‘We have a right to flourish in our own land’: using pedagogies of healing to support Indigenous students to thrive in university classrooms

ABSTRACT

This article responds to a pressing question, posed by Māori university students in Aotearoa, New Zealand: How do teachers transform universities into places where Indigenous students can thrive and heal? To address this question, we engage with pedagogies of healing, a radical critique of wellbeing within the classroom. We utilized the Māori practice of wānanga to facilitate collective reflection and action. We propose three principles for enabling Māori and Indigenous healing within classrooms: engage colonial histories, foreground Indigenous forms of knowledge, and uplift students through Indigenous research on/as healing. Within these, we offer seven teaching strategies to enact a pedagogy of healing and create classroom ‘healing zones’, strategies that challenge the individualized and depoliticized approaches to wellbeing dominant within contemporary universities.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonizing pedagogies
• Indigenous pedagogies
• healing pedagogies
• decolonizing humanities
• Kaupapa Māori
• Māori pedagogies

Why radical pedagogies of healing matter

In December 2018, in Wellington, New Zealand, Māori university students from across the country opened a one-day exhibition. They had gathered at the conference of the Association of Social Anthropology in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Having collaborated for months in preparation, their exhibition offered the academics present Taonga Puawaitanga (valuable guiding ideas) that aimed to ensure Māori university students’ success on their own Indigenous terms. The exhibition showcased diverse anonymized reflections on student experiences at university. They described how

the spaces, interactions, and relationships of our discipline are not safe for many Māori … At times we are supported, but often still alone. Other times, we experience direct hostility. We have a right to flourish in our own land

(Gifford et al., 2018: para. 7). At the heart of their wero (challenge) was a desire for the radical healing potential of education. Rather than being a source of further colonial trauma, marginalization, and alienation, which many had experienced from education and other state institutions, they saw in their engagements with university staff opportunities for support, healing and flourishing. They wanted to initiate conversations about how things might be improved. They said

As Māori we have a mandate and a responsibility to be kaitiaki [guardians] for ourselves, our whānau [extended family], our environment, and our mokopuna [children, grandchildren and descendants]. This means making change in systems, relationships and environments that improves Māori realities. We also have a duty to open up spaces for our whānau who will follow in our footsteps, to leave these spaces safer than when we entered them. We have a right to an education that supports these goals (para. 10).

We have observed much quiet work within universities in New Zealand to respond to this broader challenge, including diversifying curriculum, faculty, and teaching methods. Yet despite their exhibition’s call, the students did not receive any formal reply in the months and years that followed their exhibition. The silence was palpable, and disappointing to them. As a Māori scholar and a Pākehā [white] scholar working collaboratively on decolonizing university spaces and processes (e.g. Trundle & Vaeau, 2023; Vaeau & Trundle, 2020), we seek to acknowledge and concretely respond to their wero (challenge). We propose three strategies to enable healing within our classrooms: engage colonial histories, foreground Indigenous knowledge, and uplift students through Indigenous research on/as healing.

While we draw on the international work on healing and Indigenous pedagogies, we seek to craft pedagogies that sit appropriately in Aotearoa, New Zealand. It is up to those with the requisite expertise in other places and communities to decide how the suggested strategies apply in different settings. Such conversations should be locally led by Indigenous scholars in relation to their own realities and needs. Thus, while this conversation is undergirded by the wider project of decolonization, the ‘repatriation of Indigenous land and life’ (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 21), it is one which requires our work to be ‘time-specific and land-specific’ (Tuck et al., 2019, p. xi).

Methodologically, this article is based on collaborative reflection through wānanga. Wānanga means both gathering together for discussion, and a place for teaching and learning. It is a practice underpinned by relational commitments and a desire to work towards positive change. Wānanga can be used as a noun, verb and metaphor to describe a ‘group methodology and collective conversation’ (Mahuika & Mahuika, 2020, p. 374). Wānanga occurs within diverse settings, from education and health to community work and iwi (tribal) governance. Wānanga involves the sharing of ideas, knowledge and experiences in order to reflect, make decisions, and chart future action. These are spaces in which intergenerational knowledge is transmitted, and new knowledge is co-created (Mahuika & Mahuika, 2020, p. 374). By centering Māori perspectives, Wānanga has the capacity to challenge the established norms of knowledge production. ‘At a Wānanga level we can take the courageous space to not depend on the approval of established thought alone, we can engage in our own ways for our own needs’ (Edwards, 2013, p. 70).

Wānanga often involves methods of storytelling, and ideally draws multiple voices to the issues at hand. It prioritizes establishing connections and empowering Māori (Mahuika & Mahuika, 2020; Royal 2009). As Linda Tuhiwai Smith and colleagues argue regarding academic knowledge, wānanga should aim to accelerate ‘the translation of research into practical outcomes through transformational practices, policies, and theory development’ (2019, p. 1).

Our wānanga approach involved 11 interlinked processes of reflection and praxis:

• We met regularly outside of university spaces to enable a ‘stepping back’ mindset when reflecting on our teaching pedagogies.

