Mapping Racial Trauma: Visualizing Stories with Data
Since 2017, Associate Professor of Education Stephanie Jones has been collecting classroom stories of racialized trauma, particularly those connected to the Black community. Whenever she would find a news article or video detailing a student’s negative experience at school, she would upload the incident onto a Facebook page, piecing together an overall larger trend among U.S schools.
Trauma, explains Jones, is not a singular event that happens to someone, like dealing with extreme poverty, war, or a death of a parent. “Trauma can also happen as a series of smaller wounds that add up. It’s like I have an experience with a teacher who didn’t believe I wrote my essay — that can be one small wound. And then I go to school the next year, and an educator says, ‘Let’s recreate the voyage that enslaved people went on and tie up their wrists.’ When you add all of that up, how does that sit with a person?”
According to Jones, such trauma wounds have the potential to discourage students from becoming a teacher, or instill the belief that they don’t belong in school. Without intervention, these trauma wounds also compromise education’s positive work, benefits, and promise, especially in public school settings. Ultimately, incidents of racialized trauma can disrupt the advantages of a public education system and contribute to staggering educational disparities.
In thinking about these incidents and their impact, Jones wondered how she could shed light on people’s lived experiences and inspire intervention. Eventually, her collection of narratives would become the essence of her digital research project, “Mapping Racial Trauma.” The project has notably aspired to mitigate trauma in public schools, encouraging accountability and show a visual demand for better training for educators, anti-racist curricula, and more.
With public schools facing negative perceptions and rhetoric, however, Jones notes it is important to avoid weaponizing the data for further anti-public-school sentiment. Instead, she hopes to use her project to alleviate instances of trauma in the classroom.
“The data already shows that racialized trauma occurs across public, private, and parochial schools,” Jones shares. “I don’t want this data to be used to discourage the promise of schooling, especially by entities that are focused on privatizing public education.”
The first of its kind, the project mainly records incidents of curriculum violence, which Jones defines as educators using and creating “assignments, lectures, and questions that harm children’s intellectual and emotional spirit.” She notes that she is purposeful about using the term “violence” to identify and map instances, as she emphasizes that violence can be extended to a type of psychological harm.
“If we start to qualify what counts as violence,” says Jones, “the myriad of ways that violence can exist in a space has the potential to be belittled or erased.”
As the “Mapping Racial Trauma” website states, part of its goal is to consolidate data in an accessible space for teachers, school administration, parents, and community leaders to understand and gather resources to effectively address racialized trauma in schools. Jones hopes that the project will not only display these trajectories but also encourage people to stop them in their track.
A Vivero Collaboration
Three years ago, biochemistry and sociology major Feven Adane Getachew ’24 joined the project as a Vivero fellow, collecting and mapping these stories of racial trauma alongside Jones. Getachew, who is supported by the Vivero Digital Fellows program, utilizes digital tools to create video, mapping, and online exhibitions of the data.
Getachew also uses Vivero’s tools to supplement Jones’ research and teaching. Her digital toolkit — which includes ArcGIS and WordPress — helps her code and build interactive maps online using data extracted from student experiences. Her work on ArcGIS is published through WordPress and links to a list of racial trauma incidents posted on X (formerly known as Twitter). Incidents can span from problematic classroom interactions to racist social media posts by classmates. The project also incorporates local, national, and international racial incidents told through media channels.
So far, the data set tracks the date of these incidents and more, including their location, zip code, school district, and both victim and perpetrators’ race and gender. Incident summaries are also archived into the data. In the future, Jones and Getachew hope to create a story map, which would allow individuals to read about racial experiences while scrolling through visualizations of the data. In particular, Getachew hopes that people will be able to filter data points and pinpoint specific aspects of racial incidents, such as those found on social media.
Getachew points to similar websites as inspiration for illustrating such heavy topics. “We have seen websites that track similar racial trauma incidents — like the Tulsa race massacre — that are so beautiful and full of information. In this case, people can visualize how different the town is from before [the massacre].”
