hour bus ride to the site was quite loud and irritating. In these cases, the day's schedule for them did not look at all the same as the one posted on the board. They were fed and given a quiet place to sleep. This was one of the most important strategies I would often offer to fellow educators: to give oneself permission to practice outside of the routine of traditional schooling and 'meet' students for where they are: sometimes hungry and tired. Likewise, if a student is struggling, respond in a way that helps them get through the experience without them continuing to hate what they are doing and the person making them do it: Make these responses predictable, as needed, case by case.

What I found troubling about our conversation was how it seemed that the first block of the best practice model for trauma, as we conceived it, did not seem to account for this need to respond to what arises as a matter of unpredictability, case by case. This was ironic since the first block's subject matter is the consistent and predictable routines of a program. Many questions arose as a result of that moment of recognition of the gap between theory and particular situations. Perhaps this was more about how others and I interpreted the blocks, and the hold our ways of interpreting the blocks had on me, and my ability to see outside the enclosure of the block, or see possibilities within the block.

Does the theory imply that the first block of best practice requires society to regulate every aspect of the student's life in order to be engaged in best practice, in order to help the student progress, regardless of the student's particular circumstances? If one did not have consistent routines and schedules for a student, was one not engaged in 'best practice' simply because the statistical analysis of many other statistically significant studies decided so? What wasn't best about having a flexible schedule and routines that arise at the moments Edward felt were best for each student? Was I caught up in a narrow way of seeing, something the originators of the model did not intend?

At that particular time I had somehow found myself caught up in the idea that the best practice of the model was the way to do the work, the end. The recognition of this part of the experience was most troubling. It made me angry with myself because it did not reflect how I typically engage with other professionals.

Almost as soon as Edward finished his first sentence I recognized how I and the others facilitating the training had come into the program and presented this information as the 'truth', as the best way to work with homeless youth. Prior to this training session the training team (myself included) had talked about how Edward's program had to be using this model. We had talked as if the model were the ultimate truth on working with homeless youth. I was temporarily caught up in a way of holding this information — this science — with an authority that 'knew better' than the people in the program who worked with and knew the youth better than I did. Something was at play.

I felt I had always humbly listened to what educators were telling me and asking of me in my work as a strategist. Their words often spoke the answers they were after, and my role, I often found, was to help them hear what they were already saying about a student they were struggling with. But perhaps my beliefs and practices have been more shaped, more constituted by the predominant ways of explaining the causes of behaviour and its effects than I realized. Why did I approach Edward this way? Why did our team come to this meeting holding this model as a truth to heed to, as the way the program should operate day to day? What were we getting caught up in?

The conversation between Edward and I turned for the better because Edward was very calm and I recognized my presumptuous approach almost immediately. This didn't mean I still didn't have ideas about how he could do this work. Also, it wasn't as if the trauma model was useless, not at all. This experience of being pulled up short showed that there were limits to the model and cautions surrounding how we might venerate this kind of 'best practice'; that there was another kind of practice driven by another kind of knowledge which Edward used day to day, which I knew about but had briefly forgotten. The experience also showed how as an expert who knew what was best I had momentarily closed myself off to learning anything new from experience. Despite our conversation having some positive results, this particular kind of 'expert attitude' stayed with Edward and his team.

…some good came out of it, absolutely, there were some suggestions at my table, and at my table there were some suggestions which at first I thought that's not gonna work but today what we do, there were actually some suggestions which we use now. But that first idea that we are the experts - that we know what this looks like - you should listen to us - that you haven't lived my experience, you shouldn't tell me what to do and this was very much my take away from that. (Edward, personal communication, November 24, 2009)

The experience with Edward spoke to me about knowledge and how it is viewed and held and transmitted. It spoke to me about how we were holding a particular kind of knowledge in a particular kind of way. This knowledge lived in us and came forth in how we presented ourselves. This disturbed me. It shook me up. It reminded me of many other experiences with knowledge of this sort, particularly experiences of participating in, and instructing professional development within Special Education.

The negativity of this particular experience, the suffering of pride it brought about, led me to want to explore this phenomenon within the topic of trauma — which has been an important focus in my work for a few years now — through an investigation into the history of the topic and an interpretation of Edward's lived experiences as well as those I have been a part of.

Over a year has passed since that experience with Edward. The training in the trauma model has been completed. I wondered how this particular knowledge might shape how he sees and works with the youth in the program, now. I wondered how the program, as a collaboration of institutions, constitutes and works with the students. I wondered what ideas lay inherent within this trauma model and how trauma actually plays out in educational life. What could I learn about trauma from research energized by this negative 'expectation-pulling' experience?

