37 ENGLISHJOURNAL 113.4 (2024): 37–43 KELSEY’S STORY My student Lucas was murdered during the summer of the COVID-19 shutdown. I was 8 months preg- nant and, like so many others, quarantining with my husband. I was experiencing severe depression and anxiety. I didn’t want to get out of bed most days. If I willed myself to go for a walk and someone got too close, I would feel my chest tighten and my breath- ing intensify, and soon, I would be in the throes of another panic attack, convinced that my unborn daughter was going to die. This was the context in which I learned about Lucas’s murder. Coworkers sent me texts and Snapchat messages about him. Lucas was stabbed at a party. Everyone except his best friend Brian ran. Brian held him while he died. SAM’S STORY In my memory, my former high school student Sylvia and her child were both murdered by her boyfriend. I read Sylvia’s obituary, as well as a newspaper article about her murder, to prepare for writing this article. I learned that Sylvia’s baby survived. Her toddler. Syl- via often wrote about her ex-boyfriend in my 11th- grade advanced composition course, and she was pregnant when she served as a teaching assistant (TA) for me in 12th grade. Sylvia’s ex-boyfriend shot Syl- via, her sister, and her father before killing himself. The baby survived. MORE THAN SURVIVING Before going forward, we want to acknowledge that all student names in this article are disguised. We continue telling and working with our stories later, but want to let them breathe first. No matter how many times we write or talk about Lucas and Sylvia, it is still painful for us, but it is important to surface and work with pain rather than hiding or repress- ing it. Storytelling and writing make space to share and reflect on trauma in community with others. Our experience of coming together as writers to sur- face, confront, and work with traumas we experience because of our job as teachers is intended to serve as a model for others. We offer that English language arts (ELA) teachers and students would be better served by acknowledging and working with trauma instead of ignoring or repressing it. Further, there is a need in education to move away from deficit views of trauma, so that ELA classrooms can be prepared to authentically account for and process it. Trauma is already present in our classrooms, whether we acknowledge it or not. We call for the cultivation of trauma literacy in ELA to help humanize both teachers and students and, in so doing, to create more authentic, healthy learning environments. This article, beyond anything else, is a provocation for others to normalize confronting, rather than repressing, trauma in ELA spaces. There is an urgent need to grapple with trauma in English teaching and learning. Indeed, Dunn and Garcia (2020) wrote that “nearly every teacher will experience loss and grief during their years in the classroom,” and yet “our profession assumes that English language arts teachers must hide the emo- tions that accompany loss” (p. 52). We are moved by Dunn and Garcia’s important work and extend their argument to how teachers experience secondary Using methods of storytelling to share and make sense of their experience with trauma in English language arts classrooms, the authors imagine healthier ways of coming into relationship with the traumatic conditions produced in schools. More Than Surviving: Secondary Trauma in English Language Arts KELSEY CHINGREN-LOCKHART AND SAMUEL JAYE TANNER