This study relies on different theorist’s work. The primary conceptual grounding comes from bell hooks’s (1994) articulation of healing, love, and self-recovery in education. It provides the foundation for examining what ‘teachers as healers’ might manifest in university art education classrooms where diverse identities, lived experiences, and critical issues intersect.
Critical pedagogy, particularly Freire’s (1968) commitment to humanization and the reconfiguration of teacher–student power, further informs this study’s understanding of classrooms as political, affective, and non-neutral spaces. These ideas help frame healing not as a therapeutic intervention, but as a collective, relational, and liberatory process that challenges traditional hierarchies embedded in Western classroom models.
Besides, I also use Asian Crit as an additional framework for recognizing the racialized invisibility and epistemic marginalization of Asian and international students. This framework supports my inquiry into how healing-centered pedagogy must account for the overlooked disobedience and pain that Asian students experience within predominantly white institutions.
Decolonial and spiritual epistemologies expand the concept of ‘healing’ beyond the Western medicine and psychiatry system. Indigenous relational cosmologies, Buddhist understandings of interconnectedness, and other non-Western knowledge systems disrupt notions of cure, pathology, and normalcy. These perspectives make it possible to conceptualize healing as relational balance, embodied presence, communal well-being.
Here are several core assumptions embedded this study:
(1) education is never neutral and is always entangled with power;
(2) liberation and transformation are possible within relational pedagogies;
(3) minority experiences, especially those of Asian and international students, have been historically overlooked and require intentional centering;
(4) lived experience are intertwined with our liberation practice;
(5) healing-centered pedagogy demands the inclusion of non-Western, relational, and spiritual epistemologies that challenge Western academic norms.
Methodological Statement
This study is grounded in critical ethnography, a methodological orientation that combines critical theory with ethnographic approach. Rather than treating classrooms as neutral spaces, critical ethnography views them as political, relational, and affectively charged environments. Its purpose is not only to document lived experiences but also to reveal how oppression, marginalization, and silence are produced in classroom, and how they may be transformed.
I mainly look at Carspecken’s Critical Ethnography in Educational Research as my guidebook (Carspecken, 2013). Besides, I also draw inspirations from Asian writer Cathy Park Hong’s autobiographical work Minor Feelings (Hong, 2020). Central to this methodological perspective is the belief that liberation is possible when researchers attend closely to the experiences and epistemologies of those whose voices have historically been overlooked. As an Asian international student in a predominantly white institution, my own positionality informs how I perceive power dynamics, relational practices, and possibilities for healing in the art classroom.
I chose my ARED 8460 classroom as the main case of this critical ethnography. The classroom is unique that diverse students can feel being respected, supported and heard here. This embodied experience of care drives me further explore what ‘teachers as healers’ and ‘education as a form of healing’ might mean in high-ed art education space in American.