On that day something of me—my understanding as an expert and of an expert—began to capsize, upturn, reveal itself so that the world I worked in everyday was seen anew. The practical knowledge I had gained from experience, and knew other educators had as well, had been ever so briefly hidden by my having been persuaded by the explanatory power of a theory. The idea that Edward and I had been cultivated through our experiences working with troubled youth and that this cultivation had important things to tell us about our work began to blossom forth once again, to speak to me of what I already knew about working with difficult students. In that moment this knowledge arose alongside with and sometimes in opposition to an inductive mode of knowing and working with human beings. This topic needed to be nourished. The remainder of this essay is an attempt to articulate one of the growths to come out of nourishing the topic.

Talking to one another

Over the course of a school year, Edward and I met many times to talk about his practices as a 'special' educator for homeless youth, specifically in relation to the topic of trauma. Time and again our dialogue met up against that which we knew to be good practice through a shared understanding of experiences suffered, and that which a predominant discourse on best practices — in the field of trauma research — described in its own specific ways, with its own "grammar of analysis and its own vocabulary for action" (Fassin & Rechtman, 2009, p. 97). What was this friction about?

In reference to some very stressful and challenging situations with students, I asked Edward if he could describe what it was or how it was he made the decisions he did in the moments they were called for:

I honestly couldn't tell you…that's part of the problem…it's this mysticism over science thing…if I could just tell people that in order to do this you need to do this then there but it's not. It's very much a thing that you know… (Edward, personal communication, November 17, 2009)

I suggest Edward's words describe a phenomenon Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 — 2002) argued we have created in the modern age largely because of Immanuel Kant's (1724 — 1804) work on aesthetics in his book Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Gadamer, 1975; D. W. Jardine, Friesen, & Clifford, 2006). I will attempt to unpack this within the context of Hans-Georg Gadamer's (1900 — 2002) Hermeneutics (Davey, 2006; Gadamer, 1975, 2007; Gallagher, 1992; Risser, 1997). Prior to this, however, let me offer a general and simplified look at Gadamer's hermeneutics.

Gadamer's Truth and Method (1975) was an attempt to demonstrate the process of how it is human beings 'understand.' Central to Gadamer's work is the idea that experience and language are inextricably intertwined. Language is, essentially, the being of the world for us. Through experiences we find ourselves in, the great miracle of language gives 'being' to the world. Hence, all understanding is interpretation. This does not mean however that understanding is sucked into the traditional and long standing arguments about relativism and reality. Indeed, not 'anything goes' as it were because we are in Heidegger's terms, 'thrown' into the world (Heidegger, 1962). We find ourselves in the world, not able to ever objectively see it through and through as if we were outside or above it. Likewise, Rorty (Moser & Nat, 1987) claimed we only have 'toeholds' on understanding, not top positions overseeing all. Gadamer very carefully and specifically makes the case that relativism (subjectivity) and realism (objectivity) are not at play in Hermeneutics, in human understanding. In fact, he argued, along with Heidegger (1962) and others (Bernstein, 1983; Rorty, 2009) that both terms or conceptualizations of the world for us are incorrect, and have misled us for centuries. We are beings who are tied to our histories, to our traditions, as well as to how those traditions infuse with our anticipation of and for the future. There is 'play' about our being in the world that overtakes us, that does not permit the world to be anything we want or think it to be. We do not individually construct the world for ourselves, nor do we have this kind of control over the world around us, though we often act as if we do (D. Jardine, Naqvi, Jardine, & Zaidi, 2010). There is a structure to the world for us that comes from the power of language as it has been placed within our history(ies). Gadamer called this our 'historically-effected consciousness.' So, we cannot know 'all' nor can we make 'all' what we want it to be. Truth is multiple and perspectival and ongoing. And we are in-between this activity, this ongoing process of finite understanding in the times and places we find ourselves in. Understanding, according to Gadamer's hermeneutics, comes about beyond our wanting and doing. Because of this, 'doing' requires us to take hold of Aristotle's notion of practical wisdom found in The Nichomachean Ethics, of being called to situations and decisions to do what is right through our judgement, informed by multiple perspectives, not just one. This essay attempts to explicate (Ricoeur, 1981) this understanding of how it is we come to understand in the moments we find ourselves in, and how at times, our understanding is severely limited by the history that surrounds phenomenon we experience, like trauma since September 11, 2001, for example.

