Unified Resolve, Dissociated Parts: Academic and Professional Perspectives of Trauma-informed Practice at a Regional Australian University

University educators have a social and ethical responsibility to both address and actively pre-empt re/traumatisation in the classroom. However, despite the growing enthusiasm for trauma-informed practice in higher education, there has been a slow uptake of trauma-informed care at the organisational level. As a result, there is limited evidence about the impacts and effects of trauma-informed practice as a service-level system of care, including the challenge of fostering trauma-informed organisational support and change. In the Australian higher education context, this is particularly concerning given the prevalence of trauma exposure and risk in the university population, and the chronic and cumulative nature of trauma itself. If organisational readiness to adopt and maintain trauma-informed practice directly affects the scale-up and sustainability of trauma-informed interventions, there is a need to better understand how trauma-informed practice is apprehended and enacted by university staff. In this chapter, we examine how academic and professional staff at a regional Queensland university understand both the purpose and value of trauma-informed practice, and how these individuals perceive their capacity to contribute to trauma-informed organisational change within the purview of their everyday work. We offer a four-phase framework for understanding the different stages of trauma-informed practice in the university, and we map existing change efforts for organisational approaches to trauma-informed care. At the same time, we observe some of the challenges that are unique to regional universities and explain why the need for collective care is heightened in the regional context.