• We wrote up a set of interrelational ethics that guided our wānanga, which were tino rangatiratanga (Māori sovereignty), humility, honesty, vulnerability, care, and acknowledging successes, even small ones.

• We utilized the technique of ‘just description’, in which we each recounted teaching experiences in as much sensory and material detail as possible, while the other listened, making notes of any reactions they had, rather than interrupting. This encouraged us to sit with the experiences, to gain deeper familiarly with them, before seeking explanation.

• We reflected on our pedagogical practices utilized a ‘zooming in and zooming out lens’. We asked: what occurred in our teaching spaces at the interpersonal micro-relational? What wider structures and histories shaped classroom dynamics?

• We read and discussed Indigenous, decolonial and healing pedagogies and asked, what does this mean in practice?

• We ensured that our meeting rituals were themselves healing; we opened and closed meetings with karakia (chants invoking spiritual guidance and protection), shared food, brought our babies along, made rescheduling easy, turned up ‘as we were’ without facade, and focused on building upon our own and our students’ strengths.

• We journaled between meetings and brought journal insights to meetings.

• We allowed multiple perspectives to emerge in our conversations. When adding a different view or interpretation, one that might challenge what the other had said, we agreed to begin our comments with ‘And’ rather than ‘But’.

• When words failed us, we drew or doodled and used these as prompts to uncover our reactions to classroom experiences.

• We focused on ‘stuck point’; when reflecting on teaching experiences that had not gone as expected or as hoped, we asked two questions: ‘Why did I get stuck there?’ and “Why might the students have got stuck there?’

• We ended meetings by responding to two prompts: ‘What now?’ And ‘Imagine’. What now involved considered what tangible action might be taken based on the insights of our reflections. ‘Imagine’ was the first word of a statement that returned us to aspirational thinking, and long-term change.

The development of radical pedagogies of healing

Scholars advocating pedagogies of healing note that healing is not an optional educational ‘extra’ for Indigenous communities, Black folx, and people of colour. As Harris notes, ‘We cannot survive without it. We must be as radical with our healing process as we are with overthrowing the social and political powers’ (Harris, 2018, p. 262). As bell hooks asserts, any form of healing that we facilitate for students is tied to our own. ‘Teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own wellbeing if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students’ (hooks 1994, p. 15).

University spaces do not make this easy. This is particularly so for Indigenous academic staff, who often experience culturally unsafe spaces, and who represent a tiny proportion of the total academic staff, yet are being asked to resource growing institutional mandates for Indigenous wellbeing programmes, Indigenous inclusion policies, and Indigenous teaching and research goals (H. Smith et al., 2022). More broadly, universities are driven by increasingly fast-paced timeframes (Mountz et al., 2015), and often promote individualist, competitive and entrepreneurial metrics for assessing and ensuring staff ‘performance’, and many university institutions tacitly place research ‘outputs’ and rankings above teaching practice (Rogers & Swain, 2022), especially teaching practices that are harder to measure. In such anti-healing spaces, finding ways ‘to connect with and be mindful of one’s self is difficult but necessary work’ (Baszile, 2018, p. 266).

This is particularly vital work for Indigenous scholars and other scholars from underrepresented communities, and even more so for scholars whose life work involves fighting injustice. As Reyes points out, ‘people who commit to fighting injustice are so outwardly focused that their energy is heavily directed towards the fight outside of their bodies’ (2019, p. 57). This occurs at the same time that experiences of oppression accumulate in their own bodies and exhaustion can set in. This can be further compounded by what Sosa-Provencio and colleagues describes as the ‘corporal detachment of Western schooling’ (Sosa-Provencio et al., 2020, p. 2) in which attentiveness to the realities of physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing are assigned to private, individual spheres, while the deeper societal aggravators of wellbeing evade institutional attention.

Critical pedagogies for healing critique the expanding wellness and wellbeing industries that have come to permeate university spaces. Such attention to wellbeing in universities tends to focus on addressing student symptoms of distress through individualized access to therapeutic mental health support or through strategies of self-responsibility, self-care, and self-reliance. Students should deal ‘more effectively’ with stress through diet, sleep, exercise, and study planning. Yet the underlying and more existential ‘social sickness’ of underlying inequalities are not addressed (Kress et al., 2021, p. 1).

A first step in developing a critical healing pedagogy is thus to understand that individual healing can only take place alongside, and indeed is most effective if it takes place within, collective efforts to alter wider forces, or what DeGennaro describes as ‘looming superstructures’ (2021, p. 229). She argues that ‘Healing from while within settler-colonialism is interminable. With every step, its reverberations show themselves. Our work requires ongoing attention to the social, cultural, and political undercurrents that surround and exist in all of us’ (2021, p. 229).