I think an excellent demonstration of Gadamer's ideas on understanding and language can be had in the example of trauma. It is defined, as if once and for all:

Trauma:

1. Path. A wound, or external bodily injury in general; also the condition caused by this; traumatism. The word is derived from the Greek, meaning 'wound'.
2. Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry. A psychic injury, esp. one caused by emotional shock the memory of which is repressed and remains unhealed; an internal injury, esp. to the brain, which may result in a behavioural disorder of organic origin. Also, the state or condition so caused. ("Oxford English Dictionary Online," 1989)

But if I ask you now to say the word aloud, and to let your understanding of the word speak to you, does it not live inexplicably more complexly and diversely than the definition found in a dictionary? A definition can read so sterile, devoid of particularity, substance, placement in the world. Trauma doesn't live like this. The word invokes images of imploding towers; people jumping to their deaths in the face of being burned alive; of smoking stacks and barbed wire fences, emaciated survivors; of a boy in the fetal position, face in his hands, in the corner of a classroom. And these are images and understandings of the possible depth and diversity of applications of the word experienced upon me and yet, they are not mine alone, and I believe they resonate in some ways with our collective understandings, too. Gadamer captures language's power most brilliantly, here:

…every word breaks forth as if from a centre and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of the language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole world-view that underlies it to appear. Thus every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning. The occasionality of human speech is not a casual imperfection of its expressive power; it is, rather, the logical expression of the living virtuality of speech that brings a totality of meaning into play, without being able to express it totally. All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out.

An historical analysis of trauma reveals that it has meant different things at different times, and applied equally diversely to diverse human populations. What was once the hysteria of women, the shell shock of the World War One veteran, and the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder of the Vietnam Veteran, is now the suffering of the child who has been neglected and physically abused (Hacking, 2004; Leys, 2000; Young, 1995). None of this is to say that these groups have not suffered, not at all. That the phenomenon of human suffering exists, is not at question here (Young, 1995). There are other examples of interpretive work, arguably hermeneutic in nature, that analyze other historically-effected phenomenon and our understandings of them, like Scot Danforth's The Incomplete Child (2009), Linda Graham's (De) —Constructing ADHD (2010), and Ian Hacking's Re-writing the Soul (1995). In the trauma field, my work has been guided by Ruth Leys Trauma: A Genealogy (2000) and Allan Young's The Harmony of Illusions (1995) though in these examples the authors would agree their work is interpretive, I suspect they would probably decline to be described as hermeneutic. What is important is the sustained recognition and argumentation for the power of culture, economics, politics, and history on how it is we understand the world through language. This is an approach to understanding our place in the world that is markedly opposed to discourses of disability as abnormal difference, as situated within individuals exclusively, as problems to be remedied within the individual. Such approaches recognize the ongoing complexity and fluidity of truths and understanding.

I now return to the specific phenomenon of trauma and the importance of talking to one another in education, as lived through my conversations with Edward and our attempts to understand interpretively, what might be at play.

Bildung in context

Edward's work with homeless "at-risk" youth is supposedly driven by evidence-based best practices, specifically trauma-informed practices. Such practices within 'Special Education' and I would suggest education in general, put 'at-risk' an important understanding we can have of one another, an understanding about being with one another: the practical wisdom or judgment that arises as a matter of being experienced, of being cultivated through experience, of being educated by life in the world, of being inspired by life's works. I understand this cultivation of knowledge through life as an interpretation of what Gadamer termed 'Bildung.'

Edward's un-articulated, or even misplaced identification of his practice as 'mysticism' is not derived ex nihilo, out of nothing. If he were alive today, I believe Gadamer would say that Edward lives in a modern society which has come to often devalue the wisdom people gain in experience, in and of itself, without the credentials of the expert behind a name, or the use of 'expert' scientific lingo to validate educator practice. Current findings suggest this is the case within the context of special education and teacher knowledge (Thomas & Loxley, 2007; Valle & Connor, 2011): Teachers report not feeling knowledgeable enough to work with students with disabilities. This is not to argue that educators do not need specialized knowledge to support working with all learners. Likewise, as I will attempt to show, there is also an experiential knowledge which might be less valued because certain experts lay claim to that knowledge, and educators may accept a specialized holding of knowledge such that they do not feel 'qualified' to make truthful claims on educational practices with complex students (Skrtic, 1995).

Yet the above also runs the risk of being oversimplified for Edward recognizes something of value in what he does through what he has learned as an educator in classrooms for many years now. Our conversations are evidence of the tension between specialized services and supports as evinced in the systems of special education and that, which happens, in the day-to-day practices of educators in classrooms throughout schools. Edward struggles to articulate this tension, this knowing that often precedes theory: this knowing becomes a topic less erudite than grand theories and science. The phenomenon of tension Edward attempts to articulate could be seen through Gadamer's use of 'Bildung', as part of aesthetic experience becomes more the unique, the mysterious, and the unspeakable. It becomes magical. It becomes the craft of genius (Gadamer, 1975, pp. 46-48), the abnormal (Foucault, 1999) or the exceptional.

