Soldiers in the Classroom by Mike Rose at Inside Higher Ed addresses the situation the MLA session I was in, Trauma and the Composition Classroom, was expected to comment on. Instead, the papers the session received were other topics related to trauma.
However, the article has some interesting points:
What the classroom full of veterans wanted most was, as one of them put it, “to help our families understand what we went through.†The course was in communication, and it was part of an educational program for veterans of the Vietnam war. The teacher – my colleague in the federally funded program – had asked them what they most wanted to learn, and that was their primary answer: to explain to those closest to them the hell they endured….