Lesley University students preparing to enter the caring, healing, and helping professions would do well to think about a series of questions. Some of the most important questions are placed in phases and categories below.
Homeless in Shelters: Category One: Phase One
- At what pace are homeless clients placed in network shelters from point of in-take to quasi-permanent to permanent housing?
- What are the rules governing use of shelters within the network and the rules governing living in the network shelter as a new or returning member of the community?
- Of the clients with trauma and abuse histories, which ones receive therapeutic care and which ones do not and why?
- What is the average length of stay in temporary shelter?
- What steps and processes are used to keep siblings connected to each other and their homeless parents?
- What factors prevent the successful placement of homeless families in permanent housing?
- Are there examples of family reintegration? How does the network of providers define reintegration? What explicit reintegration treatment models are used by the network of providers?
- Is the efficacy of the model or models assessed? If so, how effective are they?
- Are efforts to engage the homeless in new skill acquisition and employment opportunity an intentional goal of the network?
- How does the network of providers define trauma-informed care for adults and children? What kinds of work referrals are parts of the social service network?
Post-Shelter: Category Two: Phase Two
- What in-house training programs do staff and service providers seek and receive? How do they access and assess that training?
- Do housing placement and treatment outcomes differ for agencies receiving training and those not receiving training? Are community police part of that training?
- Are there patterns of trauma and abuse evident in the case histories and placement success of homeless clients?
- What practices of the network providers changed as a result of the training and lessons learned from self-assessment? Are those changes scalable?
- How does the network of social service agencies choose psychiatric partners or choose to make referrals for client treatment? What ethical responsibility, if any, is there to follow-up with the efficacy of the treatment and hear from clients about how they experienced the treatment?
- Are there gendered challenges attendant to placing and caring for the trauma of homeless people?
Long-Term Effects on Children: Category Three
- How do children in the network survive homelessness? What care is provided infants, toddlers, school-aged children, and teens?
- What services are they provided? What was their assessment of the quality of the service?
- What does traumatic play look like in homeless children? What does posttraumatic play look like in these same children?
- What are the most common traumatic reactions that develop in response to abuse and homelessness?
- How, if at all, do service providers and child specialists teach homeless children to express complex trauma?
- Do school-aged homeless children practice truancy at rates higher than others? Do they show anger and depression more than other children?
- Do school-aged children with histories of abuse, neglect and trauma in the foster care system evince trauma at levels higher than homeless children?
- At what rates do homeless children stay in school and perform at grade level?
- Do rates of grade completion vary for elementary, middle, high school and college homeless students?
- Do rates of completion vary by the gender of homeless children?
- How do children understand homelessness? Which triggers must they and their teachers guard against?
- What are the more common types of trauma experienced by homeless children?
- What observations do college students engaged in internships and field practice most frequently make about what they have observed and learned?
- Do expressive therapy and teacher education college student interns make similar or dissimilar observations and recommendations?
- Are they able to apply learning in the field to text-book learning? What orthodoxies are they resisting, if any?
- What curriculum shifts are needed and why are they needed? What would the shifts accomplish related to trauma-informed housing systems?
Student Testimonials
"My experience with the course has for sure been eye-opening. The presentations have been fantastic in discussing the possible roots of child homelessness and the ways in which we can recognize and improveit. Very well put together; I am definitely enjoying myself."
- Danielle Niakaros, Expressive Therapy, Class of 2013
Faculty Spotlight
Jan Wall
Director of the LA&PS Internship Office; Assistant Professor of Psychology
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Mary Coleman
Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies; Professor of Political Science and Global Studies
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