Toward Pedagogies of Wholeness: Centering Intimacy, Interdependence, and Healing in an English Classroom

• In Event: Humanizing Praxis: Enacting Restorative, Transformative, and Healing Pedagogies

Abstract

Trauma has a significant impact on marginalized communities (Ginwright, 2016) and schools (Ko et al., 2008), even as youth continue to demonstrate resilience in the face of adversity. This study builds upon a framework of restorative justice (Chen, Dulani, & Piepzna­-Samarasinha, 2011) to focus on healing students’ experiences of interpersonal harm, transformative justice (Brown, 2017) to not only restore relationships but transform structures of power in schools, and a restorative English education (Winn, 2013) to utilize literacy as a platform for healing. This study therefore asks: how can a teacher utilize the subject matter of English Language Arts to support Students of Color to heal from trauma, both individually and collectively?

In response to an “apartheid of knowledge” (Delgado Bernal & Villalpando, 2002) in education, women of color scholars like Anzaldúa (2015) have theorized about the body’s inherent sense of knowing. Likewise, Strobel (2010) declares that the body is not only a container for ancestral wisdom, but a vessel for healing. This study bridges such women of color feminist scholarship with trauma-informed care (Ko et al., 2008), transformative justice (Brown, 2017), and a restorative English education (Winn, 2013) to envision a more humanizing pedagogy that integrates the restorative and transformative power of the body.

I combine Auto-Ethnography (Chang, 2016) with Portraiture (Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) to craft a blended portrait that synthesizes my process as a teacher/researcher with student lived realities that emerge throughout one semester teaching 11th–grade English at a high school in Los Angeles. I draw from interviews and interactions with student participants who identify as Black or Latin@, alongside curriculum analysis and reflections from an introductory unit called “Healing Schools.” There, we begin the semester building community, discussing past schooling experiences, sharing collective needs, and re-imagining schools as emotionally supportive spaces.

This blended portrait sifts through the relational, epistemological, and pedagogical shifts needed to create safety, bravery, and belonging in a place that students deem inherently unsafe. I uncover a dialectical process, where we use our bodies and classroom texts to explore the tensions between safety and risk in schools. I discuss classroom structures used to identify collective and individual needs, where a focal student named David learned to befriend his own body, analyze texts about students navigating trauma in school, and eventually bear witness to his own violent schooling experiences and transform perceptions of self-worth and agency.

Findings reveal a need for pedagogies of wholeness, defined as a willingness to dive into an intimate inquiry that uncovers pain and needs, and to build deep relationship with others to uncover individual and collective power. An interdependent kind of teaching and learning that makes space for the needs of students and teacher, pedagogies of wholeness are founded on a critical compassion that holds concern for young people’s suffering, while holding a critique of the systems of oppression that lies at the root of their pain. The study concludes with implications for educators, teacher educators, and districts interested in meeting the complex needs of marginalized youth through a fully humanizing praxis.

Author

• Stephanie Cariaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills