SARAH DESHAIES
CUP Quebec Bureau Chief

MONTREAL (CUP) — Rosemary Reilly and Miranda D’Amico always noticed a few women in their small education classes who stood apart from their peers: they were overly argumentative, or totally silent in class, sitting at the back of the class. Some would zone out, or would admit to their teachers that they had trouble with grasping the theory part of their courses.

“With some of our students, there was this real block to learning. They were intelligent, bright people, but there was just something blocking them,” said Reilly, a professor in applied human sciences at Concordia University in Montreal.

“So we did a little bit of talking with them to find out what it was, and a theme that they seemed to have was that they were survivors of either physical or sexual abuse when they were younger.”

After interviewing 10 of these women, who were different ages and came from varying racial and economic backgrounds, Reilly and D’Amico drew a conclusion: mentoring relationships can help these students overcome the “blocks” they have on their path to education.

Their study, “The Impact of Childhood Abuse on University Women’s Career Choice,” was published in a 2011 issue of Journal of College Student Development, and it’s the third in a series of studies done by D’Amico — a professor in education — and Reilly, on trauma and education.

In an earlier study published in 2008, the Concordia professors determined that abuse can help student “self-select” into certain vocations, especially so-called feminine, helpful careers like nursing, teaching and social work, where pay is often lower, leading to a ghettoization of those areas of work.

They noticed during that study that their subjects sought out the support of people in order to help themselves.

“Women were talking about relationships that they had with mentors that helped them want to be able to see themselves as capable of learning, capable of succeeding, and being able to move forward in their educational studies [and healing],” said Reilly.

Reilly suggested that all members of the academic community, including professors, counsellors, advisors and student leaders, should be trained to provide mentorship and recognize signs of childhood trauma in students. A mentor is someone who is available, both physically and emotionally, to listen to an individual and provide support.

“We need to see this as a learning disability,” she said, where certain people need “support in order to be able to learn.”

One out of five American women are adult survivors of some form of sexual child abuse, according to Learning and Violence studies done in the 1990s.

“We have to, as educators, that we have to pay attention to effect of violence on learning and mitigate through the way we design programming and engage with students in every way,” said Jenny Horsman, an adjunct professor at University of Toronto who researches how violence can impact learning, and compiles her work at the website Learning and Violence. Mentoring and relationships are one way for people to overcome issues linked to trauma, she suggested.

“They hang in when they would be tempted to give up on themselves and quit because somebody really engaged with them, noticed them,” explained Horsman, whose work was cited in D’Amico and Reilly’s article.

“Universities in particular could be doing a lot more to promote mentorship for young people, because university is this sweet spot moment where people start to emerge and explore what their adult identity means and how to get there,” said Ross Laird, a social services consultant and professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia. “And mentorship is one of the only ways to get there.”

Students are coming to school less and less prepared and are dealing with a variety of stresses that may hinder their education, resulting in a change in academic culture.

“What we’re seeing happen now is a kind of shift toward the instructor or professor as a facilitator and mentor as much they are a content expert,” said Laird, who suggested that there is absence of dialogue on this issue at the national level.

Instead, change is happening at the grassroots, like at Kwantlen, which has established its own mentorship programs.

“It’s more like individual universities and colleges are finding their own way through this because they’ve had challenges,” Laird suggested. “They’ve had crises or they’ve had a consistent run of students being under-prepared or emotionally vulnerable or unready for university.”

But Reilly admitted that her and D’Amico’s work is not yet complete: they would like to survey men in similar situations and conduct much broader surveys with hundreds of more subjects before they will consider making further policy recommendations to post-secondary institutions and government agencies.

The stakes for helping students who are victims of abuse are high, she suggested, as there’s a significant portion of the population that has this untapped capacity.

“They are not going to be able to be everything they want to be and contribute to society in whichever way they want to contribute fully because they have these blocks,” said Reilly.

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Photo: Sarah Deshaies/CUP