Gadamer (1975) took great effort in Truth and Method to show the historical transformations which took place in the understanding of common sense and aesthetics. Common sense or 'sensus communis' once had a demand on us to show "…genuine moral and civic solidarity, but that means judgment or right and wrong, and a concern for the "common good"" (Gadamer, 1975, pp. 28-29). Gadamer claims that earlier thinkers tried hard to maintain this humanistic idea within common sense. Kant, an enormously important figure in our modern thought, stripped common sense of its moral weight. Kant universalized moral action by making it the apparatus of reason, reason being an always and ever existing (a priori) structure of humanity that in and of itself is capable of determining what is right and wrong, regardless of the particulars of situations that demand our judgement. This was Kant's 'Categorical Imperative' and it universalized moral action into a rule of duty (Kant, 1964). Jardine (2006) explicates Kant's impact on modern thought (as well as Piaget's work on development), within the context of education and constructivism.

In order to make this move Kant needed to remove the importance of moral judgement that had been traditionally placed within the common sense of a community. Judgement and common sense were relegated to taste, and taste became the personal criterion of aesthetics (Gadamer, 1975, p. 30).

In other words, if one is 'moved' by an artwork or a Greek tragedy for example, one expresses one's personal taste, and only that. The judgement that one has based on how they are moved, or can somehow identify with a movie, or music as other examples, is relegated to an individual's subjective ideas or constructions. Hence the arts lose their status as expressions of truth. Gadamer's Truth and Method tries to show how this has come about and how the arts do have something to tell us about truth.

Gadamer (1975) then argued that taste, as it is understood today, is an empty shell of what it once meant and in showing its former worth, it may be reclaimed as fundamental to how it is we are able to make good and wise decisions in the world (p.50).

Gadamer reclaims taste as part of what it is to be educated by experiences in the world, within a community, as cultivation, as the growth that comes with experience. Taste is connected to judgement and both are connected to Bildung, according to Gadamer. Edward and his team judge on a daily basis what is good for their students. They do this based not only on the discourse of a trauma informed model but also on what they have learned through suffering experiences in working with troubled students. While they make these judgments, they are also finding that their understanding of the students changes too. In all growth there is a re-constitution of that which was before. Some things die off, others are subsumed. Some things remain as possibility for future growth. All around is this organic performative process of building or growth that is fundamentally powered by what Gadamer called the 'play' of experience (1975, pp. 102-110). This play demands more of everyone and it is the same play of the tragic, of trauma, which I discussed in detail in my Master's Thesis (Author, 2010).

In reclaiming taste as a part of the process of growth, or Bildung's educative process, Gadamer reveals the consequences of its having been covered up by Kant's project of universally rationalizing moral judgments or judgments of what is best or right or good to do in particular situations. Edward must make these kinds of decisions on a daily basis. Gadamer (1975) shows that in relegating taste to mere subjective descriptions of preference, the human sciences (the neuro-psychology of the trauma model as an example) had to drop all traditional materials which gave the human sciences, at the time, their status as authorities on what it is to understand human beings, their actions, and their determinations of right and wrong:

The radical subjectivization involved in Kant's new way of grounding aesthetics was truly epoch-making. In discrediting any kind of theoretical knowledge except that of natural science, it compelled the human sciences to rely on the methodology of the natural sciences in conceptualizing themselves. (p. 36)

I suggest Edward unintentionally identifies this phenomenon when he defers to a trauma model to validate what he has learned as a matter of what I have interpreted as Gadamer's notion of Bildung, as life's cultivating process through being a part of a community, a heritage, a culture.

(The trauma model) allows something to hang your hat on. I'm doing this 'because'. It's really nice to be able to say, why are you making them (students) a grill cheese sandwich? Why aren't they making their own? It's nice to be able to say, "I made the grill cheese sandwich with them to be able to get into the 'affect management' part of the model." (Edward, personal communication, November 17, 2009)

How has Edward come to believe he simply can't say, "Making grill cheese sandwiches is a good thing to do now because I know from experience that in order for this student and I to communicate authentically with one another we need to not be doing school work, or sitting in an office filling out a form. We need to be together, taking care, listening to one another in a place that we are comfortable in, that doesn't come with all the baggage that school experiences can come with for these kids?"

