Intertwined
The power and possibilities of interlacing healing justice and education
“Don’t let them see you cry—it will make you seem weak.”
“I learned to police myself.”
“I tended to my body only when it could no longer carry me.”
These are some of the experiences that women of color reported to a team of education scholars about what they heard, felt and then embodied while navigating higher education.
“These are the dominant narratives in graduate schools—these are not individual experiences. We see it across institutions and in the literature,” said Susan Jurow, CU Boulder School of Education professor of learning sciences and human development. “Based on what we know about learning, you are not going to learn in that kind of environment.”
Led by CU Boulder alumnae Liz Mendoza and the late Christina Paguyo (both PhDEdu’14) and University of Pennsylvania collaborator Krista Cortes, Jurow joined the Healing, Empowerment and Love (HEAL) team to counter these narratives and transform graduate school experiences for women of color.
The HEAL co-founders know these experiences all too well, and through the program, they aim to use their experiences, scholarship and agency to change it.
Trusting intuition
From an early age, Mendoza felt a calling to become a Curandera, a traditional Mexican healing art, but she dismissed those urges until her graduate school tribulations triggered her body’s distress signals—headaches, illness, vertigo.
At the time, she felt disconnected from her true self in an effort to fit into the expectations of the academy. Her mentor reminded Mendoza that her body holds knowledge. Though she was studying learning theories, she had not fully appreciated the knowledge her body could teach her.
Mendoza followed her instincts and dove into her healing art, or Curanderismo. Today, her mind-body-spirit connection is intertwined with her scholarship, her work at the Council on Foundations and the HEAL program.
“Now when I do healing and energy work or even in my everyday life, I rely on the mind-body-spirit alignment in the decisions I make,” she said. “I call it my superpower—my intuition is my superpower.”
Now when I do healing and energy work or even in my everyday life, I rely on the mind-body-spirit alignment in the decisions I make. I call it my superpower—my intuition is my superpower."
Mendoza and HEAL co-founders aim to foster academic and racial healing by exploring ways to connect women with their intuition and inner strength and increase interconnectedness with themselves, each other and Mother Earth.
HEAL intentionally designs educational spaces for women of color, who are disproportionately underrepresented in graduate-degree attainment when compared with white counterparts. Across the program’s multiple iterations, Mendoza and Jurow have witnessed that “when given the space to be whole, radical new ways of being, doing and knowing racial and gender equity can emerge,” they write.
Systems need to change
The co-founders believe in breaking faulty systems rather than its people, and they hope healing work in higher education could have a ripple effect throughout educational systems.
The timing is ripe as schools and universities are increasingly focused on wellness. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 70% of public schools reported an increase in students seeking schools’ mental health services, yet only 56% strongly or moderately agreed they can effectively support students, according to the U.S. Department of Education data.
Nearly half, 46%, of public schools added or expanded social, emotional well-being programming, and many states, including Colorado, passed legislation allowing mental health days as excusable absences.
However, researchers like Jurow believe that if wellness initiatives are not structured into educational policies and practices, they are not complex enough to address the emotional toll on marginalized students and educators, who face racism and mental health disparities.
Jurow’s work explores how disrupting systemic forms of oppression requires educational systems to recognize the full humanity of students, staff and faculty by honoring lived experiences, building community and cultivating social imaginations.
Youth-led healing justice
Ben Kirshner, CU Boulder professor of learning sciences and human development, notes that the focus on mental health in schools, while important, tends to focus on individuals rather than community or intergenerational healing.
Meanwhile, educators can learn from the community and youth activists who have been organizing around what some are calling healing justice, first coined by Cara Page and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective.
“Healing justice connotes the idea that as we’re working on social change as activists, we are also wanting to take care of ourselves—to heal—along the way,” Kirshner said. “We’re trying to embody the world we want to see through activism in our interactions with each other.
“For educators and youth workers, it also means responding to mental health symptoms such as stress, depression or anxiety not only as a problem of the individual student, but as linked to historical and structural factors, such as intergenerational trauma or institutional racism.”
Kirshner is partnering with Solicia Lopez, Lex Hunter, Beatriz Salazar-Medina and youth activists on the Voices of Healing project, which supports youth organizations engaged in healing justice work by co-designing healing resources with and for young people.
The power of community-building
Hunter, a CU Boulder doctoral student in educational foundations, policy and practice, is no stranger to the power of youth voice at the intersection of activism and well-being. Her research explores how marginalized youth use social media to build community, engage in healing practices and dream about new worlds.
As an undergraduate student at University of Missouri-Columbia, Hunter was part of student-led activism around the hashtag #BlackatMizzou. The university, which is 6% Black, has a history of anti-Black practices as well as Black activism, or Blacktivism. The hashtag allowed Black students, faculty, staff and alumni to share their experiences while calling for university-policy changes.
“The main goal was to care for each other,” Hunter said. “If other people outside witnessed it, that was cool, but the hashtag was really about us and creating a digital counterspace where we could be transparent about our experiences.”
Hunter, who’s a triplet, saw her siblings face similar oppressive experiences at their respective universities. As a striving scholar-activist, she came to terms with the idea that her long-term healing is “constrained without the transformation of systems,” she said.
“If you’re experiencing systemic oppression like racism, homophobia, sexism or ableism every day, you need systems to change alongside healing,” she said. “There’s no end date when you’re going through something that is rooted in the fabric of how the country thrives and operates, and you cannot engage in longstanding healing until that thing is removed.”
