Standing in the Storm
There are days when teaching does not feel like teaching at all. Instead, it feels like standing in the center of a storm. Today was such a day. My students carried with them the invisible but palpable weight of their lives—broken families, histories of violence, financial instability, and the thousand other forms of pain that accumulate silently over years. Sometimes these burdens remain hidden, but other times they rise collectively to the surface, filling the classroom with a kind of raw electricity. On days like this, I do not merely deliver lessons; I anchor myself, becoming a steady presence in the chaos.
The metaphor of the lighthouse has always felt true. A lighthouse does not silence the storm, nor does it change the tide—it simply stands, visible and constant, so that others might find their way through darkness. This is my role when trauma spills into the classroom. I cannot erase what my students have lived, but I can remain steady, refusing to abandon them to the waves. And though these days leave me exhausted, they also leave me strangely alive. For it is in the storm that the purpose of education becomes clearest—not as transmission of knowledge, but as presence, guidance, and endurance.
Trauma and the Black Field
When I look at Clyfford Still’s PH-241, I see this storm rendered in paint. The vast black field that dominates the canvas is heavy, suffocating, seemingly infinite. Its texture is rough, layered, scarred—as if the paint itself carries memory. Trauma works in this way. It is not a single wound but an accumulation of jagged layers, each new experience settling into the surface of the self, darkening and thickening it over time. The black is not simply the absence of color but the presence of pain.
And yet Still interrupts this darkness. Along the edges, color forces its way through. Red burns at the bottom like embers refusing to die, while electric blue glows at the right edge, pushing upward against the void. These ruptures of color remind me of my students. Even in their bleakest days, when despair feels like it has swallowed everything, flashes of vitality break through: a wry smile, a question asked with genuine curiosity, a moment of kindness unexpectedly offered. These are the fissures of light that trauma cannot completely bury. Just as in PH-241, the darkness may dominate, but it never achieves totality.
The Psychology of Fracture and Survival
Judith Herman (1992) describes trauma as producing a “dialectic of trauma”: the survivor is compelled both to remember and to forget, to bury and to relive. Still’s painting captures this paradox—the black seeks to smother, yet the eruptions of color reveal what cannot be fully erased. Bessel van der Kolk (2014) reminds us that “the body keeps the score.” Trauma imprints itself physically and neurologically, long after conscious memory tries to silence it. PH-241 feels bodily in this way: thick, scarred paint that refuses smoothness, as if the very surface of the canvas were a skin carrying memory.
Yet alongside devastation lies resilience. Trauma survivors are not merely broken; they are also survivors of immense strength. The color in Still’s painting is not soft or delicate—it is fiery, electric, insistent. My students embody this paradox. They live with burdens I cannot erase, but they also demonstrate an astonishing capacity to endure. Their very presence in my classroom is testimony to their survival. Recognizing this requires me to shift perspective: from seeing them as damaged to seeing them as already engaged in the lifelong work of constructing meaning from fracture.
Constructivism in the Shadow of Trauma
Educational philosophy offers language for this work. Jean Piaget argued that children are not passive recipients of knowledge but active builders of it, constantly restructuring their understanding through experience. Lev Vygotsky emphasized that this process unfolds socially, within relationships, as learners co-construct knowledge alongside guides and peers. For students living with trauma, this constructivist vision takes on profound significance. They are not empty vessels waiting to be filled; they are already constructing meaning—though much of it emerges from pain and survival strategies.
In this context, my role as educator is to enter into their process, not to replace it. Constructivism, when applied to trauma, becomes an ethic of companionship. It asks me to stand with students in their black fields, helping them reinterpret their experiences, expanding their capacity to imagine futures not defined solely by suffering. Paulo Freire (1970) pushes this further, warning against the “banking model” of education and urging instead toward conscientização, or critical consciousness. For my students, critical consciousness often begins with naming the structures—poverty, racism, systemic neglect—that contribute to their trauma. It is not enough to offer academic content; I must also offer tools for re-seeing themselves as agents within a larger social reality.
In this sense, constructivism becomes more than pedagogy—it becomes hope itself. It affirms that even the most fragmented lives can be reassembled into new narratives, that knowledge is not something imposed from outside but something grown from within, like color pushing out from the edges of black.
Hope at the Edges
What Still teaches me most powerfully is that hope often emerges at the edges. The red and blue are not centered—they intrude from the margins, irregular, incomplete. Hope in the classroom rarely announces itself in grand gestures. It appears in fragments: a student completing an assignment after weeks of disengagement, another daring to share part of their story, another laughing unexpectedly in the midst of sorrow. These are not trivial details; they are the fissures through which life insists on being seen.
My task as teacher is to recognize these small ruptures of light and to reflect them back to my students. To say: I see you. Your light is real, even if it flickers at the edges. This, too, is the work of the lighthouse—not banishing the storm but signaling that someone stands steady, someone bears witness, someone believes the light is still there.
Teaching in the Black Field
Clyfford Still’s PH-241 is not easy to look at. It confronts us with darkness, with weight, with surfaces that refuse smooth resolution. Yet it also affirms a truth at the heart of both trauma and education: that hope persists, not by erasing the black, but by breaking through it. Trauma psychology teaches us that wounds leave scars, but also that survival endures. Constructivist philosophy reminds us that learners are not blank slates, but builders of meaning—even from fragments. Together, these insights converge in the lived reality of my classroom.
To teach in the midst of trauma is to dwell in the black field, acknowledging its density without being consumed by it. It is to recognize the moments of red and blue, to nurture them, and to point them out when students cannot yet see them themselves. It is to embody presence, like a lighthouse, steady and constant against the storm. And most of all, it is to believe that education is not only about knowledge, but about transformation: the slow, painful, but undeniable emergence of color from darkness.
References
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Piaget, J. (1972). The psychology of the child. Basic Books.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.