I asked him this directly:

The words lend authority to certain things…Is this stuff that I did before the model? Absolutely. But the model allows me to, when I'm talking to a staff member who goes by the book, first they need a, then b, then c. I can say, well, they're not ready for self-regulation and all of sudden, just using those words, makes them go, "Ohh. I've read that in the textbook so self-regulation is important so they must not be ready for that so we need to build attachment." Instead of saying what I would have said, "You know this kid needs to feel safe and wants to come here." Those are the words I absolutely would have used. "This kid needs to feel safe; needs to like coming here; and this kid needs to come here every day." Those are the things I used my first 9 years at (previous setting). I never once said, "I need to build attachment with my class." I said, "You know I like my class to be here and I like to see you all here and I want to make sure you're all here." With the model stuff it allows me to sound authoritative. (Edward, personal communication, December 14, 2009)

Edward trusts his judgement so why does he not speak to them directly? Partially because he has been told that the program he leads must use the trauma model as a common language so that all staff understands why or why not they engage the students in the ways they do. The grandness of the model 'unifies' their understanding, eliminates the often intense conflict that can arise in programs supported my multiple agencies with distinct ideas on how best to engage with students. In my four years of working across schools and unique settings, I have seen this tension first hand, and how difficult it can be to encourage people to create safe environments where difficult discussions can be had with one another over beliefs on what is best and right to do with and for students. When specialized services with their experts (sadly, like myself) bring down from on high grand theories of best practice, it allows people to refer to what the models say, rather than on one's personal, seemingly isolated, subjective 'opinions.'

…if you do this you come across as a person who is seen as full of themselves, knows they're the only one doing it right and they're doing it wrong. Listen to me. I'm now the authority. It's a personal attack to some degree because once I start saying you know what in my experience if I do it this way this works so maybe you should try it this way you're almost saying you're doing it wrong. But if you say it as, you look at the science or as a theory and its kinda weird that I'm not a big fan of the science part but it's nice sometimes to be able to say, if you look at it this way it works really well because this is why, umm, and that's for me, I hate being the person who is doing a personal attack… (Edward, personal communication, December 14, 2009)

Through a reading of Gadamer's hermeneutics of aesthetics, I suggest that Edward lives in a time when his experiences are relegated to subjective judgments of taste, as are other ways of knowing, like experiences with art. Any talk about 'his experiences' as opposed to 'our experiences' are seen as personal attacks because, his experiences are 'his' and so they are subjective, void of worth and truth. Jardine (2006) wrote, "…I somehow 'bring' to my own experiences my own background and perspectives and constructs and can therefore only speak of things in the world — like that pine tree outside the window — "from my own perspective" (p. 128). Experiences seem to have become the battleground of the 'I' and 'thou' rather than the meeting place of a topic of concern. Experience itself has lost the 'to be taken on a journey' of its meaning (Gadamer, 1975, pp. 84-85; Jardine, Friesen, & Clifford, 2006, p. 271).

So when Edward wants to talk to his new teammates about what experiences with students who suffer has taught him, he feels he can't because his experiences alone are not perceived as having truth value in them. He has no choice but to find truth in the modern manifestation of the human sciences in Special Education practices: the trauma model — which I suspect Gadamer might also have seen as a demand of a colonizing force, rooted in Kant's notion of the power of the structures of reason, bringing the world to and for us (D. W. Jardine, et al., 2006). If Edward was in a role where he was seen as an expert, like a Strategist, Consultant, Specialist or Psychologist for examples, could he then be able to share his experiences and have them seen as having truths to tell us?

Edward saw the new program for homeless youth as an opportunity:

The opportunity to see, first of all, to see a new project start and hopefully guide it with that vision of what I felt education was like, was huge. I was truly getting frustrated with the way that (previous program) had, in my mind, warped from the original vision. I was continually frustrated with "We have to get XYZ done. Why aren't they done?" So being able to step back and say this is a program that deals with students. At no time in the interviewing (for the position as teacher in the homeless program) was I asked, "What's your skill with X curriculum?" Instead it was, "How would you deal with this situation? How would you deal with this kid in your class?" Those were such questions that felt right to me. (Edward, personal communication, November 24, 2009)

Nicholas Davey (2006) wrote, "Acquiring a mental openness and a flexibility of response toward the strange and unexpected is to have become experienced in the discipline" (p. 37). In hermeneutics this process is known as gebildet (Davey, 2006). Edward's responses to severe situations with his students are signs of his "becoming cultured" which is, according to Davey (2006), the very thing the "…humanities aim to foster" (p.39) This is Bildung, the ongoing outcomes of gebildet: "…the accumulation of sufficient practical experience within a discipline so as to offer a spontaneous and yet informed response to a question permitting it to be grasped in a new and unanticipated way" (Davey, 2006, p. 39). Burbules (2008) emphasized this way of being an educator as tacit teaching.

