Curriculum Overview

The goal of this curriculum is to provide teachers, instructors, and collective study groups with a guide to engaging with and learning about collective trauma and collective healing. Through the readings, discussion topics, recommended films, and optional assignments detailed in the free, online Instructors’ Guide, learners will develop an understanding of what collective trauma encompasses and apply that knowledge to strategies for fostering healing and resilience within communities.

Throughout the curriculum, emphasis is placed on how violence and trauma are produced and sustained through multiple social systems, norms, and institutions, and how healing must be multi-layered and empowering. Readings, discussions, in-class activities, and videos emphasize gender, intersectionality, and how cultural and socio-political factors shape how people respond to trauma and engage in healing.

The curriculum builds awareness regarding collective trauma and healing and helps learners understand what it means to be a collective-trauma-informed and healing-centered ally. This awareness may contribute to organizational or classroom capacity-building in therapeutic, educational, recreational, or correctional settings, but is primarily intended to provide a foundational understanding of the causes, manifestations, and potential means of addressing and promoting collective healing.

Highlights

  • Available free to instructors, organizations, schools, and community groups.

  • Suitable for college-level learners and college graduates.

  • Appropriate for workshops, trainings, or full-length college courses (e.g., sociology, psychology, gender studies, public health, conflict studies, restorative justice, or healing-centered education).

  • Adaptable for specific audiences such as shelter staff, correctional institutions, reentry programs, or refugee organizations focused on trauma recovery and healing.

  • Usable in both in-person and virtual settings.

Learning Objectives

  • Understand differences and convergences between individual and collective trauma and healing processes.

  • Define and utilize key concepts such as trauma, healing, social structure, intersectionality, gender-based violence, stigma, historical and intergenerational trauma, and collective healing.

  • Analyze how specific communities are impacted by recurring violence, displacement, illness, discrimination, and oppression— and how they heal and rebuild.

  • Explore community-based collective healing methods that foster resilience, restoration, and growth.

Curricular Structure

  • Four units, each consisting of approximately 3 class hours (total ~12 hours).

  • Units can be shortened, expanded, deleted, or divided as needed.

  • Each unit includes learning objectives, background readings, PowerPoint slides, discussion topics, activities, readings, “deep dive” assignments, and recommended videos focused on trauma awareness and healing frameworks.

Unit Summaries

  • UNIT 1: Introduction to Collective Trauma and Healing
    Introduces trauma concepts and healing-centered approaches, exploring individual and collective experiences through history, culture, and social structures.
    Assigned Readings: Thompson (2021); Hirschberger (2018).

  • UNIT 2: Gender-Based Violence as Collective Trauma
    Examines gender-based violence as both individual and collective trauma, exploring structural forces, victim-blaming dynamics, and paths toward healing.
    Assigned Readings: Salter et al. (2025); Pain (2021).

  • UNIT 3: Intersectionality and Healing
    Explores how intersecting identities (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) shape collective trauma experiences and collective healing practices.
    Assigned Readings: Quinn (2025); Kelly et al. (2020).

  • UNIT 4: Collective Healing and Transformation
    Focuses on approaches and frameworks for collective healing through inclusive, community-based, and restorative practices.
    Assigned Readings: Thomson (2021); Leng (2025).

Instructor’s Guide

The free, online Instructors’ Guide includes all of the information and resources an instructor or study group needs to explore collective trauma and healing. The Instructors’ Guide features topic overviews, goals and objectives for each unit, recommended readings and videos, lively discussion topics, modifiable PowerPoint slides, and suggestions for modifying, shortening and expanding the units.

Click here for the complete instructor’s guide in pdf format.

Please contact our team to request the instructor’s guide in modifiable (editable) format (Word) or to request assistance modifying the curriculum to meet your pedagogical needs. Visit our Contact page and include the program title and your affiliation so we can process your request promptly.