Abstract This forum piece begins with a spoken word poem titled A Pedagogy of Wonder , performed by the author, through which the intersections of trauma, language teaching, and creative inquiry are explored. While TESOL scholarship has predominantly focused on refugee‐background or international students as “traumatized populations,” and on trauma‐informed pedagogical frameworks, less attention has been given to teachers' embodied experiences of trauma and their ethical responsibilities in multilingual classrooms. This spoken word poetic inquiry addresses this gap by responding to these under‐examined aspects of teachers' experiences. Drawing on personal and professional experiences of trauma, it examines how educators navigate their own histories of pain while supporting students whose learning is shaped by diverse, often invisible, traumatic experiences. Positioning spoken word poetry as both an inquiry and pedagogy, my work engages arts‐based educational research to demonstrate how creative expression fosters reflection, relationality, and healing. A poetic inquiry becomes a space to hold memory, emotion, and uncertainty, allowing teachers to witness their own processes of healing while attending to students' needs. It presents language teaching not merely as the development of skills, but as a practice grounded in relational connection and attentive presence. This inquiry highlights the ethical dimensions of trauma‐aware teaching, foregrounding care and the cultivation of spaces where students' agency and experiences of struggle are acknowledged. It further illuminates the often‐unspoken power dynamics that structure educational practice and sustain forms of oppression within it. Ultimately, this work argues that language teaching can be a transformative practice: a landscape where trauma, creativity, and human connection meet, and where wonder guides the experiences of educators and learners.
Jennifer Burton (Fri,) studied this question.