The purpose of this study is to explore how the concept of ‘teachers as healers’ can be understood, interpreted, and enacted within contemporary art education space in U.S. universities. Through a critical ethnographic approach, this study seeks to examine how pedagogical practices in an art education classroom can cultivate care, relationality, and communal learning beyond the limits of Western therapeutic paradigms and traditional teacher–student roles. By using my ARED 8460 classroom as a case study, this research aims to illuminate how healing, as an epistemological, ontological, and pedagogical orientation, can open new possibilities for teaching and learning in a diverse educational environment.
Research Questions
1. How is the concept of ‘teachers as healers’ understood and interpreted within a diverse contemporary art education context?
2. In what ways do teachers and students enact practices of healing, care, and relationality in American university’s art education classroom ?
3. In the context of healing-centered education, what is the teacher’s role in the classroom?
4. How might storytelling, theory, community-building can challenge traditional knowledge framework in Western high-ed classrooms?
Relevant Scholarship
Recent scholarship has examined how healing, care, and relationality can be enacted within educational contexts, offering important foundations for my study. Whitfield and Klug (2004) argue that 21st century education requires a shift from economic capital to human and relational forms of capital, suggesting that teachers must cultivate empathy, community, and care in order to support diverse learners. Their work also foregrounds Indigenous understandings of ‘healing’, highlighting how non-Western knowledge systems can reorient pedagogical relationships toward holistic well-being rather than clinical models of intervention.
Other scholars have extended discussions of healing by critically examining how Western medical and psychiatric paradigms limit the ways healing and cure (OliveiraBorges, E., Santo, Georgia, R., & Cardoso, Â, 2025). These critiques illuminate how healing must be understood beyond pathology. Within art education field, Staikidis (2024) identifies the current challenges facing the field and calls for an ethics of care grounded in bell hooks’s love ethic and decolonial approaches. Her work emphasizes how art classrooms already operate as affective, relational, and community-oriented spaces, and argues that art educators should seek for a new mode for social change and radical transformation.
In addition to research centered on healing, scholars have explored classroom practices that embody the ideas of community, narrative, and shared experience. Qiu, Rasmen, and Zheng (2023) demonstrate how Asian and Asian American women use the “sister circles,” storytelling, and collective reflexivity as healing practices in their transcultural learning and living experience. Their work highlights how racialized and gendered experiences shape students’ emotional and intellectual lives, and why frameworks such as CRT and AsianCrit are necessary for understanding forms of harm and care in learning environments.
Besides, ethnographic studies of higher education classrooms offer methodological guidance for me. Imoto’s (2022) contemplative ethnography of a North American university classroom gives me strong inspirations. This model of critical ethnography provides a useful structure for studying how healing manifests in my own case and how classroom ethos can be interpreted through immersive observation, narrative data, interviews, and contextual analysis.
Subjective Statement
I am an artist, art educator, healer, as well as an international student who has a transcultural learning and living experience in three different countries. From my own learning and teaching experience, I noticed that the classroom is not just a space for teaching and transmitting knowledge; it’s also a place where we can experience trauma and recovery. The first time I read bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, I was touched by her position to propose the idea of ‘teachers as healers’. I wonder when facing the structural injustice, even in art & humanity classrooms, how can we reflect and then change our pedagogy towards a purpose of healing, and how to build an environment where everyone can feel and being supported?