Developing and Understanding ‘Teachers as Healers’ and Education as a Way of Healing in American University’s Art Education Space


Yilin Zhang
QUAL 8400





  • When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two—that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other.
—bell hooks






Problem Statement

The classroom is never a neutral space. In the 21st century’s art education space, contemporary art no longer focuses solely on technique but connects with philosophy, sociology, critical theory, and other field. When teachers of visual art and art education in diverse U.S. universities address contemporary issues, complex conditions begin to emerge: What kinds of knowledge are being taught? If there is no neutral, universal knowledge, then whose knowledge can be considered as knowledge? Whose words are ‘theory’, and whose are not? Whose voice are amplified, whose is being overlooked?

The critical turn and the rise of social issues in contemporary art also present teachers with new challenges: When a classroom includes students of varied backgrounds, races, skin colors, and genders, how can care be enacted? Whitfield and Klug (2004) propose the idea that teachers should be trained to teach diverse populations. To create classroom communities of learners, teachers should be able to create caring environments that allows students to make connections between what they’ve learned in classroom and the outside world.

While care, diversity, and critical pedagogy have been widely discussed, little research haven been widely examined on the teacher’s role through a healing-centered pedagogy to confront such conditions. Under this background, I introduce the concept ‘teachers as healers’ as a key metaphor to explore what roles teachers should play in the 21st-century art education space at American universities.


‘Teachers as Healers’?

The concept ‘teachers as healers’ I use here initially came from bell hooks’ book Teaching to Transgress (hooks, 1994). According to bell hooks, healing-centered pedagogy means that teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well being (hooks, pp. 15, 1994). At the same time, she situated her own pedagogy within the anticolonial, feminist and critical framework and emphasized that our lived experience, theory and practice are interconnected. ‘Teachers as healers’, in her words, is a way to collective liberation and self-recovery.

In this study, I do not simply adopt bell hooks’s formulation of “teachers as healers.” Rather, I use my research to probe what this concept comes to signify within the diverse and complex landscape of contemporary art education: how we might understand this concept,  what does healing mean in art education, and how teachers might enact it in practice?

Here, it is important to notice that I intentionally using the word ‘healing’, not ‘cure’ or ‘therapy’ to differentiate my discussion from the field of Western medicine, psychiatry, art therapy or any other discipline follows the rules and norms of Western psychopathology.

Whereas therapy and cure operate within a clinical paradigm that seeks to correct, normalize, or repair a pathology, healing emerges from a different worldview—one that understands human experience as relational, embodied, culturally situated, and inseparable from community, history, and environment. Healing does not aim to “fix” a deficit; instead, it acknowledges pain, cultivates connection, restores relational balance, and honors multiple ways of knowing (Klug & Whitfield, 2003; Pewewardy, 1998). In this sense, healing opens a space for pedagogical practices that are affective, ethical, and communal rather than clinical or diagnostic.



What does ‘Healing’ mean in Art Education Space?

In the existing literature, Whitfield and Klug (2003) have discussed how we might practice educational approaches that emphasize empathy, community relationships, and care in diverse learning environments, as well as how healing in Indigenous knowledge systems can help us understand the notion of ‘teachers as healers’. Staikidis (2024) proposes employing bell hooks’ love ethic and a decolonial framework in art education for the purposes of social change and radical transformation.

However, I would like to highlight several gaps that remain insufficiently addressed. Art education and visual arts in higher education operate in fundamentally different ways from other disciplines, yet current literature devotes little attention to arts-based methods and storytelling, which are more creative and hold huge potential. Moreover, existing discussions of liberation within art education mostly draw on Black histories and Indigenous knowledge. Although Asian students constitute a significant proportion of U.S. university populations, there is a profound lack of scholarship addressing the experiences of Asian students, particularly international students rather than Asian Americans. As an Asian international student myself, I am often expected to articulate my oppression and possibilities for liberation through the lens of Black feminist thought within predominantly white academic spaces. Even though I am acutely aware of the limitations and risks of appropriation embedded in this expectation, I have struggled to name this subtle disobedience.


Finally, if we understand ‘healing’ as a heterogeneous, relational, and communal concept, then the traditional roles of teachers and students in Western classrooms are fundamentally challenged. While this perspective is inspired by Freire’s (1968) critical pedagogy, my concern extends beyond critique of bank education. My questions are: Can we imagine the classroom as a kind of multisensory, polyphonic musical performance, in which students’ contributions, especially when critical theory, feminist practice, and personal lived experience are deeply intertwined—are not only included but allowed to exceed the boundaries of established knowledge frameworks?

In this study, I take my own ARED 8460 classroom as the primary case-study site, entering the field with these inquiries in mind.






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Purpose Statement


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?







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Theoretical Framework

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.








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References


Francis Phil Carspecken. (2013). Critical Ethnography in Educational Research. Routledge.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic.

Hong, C. P. (2020). Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. One World.

hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom (pp. 167–175). Routledge.

Imoto, Y. (2022). Towards a contemplative approach to ethnography and education: an ethnography of acontemplative classroom at a North American university. Ethnography and Education, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2022.2036215

Kress, T. M., Emdin, C., & Lake, R. (2022). Critical pedagogy for healing : paths beyond “wellness”, toward a soul revival of teaching and learning. Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Kryssi Staikidis. (2024). An Ethics of Care in Art Education. Studies in Art Education, 65(1), 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2024.2320042

Oliveira, E., Borges, E., Santo, Georgia, R., & Cardoso, Â. (2025). Healing and reenchanting Mental Health care: reflections from the inner love of bell hooks. Interface - Comunicação Saúde Educação, 29. https://doi.org/10.1590/interface.250182

Pewewardy, Cornel D. (1998, November 19). Culturally Responsive Teaching for American Indian Learners. Ed.gov. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED459981

Qiu, T., Resman, J., & Zheng, J. (2023). Interrogating (Proximity to) Whiteness: Asian(American) Women in Autoethnographic Sister Circles. Qualitative Inquiry, 107780042211500. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004221150010

Reinharz, S. (1992). Feminist methods in social research. Oxford University Press.

Starr, L. J. (2010). The Use of Autoethnography in Educational Research: Locating Who We Are in What We Do. Canadian Journal for New Scholars in Education/ Revue Canadienne Des Jeunes Chercheures et Chercheurs En Éducation, 3(1). https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/cjnse/article/view/30477

Whitfield, P. T., & Klug, B. J. (2004). Teachers as “Healers”: 21st-Century Possibility? Or Necessity?. Multicultural Perspectives, 6(1), 43–50. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327892mcp0601_8