With this reading, the psychological expert who enters a classroom, because of their experiences should have developed a 'Bildung' for their practice. In which case, this particular kind of expert would have a great deal to offer the educator, if the expert is open to experiencing events as new and unanticipated or as Jardine (2006) wrote, not as the "been there, done that" attitude (p. 18). It is Bildung which Gadamer refers to in order to invocate that "alongside scientific and technical knowledge there exists another body of knowledge that is not the result of proof and demonstration but is laid down by tradition, received wisdom, and practical experience" (Davey, 2006, p. 40). Key to this is Gadamer's use of "…alongside…"

During our conversations Edward shared many examples of situations where his practices often led to the ongoing health of his students, despite the severity of their situations. These practices have been a part of Edward's being as an educator for years now, prior to his training in the best practices of a trauma model. He has been cultivated through knowledge gained that is different from the knowledge of the empirical sciences in modern trauma. Walstrom (2010) wrote:

But the world, the experience, also has an effect on us as humans. We live through, suffer through, our experiences. The point is not to collect new experiences, to meet the unknown in the way a tourist would, but rather to undergo change as humans by seeing things with new eyes and asking new questions. Bildung, which starts off in experience, is thus not primarily about the individual, but about the situation itself, with all of its complex links and relations to what we have experienced so far and what we are about to experience. The abode of Bildung then becomes, rather, part of the space between people, part of the communication and the situational meeting. (p.306)

In appealing to knowledge gained from tradition and experience, there is an appeal to that which lives before us as authority, as a power that can influence our lives. I am speaking now of the authority of the psychiatric expert, the psychologist, the science intermixed with practical experience, the 'special' educator learning through living his practice while being directed to scientific learning through models of best practice. It seems like an odd move, to bring back the wisdom of the trauma model, of the psychologist, but it is not if we accept the power of the assertions made thus far through Gadamer's work. This is what Gadamer (1975) called the "…art of strengthening" (p. 361).

Gadamer's hermeneutics wishes to show how those we give authority to is not an act of unthinking surrender. We give power to the psychologist for example, and their works, like that of the trauma model, because we acknowledge that there are true things they have to tell us about ourselves. We usually give assent to their status and authority because they too come from a tradition of knowing human beings that is not just empirically founded, and certainly not created in a moment of sterile brilliance.

Admittedly, it is primarily persons that have authority; but the authority of persons is ultimately based not on the subjection and abdication of reason, but on an act of acknowledgement and recognition — the recognition, namely, that the other is superior to oneself in judgment and insight and that for this reason his judgment takes precedence — i.e., it has priority over one's own. This is connected with the fact that authority cannot actually be bestowed but is earned, and must be earned if someone is to lay claim to it. It rests on acknowledgment and hence on an act of reason itself which, aware of its own limitations, trusts to the better insight of others. Authority in this sense, properly understood, has nothing to do with blind obedience to commands. Indeed, authority has to do not with obedience but rather with recognition. (Gadamer, 1975, p. 281)

Bildung allows us to be able to recognize this, as Edward recognizes the value in the trauma model. While participating in training for the trauma model, Edward was asked to use the model as a means of being mindful about his students and his practices. The model was presented in goodwill and not delivered as the final say for student complexity. Likewise, it is Edward's daily goodwill towards his students, his acts of caring which permits them the space they need to feel safe in the program, to trust in Edward's authority. This is:

…the basic structure that comes to define Gadamer's explicit hermeneutic theory, namely, that within tradition it is the voice of the other that is to be heard, heard not in terms of the demands of subjectivity, but from its own freeing in the trust — goodwill — that this other is right. (Risser, 1997, p. 69)

Edward said:

We're a family, all of us…It's not a community of equals but where everybody has a say because that's something that's very hard for a lot of professionals to walk into…it should be this way because the kids can't. Well, wait a minute. Did we ask them if we could? We had an issue about the kitchen where three staff members were like, "We need to lock the kitchen. They're not cleaning up in there."…There's going to be a fight over this. Is this the mountain we wish to die on? …and when we sat down and round tabled it (talked about it with the students), explained why we were (rewarding them) for cleaning up and they were like, "OK" and we told them this had been an issue, it can't continue…It's making decisions in the classroom…to have them say," I think the breaks should be flexible", which was brought up by a student this year, is great! You have to give voice to them because if you take their voice away it becomes a confrontation, us versus them. (Edward, personal communication, November 17, 2009)

Bildung, as part of hearing the voice of the other, is not to be understood as a skill set or a theory. There is no one single method to its action. Bildung is a concept which describes how it is we come to learn in the world, not the uniform steps taken towards knowledge. The wisdom one can gain through Bildung entails remaining open to experience for what it has yet to teach us. "I think hopefully we can show education is a partnership, it's cooperation with teacher and student and again cooperation isn't you do what I tell you, it's let's work together to get what you need" (Edward, personal communication, November 24, 2009).

