This presentation will define and consider the role brave spaces play in trauma-aware practice, with a specific focus on teacher education. Using the workshop model, we will engage in a collective dialogue around three vignettes which highlight the significant role emotion plays in grappling with material that underscores the structural conditions that produce trauma for marginalised people. Thinking with these vignettes, we will then consider the ways trauma-aware practice and, more specifically, the National Guidelines for Trauma-Aware Education address issues of historic marginalisation, racial and cultural violence, and social/educational exclusion. We will use the Critical Agentic Relational Strengths-based framework to explore our own affective responses for evaluating instances where social positioning may perpetuate or uphold systemic practices of marginalisation. Here, we begin addressing emotion as a place of struggle and possibility by mapping critical instructional moments. This presentation locates social positioning and disruption of historic marginalisation as essential foundations of trauma-aware practice while also embracing the systemic challenges for teachers and teacher educators, arguing that the deep work of trauma-aware practice comes from actualising brave spaces. Drawing from current research around systemic harm and its place in trauma-aware practice, this presentation seeks to think with leading scholarship around dignity and responsibility for education in our times.

Schools are increasingly positioning themselves as places of sanctuary through trauma-informed pedagogies. Yet an overlooked risk remains: when students or caregivers seek support and encounter dismissal, inflexibility, or institutional resistance, schools can inadvertently become sites of sanctuary trauma. Originally conceptualised in clinical contexts, sanctuary trauma occurs when help-seeking is met with additional harm rather than safety.
This presentation explores how sanctuary trauma manifests in educational settings, particularly for neurodiverse, disabled, chronically ill, culturally diverse, and gender-diverse students and their families. Drawing on interdisciplinary research and a socio-ecological lens, the session identifies structural, interpersonal, and systemic factors that undermine trauma-informed intentions. These include rigid policy frameworks, deficit-oriented communication, microaggressions, exclusionary practices, and institutional responses that prioritise compliance over relational care.
Moving beyond awareness, the presentation offers practical strategies for prevention. These include embedding relational accountability in leadership practice, developing trauma-aware caregiver engagement protocols, reviewing discipline and adjustment policies through a sanctuary lens, and strengthening reflective professional learning focused on power, equity, and micro-level interactions.
By reframing sanctuary trauma as a systemic issue rather than an individual misunderstanding, this session supports educators and leaders to move from trauma-informed rhetoric to trauma-transformative practice, ensuring that help-seeking within schools is consistently met with safety, dignity, and trust.