On the website, site visitors can also find linked online stories published in conjunction with the racial trauma incidents. As the Racial Mapping website indicates, it is important to bring awareness to the assumptions, harm, and curriculum violence that educators and peers can bring to students. “I believe that all harm is violence, whether or not a person touches you,” says Jones. “I believe the word is appropriate to the type of educational experience that Black and brown youth have had to endure.”
Getachew points out that curriculum violence has had a strong presence within the U.S education system, morphing and appearing in new ways. “The impact curriculum violence and racial trauma has to this day and the number of students going through this is too great,” she says. A good place to start, notes Getachew, is examining these incidents and witness how racism could grow, change, and manifest itself in the classroom. As for teachers and adults, Getachew emphasizes they should constantly examine their teachings at home and at school. “What kids are doing at school reflects what the adults around them are doing – children are a good reflection of what adults are doing wrong and what they’re doing right.”
Learning from Visualized Data
In reflecting upon her work on the “Mapping Racial Trauma” website, Getachew, a graduate of May 2024, says she appreciates her work and visualization tools so much more. “What I’m seeing on the website didn’t happen overnight,” she says. “Even now, we are still developing ways to organize data we’ve had for two and a half years. You can do things one way for a month, but then realize it doesn’t work and has to be changed. This job [as a Vivero fellow] forces you to be flexible and problem solve at any moment.”
According to Jones, Getachew has been her longest-standing Vivero fellow, which she says “speaks to her recognizing the importance of what it means to do this work on behalf of Black students and the diaspora of Black students.”
Jones and Getachew aspire to expand their research and create a database of racial trauma incidents among different racial groups who also experience subtle and overt racism in schools. However, Getachew hopes that the website’s current information will serve as a starting point for people to understand and call out incidents of curriculum and racialized violence in the classroom. She says this is especially important in schools and communities where marginalized students are vulnerable and there to learn.
As for those affected by these incidents of racialized trauma, Jones predicts the digital research project will eventually serve to track patterns on a local and national level. “Are we finding these incidents happening in states that are passing anti-CRT [Critical Race Theory] legislation? Are we finding that these incidents are happening in places with certain curriculums bought by the school district? Are we finding that these incidents are happening where is a large amount of Black and brown students and families moving into the community that weren’t there before?” Such questions, says Jones, are necessary to preserve the promise and work of the public education system.
The interactive nature of the project is what makes the project unique from research presented through written, academic work, notes Getachew. “It is a different way to present information, but the learning you do is much more powerful and impactful,” she remarks. “It is easier to retain information this way than just reading a scientific paper.”
As Jones stated in her article “Ending Curriculum Violence,” mapping these incidents is to identify exactly what is occurring in the classroom and what is hurting students. “In order to reclaim our schools as sites of real learning and safety rather than suffering and racial trauma,” writes Jones, “it is necessary to help prepare teachers to critically examine what curriculum violence looks like within their discipline… We must want to do the right thing by our students, even if that means we have to struggle to learn more and seek feedback from students about the impact of our curricular choices.”
View the Racial Mapping Project online. Individuals can email the project to submit personal anecdotes of racial trauma and curriculum violence on school campuses from elementary to college levels.
About the Vivero Digital Fellows Program
The Vivero Digital Fellows program serves to develop a digital liberal arts community that embodies the College’s commitment to social justice, diversity, and excellence in undergraduate liberal arts education. Vivero digital fellows collaborate on digital projects led by faculty and staff from all disciplines and departments; provide peer mentoring support for courses engaging in digital methods of analysis and presentation; and offer drop-in office hours as a resource for students pursuing digital projects as part of their curricular or co-curricular work. Vivero digital fellows dedicate their time to two, four-hour shifts in the media room of Burling Library. Along with the Vivero program, the “Mapping Racial Trauma” project is also supported by a team of research students at Boston University’s Center for Educating Critically in the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.