When Edward can hear what his students have to tell him, which is often a hearing formed through experience, he can move with goodwill. I believe Edward's practices demonstrate this openness to hearing what his students have to say, what experiences with them say. Similarly, we both participated in a yearlong series of professional development and training in the trauma model. We both had moments where we felt the model had much to offer us as well as times where our judgment didn't agree with the model. Edward was open to hearing what the model had to say to him about trauma, and how that information could be used in his practices. Leys (2000) suggested that this knowledge for right action in trauma, whether that of Edward or a strategist or psychologist…

…would be an intelligent, humane, and resourceful pragmatism. The best practitioners have always been pragmatic in this sense, making use of whatever psychotherapeutic, medical, and other methods are available to help their patients without worrying too much about the exact fit between practice and theory. (p. 307)

Holding and sharing knowledge, especially empirical/theoretical ways of knowing must be done as an act of goodwill that recognizes the truth claims educators can make about their practices. Those truth claims do not need to reflect an empirical understanding of a topic. As people with expertise, be it teacher, support worker, specialist, psychologist, strategist or administrator, we must be open to the voice of the other, those others being our fellow educators and the experiences they have to share, and also those voices of others (be they texts, art, music, allegories) within our culture that are old, traditional, sometimes concealed by the discourse of science. It is very difficult to be vigilant to this openness, to not let our common notions of the expert and experience conceals what is inherent within them. We are all subject to Bildung, according to Gadamer. At the same time we are open to hearing what best evidence models have to say, too. Bildung does not pick or choose. This is not an either/or binary. Gadamer's notion of Bildung suggests that becoming 'cultured' is complex and requires us to be open to hearing all voices. Simply put, truth is not singular: it is plural.

Edward described an experience with a student who had just been fighting with another student and Edward felt this student was ready to talk about what happened. Some of Edward's new team mates preferred to do this kind of talk over a formalized 'processing' sheet, which Edward believes isn't the more authentic way to work with students in crisis:

It's not like I did things the improper way. I took the backdoor. Instead of taking the sheet and ask this question and this question and this question and if we know these four and I mean we've all done behaviour support plans where it says, "What does it feel like just before…" …we're asking kids with severe emotional and social behaviours to do the same? Oh my god, you couldn't ask that code 80 (gifted) kid that question and expect to get an answer, it'd be like, "I dunno. I was mad!" (Edward, personal communication, December 15, 2009)

Edward's ability to decide what was best for the student and for his teammate speaks to aesthetic judgements on his part. He cannot nail down once and for all how he knows what to do, though perhaps now he and I could talk about gibeldet and Bildung, or tacit teaching as being part of what has happened and is going on in his practice, alongside the trauma model. We can certainly talk about our suffered experiences as having something to teach us, and not just as his subjective experiences alone. The trauma model actually gains from this new place we find ourselves in. With our judgement brought to the fore, we once again see that the model has its place, and helpfulness only because we interpret it through our understanding of the experiences that have had us. We have strengthened the model's ability to inform us because we begin to look at the model through critical, experienced eyes. We begin to tap into our practical knowledge and wisdom to inform the model, not the other way around.

What helps determine the right places and times and decisions for these moments of good practice? What has experience given Edward, and still challenges him to do, which often results in wise decisions on his part? One of the answers to this is tact:

By tact we understand a special sensitivity and sensitiveness to situations and how to behave in them, for which knowledge of general principles does not suffice. Hence an essential part of tact is that it is tacit and unformulable. One can say something tactfully; but that will always mean that one passes over something tactfully and leaves it unsaid, and it is tactless to express what one can only pass over. But to pass over something does not mean to avert one's gaze from it, but to keep an eye on it in such a way that rather than knock into it, one slips by it. Thus tact helps one to preserve the distance. It avoids the offensive, the intrusive, and the violation of the intimate sphere of the person. (Gadamer, 1975, p. 15)

Gadamer (1975) also went on to write that tact "…in the human sciences is not simply a feeling and unconscious, but is at the same time a mode of knowing and of being" (p. 15). Edward's tactfulness in his work is not simply his experiences isolated from the trauma model. His tactfulness is a way of being with students informed by experience, the trauma model, and the culture we are in, all surrounded by a history which effects us. This is Husserl's Lifeworld (1970). Edward's Bildung and tact are part of the narrative he has built up (and has been built for him) in living in the world. It is a story that continues to inform, to give opportunities to learn about how and when and right and wrong. Trauma informed practice, based in the proofs of neuroscience (Kinniburgh, et al., 2005; Perry, 2006) helps but it doesn't provide this richness of experience as a narrative form of knowledge, a story among stories providing wisdoms to choose well, to live well. Such a model permits the eventual goal of trauma 're-integration' through a jointly re-constructed narrative between therapist and patient however, the events or ways of being traumatized are 'proven' through what science tells us about the brain.

