Two classrooms, one principle: trauma-informed practice in healthcare and language education

The parallel with language education is striking. Refugee and asylum seeker healthcare professionals (RASHPs) — doctors and nurses who have been displaced and are working to re-enter clinical practice in their new host country — represent a highly educated but deeply vulnerable group of English language learners, with a wide range of linguistic backgrounds, experiences, and proficiency levels. For teachers working with this group, subject expertise alone is not enough.

Research and training in appropriate trauma-informed pedagogies remains sparse and largely dissipated across disciplines — spanning ELT, refugee studies, trauma psychology, and positive psychology — making it difficult for teachers to gain the knowledge and skills to work with refugees as effectively as they could. Meanwhile, post-traumatic stress is known to affect verbal learning, memory and concentration, yet most ESL teachers do not receive training in trauma-informed teaching.

The WHO standards adopted in Estonia offer a compelling mirror for language educators: that working with displaced professionals requires not just subject expertise, but a conscious commitment to safety, cultural humility, and person-centred practice. Whether you are training a clinician to treat refugee patients, or an English teacher preparing a refugee doctor for professional practice or OET, the quality — and the sensitivity — of that human interaction matters enormously.