Micro-affirmations are a way to care for each other in the everyday while we also dream up new ways for the institution to be, new ways for ourselves to be and new ways for the world to be."
Radical rest and micro-affirmations
That harsh fact allowed Hunter to give herself and other activists grace while working toward change. Rest and love are radical forms of healing for historically excluded communities while navigating a culture that thrives on productivity, she said.
“Micro-affirmations are a way to care for each other in the everyday while we also dream up new ways for the institution to be, new ways for ourselves to be and new ways for the world to be,” she said.
Hunter studies and prioritizes everyday rituals of care—like eating together, listening to music, praying together and being in nature, she said.
A former high school teacher, she has seen these practices in her students, and she believes many teachers can and are incorporating them into classrooms. Practices like breathing techniques, checking in and shifting class content when something significant is happening in the world can be interlaced with classroom content.
“In those moments, we remember we're not in this struggle alone,” Hunter said. “I find great joy and responsibility in knowing that I'm a part of this long line of educators, abolitionists, scholars, community organizers and people who are committed to everyday practices of care.”
Listening to the body
Kachine Kulick, a doctoral candidate in Teacher Learning, Research and Practice, is also committed to the struggle required of lasting change. She came to CU Boulder to study whiteness, eager to loosen white supremacy’s grip on education—what she embraces as her “soul contract” work.
A former teacher who grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, Kulick acknowledges anti-racism work is a life-long practice. When curiosity about those most implicated in anti-racism work arise, she remains anchored by the wisdom of Black, Indigenous and Brown elders and colleagues, including a friend who said, “we got us; you need to take care of your people.”
Early in her doctoral studies, Kulick was introduced to the rich possibilities of somatic practices as an important resource for anti-racism and abolition in the classroom through the transformative work of scholar and activist Resmaa Menakem.
Somatics is about listening to your body and what it’s telling you in those moments of discomfort or openness,” she said. “It’s about noticing your patterns—to either sit with discomfort or shift it."
“Somatics is about listening to your body and what it’s telling you in those moments of discomfort or openness,” she said. “It’s about noticing your patterns—to either sit with discomfort or shift it.
“This work comes from legacies of folks of color doing this work out of necessity and survival. For me, I heed the often uncomfortable—but necessary—call to sit with and alongside other white-bodied folks, so that we may develop the somatic capacities to engage in conversations about anti-Blackness and racism when they arise. I am called to galvanize the power of truth, not from shame, but as a sacred responsibility for our collective freedom.”
A new take on teaching
Kulick partnered with Ashley Cartun, director of teacher education, to revamp the “Step Up to Social Justice” required course for first-year elementary education students.
While education courses often intellectualize about race, class, gender and sexuality, this course centered on a social-emotional and embodied understanding of justice through somatic practices, like pausing and listening to the body.
“I noticed what I call ‘little subtle shifts’ of embodiment,” Kulick said. “During moments of charge, teacher candidates used somatic practices in class and in their dorm rooms with their roommates.”
Though it was only a start, Kulick noticed a “softening” and “stamina” in conversations about white supremacy rather than dismissal and defensiveness. The course revealed the potential of somatic practices for future teachers to connect with themselves and their students through “pausing and slowing things down”—practices they noted they would use in their classrooms.
Interweaving healing and education
Kulick, Hunter and the next generation of scholars bring hope for people like Kirshner, Jurow and Mendoza.
The co-founders of HEAL say they are learning from each iteration of the program, as they explore different tools and traditions for healing in education.
“Everyone brings multiple strengths, and we are learning from each participant,” Mendoza said. “There are so many different modalities, we invite them to share and we try to expose them to what might work for them…
“By paying attention to the body, learning from Mother Earth and sharing our experiences, we are reframing (education) toward possibility. If we could each walk in our own light, if we are strong in our own light, that is how we heal.”
The Art of Healing
A first-generation college student who grew up in Denver’s racially diverse Montbello neighborhood, Palomar studies the intersection of race, mental health and education. She often uses music and poetry to process trauma.
She is a CU Boulder doctoral student and graduate research assistant for the Lyripeutics Storytelling project with Learning Sciences Assistant Professor Kalonji Nzinga and school partners in her home district. The project investigates how learning environments can facilitate opportunities for BIPOC youth to learn and share wellness narratives as they use hip hop and artistic expression to explore their community cultural wealth.
As Lyripeutics teachers and students create art and reimagine schooling, Palomar sees activities that are very different from her schooling experiences in the same district.
“We're talking about culture and educational experiences, and that's something that I had been missing from my education,” she said. “I went to a very underfunded school, and a lot of times I was craving so much more from my education.
“I am excited to be part of (Lyripeutics), because this is my community. This is my district where my little cousins, neighbors and just people in general deserve an education that is centered on our community and knowledge. It is fun and enriching.”
Palomar said young people can take some time to open up, so she models sharing her story—which includes a lack of educational experiences and offerings at her school, systemic barriers and racist environments and interactions.
She has often experienced and witnessed trauma, yet she believes art and healing have so much potential.
“Like in music, I see (healing) as waves, and there are different things that we’re healing with and from,” Palomar said. “We’re able to add to current healing practices and add to certain strands of those healing waves.
“I don't see healing as one thing, but multiple waves that are in conversation with each other through time and community.”