Research Questions What do faculty in higher education already know about trauma-informed care (TIC) and trauma-informed education supports (TIES) in teaching and learning?
What are the perceived barriers, limitations, and potential constraints for faculty members as they engage in TIC and TIES?
What is the impact of a professional development eLearning module on awareness, knowledge, and practice of TIC and TIES and how can this support a sense of belonging and culture of wellbeing students and educators.

Participants: Ontario Tech, multiple faculties, 3 – 20 faculty;
50 or more students. Undergraduate and/or graduate classroom settings, while demographic details of the participants are yet to be determined, but steps will be taken to ensure that the participant population represents the population under study, instructors and educators at Ontario Tech University.

Recruitment: Various institutional channels of communication at Ontario Tech University, including emails and posters. Efforts will be made to recruit participants to reflect the full range of views among members of the Ontario Tech community, including diversity in ability, age, sex, gender, and socio-economic status, to help support the validity of the study (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2022). Outlook/email, Ontario Tech’s Learning Management System, and also by posting recruitment literature in faculty spaces. Student participation will be solicited inside of the corresponding faculty member’s course shells, but will redirect them to an external hosting site, Survey Monkey or Qualtrics

Title: You Belong with Me (Professor X's Version): Designing, Implementing and Evaluating TIC and TIES in Online Environments in Higher Education

Youth Empowerment Theory (Zimmerman, 2000)

Instructor and student well-being (Bruznell et al., 2019; Bruznell et al., 2021)

Trauma-Informed Frameworks (Carello et al., 2015; Crosby, 2015; Davidson, 2017; Fallot & Harris; 2018; Brunzell et al., 2019; Doughty, 2020; Harrison et al., 2021; Henshaw, 2022; McChesney, 2022)

Trauma & Popular Culture (Laffier & Westley, 2022; Westley, 2024)

Adlerian Theory - Belonging (Carlson & Englar-Carlson, 2017)

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (Sherwood et al., 2021; Henshaw, 2022; Munroe & Hernandez Ibinarriaga, 2022; Kumi‐Yeboah, 2023)

Universal Design for Learning & Online Education (Rose, 2000; Glass et al., 2013; CAST, n.d.)

Conceptual Framework

Ethical Considerations: Informed consent, maintaining security and legal compliance, research design should reflect thorough consideration of ethical issues and propose strategies to mitigate bias and protect integrity of data collection and storage.

Research Design: Qualitative; Critical Ethnography; Digital Ethnography; Autoethnography; Phenomenologically Grounded Case Study. Compatible with participant observation, PAR, phenomenology, narrative inquiry, case study (Eisenhart, 2019), and typically framed by a sociological approach (Delamount, 2017).
Digital Ethnography: growth of digital technologies requires new techniques to study online communication and culture (Murthy, 2008; Coleman, 2010; Varis, 2015).
Critical Ethnography: associated with the Foucauldian right to critique truth and power (Foucault, 1982; Powell, 2022).
Autoethnography: researcher reflects on the positionality of their own vantage point (Knowles & Cole, 2008; Adams, 2017; Lauricella, 2020; Eamer, 2021).

Data Analysis Qualitative analysis: content analysis, narrative analysis
Quantitative: statistical content analysis

Paradigm: Critical (Transformative) and Interpretivist (Kivunja & Kuyini, 2017; Creswell & Creswell, 2017; Crosby et al., 2018)

Data Research Triangulation: Ethnographic field notes; Interviews

Data Collection & Instrumentation Participant journals
Audio/video journals
Questionnaires Interviews
Other: Online training module