Healing through Cultural Practice: Ritual, Rest, and Resistance in the Classroom

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 7:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Trauma and Health Equity: Building Bridges Between Public Health and Education

Abstract

1. Objectives:
This presentation explores the role of culturally sustaining practices in fostering healing, emotional regulation, and resistance among students and educators in school settings. The primary objective is to document how ritual, embodiment, and rest serve as pedagogical strategies for addressing educational trauma and nurturing wellness in historically marginalized communities—especially Black, Indigenous, and Latinx youth. The work also aims to demonstrate how healing-centered educational models contribute to collective care and relational accountability in classrooms.
2. Theoretical Framework:
Guided by Black feminist pedagogy (hooks, 1994; Love, 2019), healing justice (Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, 2017), and culturally responsive education (Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995), this study situates cultural expression and embodiment as essential components of trauma-informed teaching. These frameworks reject the Eurocentric, discipline-heavy models of schooling and instead center holistic well-being, ancestral knowledge, and resistance to oppression as core tenets of educational practice.
3. Methods:
This study uses practitioner inquiry and critical ethnographic reflection to analyze classroom-based implementation of healing-centered rituals and embodiment practices. The presenter, an educator and researcher, documented experiences across three academic years through field notes, reflection journals, and structured classroom observations. Inquiry was guided by the question: What does it look like to teach in ways that center healing, rest, and resistance, particularly for students of color?
4. Data Sources:
Data include weekly reflective practitioner journals, student-generated artifacts (such as affirmation cards, journals, and movement scripts), and classroom observation logs collected at three Title I schools in California. These schools serve predominantly Black and Brown student populations. Informal interviews and feedback sessions with students and fellow educators were also incorporated. The data capture both individual and collective responses to healing-centered interventions over time.
5. Results:
The incorporation of daily rituals—such as breathing circles, affirmation stations, movement-based grounding exercises, and storytelling—resulted in marked improvements in classroom climate, student engagement, and peer-to-peer relationships. Students reported feeling “seen,” “safe,” and “more calm” after participating in these practices. Teachers observed reductions in behavioral incidents and more emotionally expressive student dialogue. The work also revealed the emotional labor of sustaining such practices in under-resourced schools and the need for institutional support to maintain these approaches. Importantly, healing practices did not detract from academic instruction but instead served as bridges to deeper learning and community connection.
6. Scholarly Significance of the Study:
This work contributes to the fields of trauma-informed education, culturally responsive pedagogy, and health equity by illustrating how culturally grounded healing practices transform classrooms into spaces of resilience and resistance. It pushes the boundaries of traditional educational research by offering embodied, relational, and ritual-based practices as legitimate forms of inquiry and care. In doing so, it makes a case for investing in educator preparation programs that teach not only curriculum, but also how to hold space for rest, ritual, and resistance as part of liberatory teaching.

Author

• Angelica Bradley, University of California - Los Angeles