Post-Traumatic Growth in the Global South: Possibilities in Relational Ethics from Communities to Classrooms

This article reports on a qualitative study of the way instructors and students understand and respond to traumatizing events in a Sri Lankan university. It shows how the attitudes and practices in the society at large are carried over to classrooms even though local institutions do not have a programmatic trauma-informed pedagogy. Relational ethics practiced in the community, deriving from local understandings of life as inter-dependent and vulnerable, have significant implications for classroom relations. Having been socialized into such ethical practices in the community, instructors and students respond to the needs of trauma-affected students to facilitate learning in ESL classrooms. Such practices also help such students toward post-traumatic growth, when traditional scholarship treated “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) as the likely outcome that caused learning and communicative disabilities. The study presents these experiences as typical of many Global South communities which experience historical and collective trauma from years of colonization, different from the Global North theorizations of trauma as event-based, individual, and pathological.