What is Healing-Centered Education?

Healing-Centered Education (HCE) is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to cultivating equitable educational ecosystems for (re)vitalizing inquiry and discovery. With holistic practices and dynamic pedagogies, it nurtures the wellbeing of everyone who shapes the learning process, from students and instructors to researchers and administrators. By recognizing their inherent wholeness, HCE honors the wisdom of their academic, experiential, and ancestral lineages.

Developed over decades in conversation with influences such as peace studies and multiple intelligences, HCE applies contemplative, culturally sustaining pedagogy to design frameworks for collaborative lifelong learning. Grounded in ethics, critical consciousnesses, and Indigenous scholarship, this integrative field grows mindful methods from transformational soil.

Celebrating diverse voices and distinctive perspectives empowers students to co-create enlivening educational experiences with teachers who feel fully resourced in their roles. Recognizing self and Earth care as essential ingredients for social justice stimulates radically reimagining the systems that prepare people to navigate a complex planet. By emphasizing relationality and encouraging curiosity, HCE seeds resiliency and (re)generativity within classrooms and intersecting communities beyond.

 
 

Nutrients that Bring Healing-Centered Education to Life:

Healing-Centered Education has vast applications across K-12, Higher Education, and nonprofit environments, so its shape depends upon the setting.  Common elements include:    

  • deep listening

  • social emotional learning

  • contemplative and somatic techniques

  • community-based learning

  • culturally responsive teaching

  • reflective and restorative practices

  • nature-based learning

  • anti-oppressive pedagogies

  • decolonial praxis principles

  • trauma-informed and post-trauma growth methods

  • arts-based research and arts integration opportunities

 

Streams of HCE Consulting:

As an avid collaborator, I approach consulting as a form of professional mentorship and thought partnership.  When we wonder side by side, innovative ideas and answers arise.  Drawing upon years of teaching in community college and university settings, as well as working in admissions and student affairs, I offer support in these specialties:

  • Custom Curriculum Integration: Open to educators across subject areas and grade levels, this path prepares you to engender classroom conditions in which healing can emerge through teaching and learning. Together we will curate a collection of holistic academic resources attuned to your educational ecosystem. We will also cover how to incorporate HCE seamlessly into your courses in ways that contribute to the wellbeing of you and your students.

  • Academic Transition Navigation: Tailored to high school or undergraduate students, this option offers compassionate guidance on the journey to graduation and into the world beyond. Through asset-based approaches, we will nurture your innate strengths and identify learning environments where your fortes can flourish. Whether you envision yourself pursuing college or graduate school immediately, or taking time to work, travel, or heal, we can proceed at your preferred pace toward a place where your passions will naturally promote personal and professional growth.

  • Thesis/Dissertation Preparation: Ideal for undergraduate and graduate students across disciplines, this route provides stress-relieving resources to foster ease and flow throughout the research and writing processes.  For those interested, exploring the history of HCE or the science behind its mind-body methods is also possible. No matter your focus, it can be helpful to work toward your degree in dialogue with an educator who can offer insights free from institution-specific sources of pressure.  Even during intense phases, learning can feel joyful and life-giving.

  • Healing-Centered Systems Synchronization: For those seeking an experientially integrative opportunity, this option involves infusing any area above with Organic Intelligence (OI). Pairing HCE consulting with OI coaching bolsters intellectual expansion with nervous system autoregulation, resulting in greater resiliency, clarity and creativity. Unlearning mental, physical, and societal patterns that precipitate states of fight, flight, and freeze frees up space and energy to conceive alternatives to the status quo. As a result, braiding academic resources with intrinsic environmental resources can initiate healing physiologically as well as institutionally. Additional details about Organic Intelligence are available below.

 

How Can Organic Intelligence Enrich Healing-Centered Education?

Organic Intelligence and Healing-Centered Education first entered my awareness during graduate school while researching links between educational and ecological revitalization. Immersing myself in these fields simultaneously felt fortifying and profoundly inspiring, prompting me to train in their synergistic methodologies.

Evolutionarily, the shared OI & HCE elements of curiosity and relationality have led the human learning process for millennia, continually guiding people through change.  OI highlights sensorial orientation to the environment as the initial condition for neurobiological self-organization, the foundational catalyst for (un)learning, healing, and capacity building. Attuning to natural cycles across concentric systems creates safe, brave, and liberating spaces to explore new places, practices, and paradigms. This growth trajectory enables people to dissolve the structural barriers and intergenerational inequities that prevent many institutions from serving as inclusive, sustainable schools that affirm myriad ways of knowing and being.

When woven together, OI and HCE form a (r)evolutionary web of accessible pathways to systemic change. Tending to the Earth and reflections of its rhythms within our multispecies kin allows minds and bodies to feel seen, heard, and whole. Restorative relationships prepare transformative ideas to synchronize, nurturing learning communities that prime the planet for collective thriving.

Working Together

If any of these offerings speak to you, I encourage you to reach out here for a free 20-30 minute consultation. If we decide that we’re a good match, we can begin meeting virtually from anywhere in the world.  Sessions typically last 50-55 minutes each, and they take place in a rhythm ranging from weekly to monthly. To foster ease for all, I offer sliding scale pricing and accept multiple payment methods. If special accommodations are needed to make HCE consulting feasible for you, please let me know so we can arrange the best forms of support. I look forward to connecting!