From Policy to Practice

Trauma-Informed Approaches to Student Attendance

Abstract

This article contributes to inclusive TPC pedagogical scholarship by using a trauma-informed pedagogical (TIP) principles (Imad, 2022) to study an under researched area: classroom policies. Specifically, we treat instructors as technical communicators in the classroom and focus on how they design, implement, and enforce their attendance policies. Guided by Miriam Williams’ (2020) conceptual framework for policy analysis, we conducted interviews with instructors at a local institution to identify that a variety of factors impact their decisions regarding attendance policy: from their teaching philosophy; to course type; to institutional contexts. The challenge of developing inclusive attendance policies coalesced to two themes: flexibility and accountability, which represent the two ends of a spectrum. We offer TIP principles to address these challenges and provide specific suggestions for instructors to implement in their own classroom and to further consider relevant applications to other class policies.