Healing Pedagogy

Healing Pedagogy

If I were to trace it back, I would consider one thing that directed me into this program. Poetry.

         It began on a study abroad trip, during which I read famous poetry where it was originally written. I took the opportunity to use any writing assignment we were given to write my own poetry in response. It became a way of making sense of things, and of weaving together my feelings and impressions with learning. The professor of Literature on Location, one day, used my writing as an exemplar to my classmates. He said that I had taken the assignment above and beyond. He later told me I had true writing talent. Besides encouraging the style of my writing as being “academic,” he ignited a flame for my wanting to take writing to places it doesn’t “usually” go. To the heart.

         I think it’s when a call on our life becomes recognized by another that the course of life begins. It was no longer enough for me to have knowledge of words and ideas and the power they can have in the world - it had to be shared.

         It isn’t enough to just read stories, either, but to write them. I consider teaching my opportunity to allow students chances to see themselves as the authors of their lives. I want my teaching to be a space where the people around me can learn ways in which they can design their art, their communication, their lives, and grow. Where the curriculum students have access to is healing. As I am a lifelong learner participating in this diverse global world, my library will  include diverse perspectives and forms of communication, art, and literature. The way things are, to involve people in healing involves the strategic removal of dominating forces that inhibit, traumatize, and block the truth.

        My theory of teaching practice includes analysis as key. Analysis of every word and thought, to discomfit and to challenge, to make aware and to prepare students to act and create the best lives they can possibly have. To dissect, pick apart, and break the world so we can put it back together, together.

        Jimmy Nelson in a Ted talk speaks about the Himba people in northern Namibia who tear down the fence around the village every time their chief dies. They do this as a metaphor. First: destroy, then: reflect, then: rebuild, THEN: respect. We have a lot of work to do in America to regain the respect of each other, with all of the injustice we are built on. We are who we are because of our our forefathers before us, and our history is violent and inhumane.

        So I will destroy in order to respect. My teaching will be organized and careful. Structured, inclusive, open-ended and dialogic. Room for all six avenues to understanding, and reminders of them posted up in my room. Teaching sensitivity and strength-building along the way. My way of being in the classroom will be relaxed and calm, centered and from a position of being whole. I am far from a perfect teacher candidate nor am I a perfect human, but I think teaching to be the best vocation to promote the most healing and wellness through hard knowledge and soft reflection.

        I can not control ideas, nor the present or the future, but  I can facilitate the ideas’ consideration and continuation, or destruction.

        Not yet knowing where or whom I’ll teach, I’ll continue willing meaning into existence: seeing possible connections and making things happen to allow the rebuilding of respect. Spaces in my class will become “McQueen-like,” like the one at Harding High. Space, comfort, light, questions, truth, knowledge, and breathing.