Gadamer wanted us to see that we are not adrift in the present moments of our times without any connections to the past, therefore in one sense completely free and in another, terrifyingly able to do whatever we please. We simply can't put our backs on the past because we can't get back behind the past (Risser, 1997, p. 79). The past is always with us anew, a part of our very being in the world. As Gadamer (1975) worked hard to show in the example of the Festival (p. 121), we are engaged in traditions that have carried forth to now, and at the same time they are performed anew each time, as a result of finite temporality and space with us here, now. Tradition binds us on one hand and also acknowledges our collective, ongoing, cultivation of wisdom through it, on the other. In this way we cannot allow ourselves to see the human sciences, in our case, the trauma model, as a stand-alone theory created in the sterilized and objective confines of a vacuum, human-free universe. This is similar to what Kearney (2002) wrote about bringing multiple ways of seeing life together in order to decide which version of history stands. McCarthy's (2007) analysis of Ricoeur's narrative self also 'stabilizes' the lifeworld: "In brief, it is the embodied and temporal nature of the narrative self that prevents it from solidifying into substance on the one hand, or dissipating into ether on the other" (p. 236).

In Edward's case, his tactfulness could be read as a form of listening complexly cultivated as part of the process of gebildet, a process aimed towards the ongoing building of one's cultured senses — Bildung:

Tact is a speculative skill insofar as it can grasp the meaning of what is immediately said or disclosed in terms of what lies beyond the self-evident. It has learned that the meaning of what is actually said depends on the unsaid. Tact, then, involves an ability to sense the flow and direction of a given dialogue…to know what is appropriate — is, of course, a matter of practice rather than method. (Davey, 2006, p. 89)

Edward is not engaged in mysticism though I have suggested there are historical reasons for him to use this kind of language. Bildung and tact have been concealed, devalued, made too personal, terms of subjectivity. Bildung too, has a deep and long, complex and contested history that is beyond the scope of this author's current understanding. To do better justice to Bildung, one should understand its history as well.

For now, I suggest tact is the centre of a re-flowering Bildung, shining hope and possibility throughout the suffering of the work Edward and his team are engaged in, as a community, as a real place in the world where we are constantly entwined, sometimes in very challenging ways, with others.

Summary: Larger connections to inclusive schooling

If we are open to hearing the voices of those around us, including our own, while at the same time using those voices to hear what scientific models of best practice in special education have to say, we are able to judge within our collective communities how best to proceed in the situations that present themselves before us. We are able to break free from the grasp of best practice models we have enclosed around ourselves, thus perhaps empowered to judge whether or not such practices are best indeed. In some cases they may very well be. In others, they may not. Such is the point, I think. Educators may once again accept that they are knowledgeable enough to know what is best for the students they work with (Lupart, 2008) while at the same time knowing when they are not. At the least, the cultivation of hearing what others have to say, including themselves, allows judgement to act accordingly in each case, without easy recourse to a model to save the day. Teachers will not always believe they need to rely on the parallel system of special education to inform their practices (Skrtic, 1995). A more pragmatic and democratic system of deciding what is best within school communities may arise. The rights of all students could be honoured and respected. Social justice — the moral call to do what is right for each unique individual before us — will drive our decision making, rather than the gaze (Foucault, 1977) of disability blinding us to the complexity of the world around the students we serve. Bildung's action encourages critical decision making which reflects a larger understanding of the situations we find ourselves in. It encourages us to seek multiple voices in order to make what Dewey called 'warranted assertions' (Biesta & Burbules, 2003). It is not a tool that can be laid out, described and used as a series of steps or actions prior to the situations themselves! It is here that Bildung's action - that phronesis and tact - are applied to methods and theories by questioning them for their applicability in the light of what we know based on the recognized importance of talking to one another and deciding together what is best for and with, our students and their caregivers.

Given the above, it is possible for educators to start saying that many more students belong in their classrooms and these are the humane (Thomas & Loxley, 2007) ways we can include them. If we begin to say and do this, perhaps educational resource allocation will shift to align with such envisioned inclusive attitudes.

Hence, largely taken, empowering educators to act together to make more fully informed decisions for students at localized levels, with supports as needed, might just overcome the challenges of changing attitudes (Valle & Connor, 2011) and begin a shift toward understanding inclusive practices as practices informed by shared wisdom - multiple truths — rather than grand unified theory as truth, like models of best practice tend to strive to be. Based on my fast burgeoning reading of Disability Studies, I think the above resonates with the idea that educator practices with those we currently label as traumatized for example, require us to consider the complexity of the world we live and work in every day, and not just a focus on the label, or the student (and their caregivers) and their 'need', 'disability', 'exceptionality.' This essay is not an argument for an either/or approach. It is an attempt to bring forth the importance of historical forces that can sometimes reify the human sciences at the cost of educator experience. It is an attempt to reveal some of the power discourses can have over us so that we might be open to always hearing the multiplicity of voices informing truth around us, including those of the human sciences. This would be a more balanced, pragmatic, and democratic way of engaging students and their caregivers, I believe.