Breathing Room: Reclaiming Somatic Knowledge in Counselor Education for Liberation and Healing

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Healing and Empowerment in Counseling

Abstract

In response to the AERA 2026 theme, “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures,” this proposal presents a pedagogical framework for counselor education that reclaims somatic knowledge, ancestral wisdom, and culturally grounded healing practices as essential to the training of clinical mental health counselors. Through a decolonizing, trauma-informed lens, this presentation outlines a liberatory model of teaching that positions the body not merely as an object of intervention—but as a critical site of knowing, resistance, healing, and educational transformation.

Author

• Zoya A McCants, St. John's University