‘Radical healing’, as Ginwright describes, is not individualized but collective. It attends to individual bodies but serves the common good and a quest for social justice. Such a definition explains the internalization of blame, low confidence, and emotional distress that many Indigenous students feel in university settings by directly connecting it to wider political realities and social environments. In this vein, as Ginwright argues, a healing pedagogy foregrounds existential human needs, and the efficacy of ‘agency, voice, and belonging. These features of radical healing promote meaning and purpose, all which contribute to both individual and collective well-being’. (2016, pp. 8–9)

A first step in creating healing pedagogies involves acknowledging and understanding how modern university spaces can alienate and marginalize Indigenous students daily. To acknowledge this is not to suggest that this represents the totality of their experiences at universities, which are often complex and contradictory, simultaneously sustaining and disempowering. But we must recognize that this persistent experience has been repeatedly articulated by students, and it was clearly articulated by Māori students in their exhibition. In seeking to cut to the core of experiences of alienation, Baszile argues that

Although alienation can be defined as a condition of isolation driven by practices of marginalization, where one is made to feel as if s/he does not belong … such a condition is better understood as an affective process which can wreak havoc on one’s ability to love not only him/herself, but the collective through which one makes meaning of self (2018: 276).

According to Baszile, a Black scholar in the US, the only form of healing pedagogy that effectively addresses alienation for her students is ‘Black self-love’. This practice is often misunderstood, as ‘Many people assume that loving blackness is akin to romanticizing or valorizing blackness’ (Baszile, 2018, p. 277), when in fact it is about adding complexity to the humanity of blackness, or more nuanced ‘self understanding’. This she argues, ‘is held at bay when the cultural knowledge that gives that self a meaningful context is absent, limited, distorted, and/or consistently devalued as normal practice in the environment one must navigate and negotiate on a daily basis’ (Baszile, 2018, p. 277).

In Aotearoa, developing modes of healing through self love requires the disruption of limiting narratives about Māori that so often pervades education. Māori are often presented through deficit tropes where they are a social problem in need of a solution. A simple switch towards ‘empowering’ stories does not solve the issue, for complexity and richness are still missing. What is required is ‘counterstorytelling’ (Baszile, 2018, p. 267) that allows the fullness and diversity of Māori experience to shine, and in which the joys, frustrations, tenacity and challenges within Māori communities are recognized, all of which are underpinned by aspiration and hope for the future. As Ginwright argues,

Hope understood as a collective phenomenon is not simply the aggregate of individual hopefulness. Rather, collective hope is a shared vision of what could be, with a shared commitment and determination to make it a reality. Collective hope can be likened to the soul of the community as it bolsters and protects the existential dimensions of community life, its faith, purpose, meaning, and collective imagination. (2016, p. 21)

Healing is not foreign to Māori ways of learning and teaching. Kaupapa Māori (Māori ways of knowing and coming to knowledge) often centers healing as both method and goal of knowledge. Kaupapa Māori relies upon principles in line with healing pedagogies. These include tino rangatiratanga (self-determination and sovereignty), tikanga (cultural customs) and knowledge sharing and reciprocity based upon whanaungatanga (relations of connectedness) (Bishop, 1999; Pihama et al., 2002)., Kaupapa Māori contains within it an intent to ‘translate research into positive and transformative outcomes for Indigenous Peoples, nations, communities, and families’ (L. T. Smith et al., 2019, p. 74).

Of crucial importance within practices of knowledge production are the place of Māori people, not simply Māori ideas decontextualized from the relations that produced them or the communities dependent upon them. This ensures that the healing potential of Kaupapa Māori is directed to those who need it and most benefit from it. This requires

that Māori are the principal hosts and Māori cultural protocols will inform the taken-for-granted social processes of any gathering of stakeholders and experts; that Māori knowledge is a critical part of the discussion and designing of solutions; and that Māori participation includes but is not limited to formal and ceremonial processes (L. T. Smith et al., 2019, p. 74)

Healing principles thus nest into the ordinary and established norms of Kaupapa Māori. Rather than claiming we are reinventing the wheel of healing pedagogies, we would thus like to acknowledge all of the Māori scholars, teachers, community leaders and community members who embody the principles of healing in their relations of care, education, support, activism, and lifting up, which occur every day within te ao Māori (the Māori world).

Practicing radical healing in our classrooms

Classrooms are places in which we should not only avoid trauma inducing events and practices, (such as overt and covert racism), but, more radically, develop what Ginwright calls ‘healing zones’ (2016, p. 78). Below, we set out three principles for a healing pedagogy, and seven practical strategies for enacting them.

Principle 1.

Engage the colonial histories, carefully.

Dawn Zinga and Sandra Styres notes how decolonizing pedagogies aim to ‘open up safe spaces within classrooms where students can question, within the context of their own positionalities, the ways they are implicated in and/or affected by the societal maintenance of assumptions, biases and relations of power’ (2019, p. 33). Knowledge about our histories is critical to healing. For Māori, storying history ‘is about the ability to name our pain, and create our own pathways to hope and healing’ (George et al., 2014, p. 192). Katarina Gray-Sharp also reminds us that non-Indigenous people also need to engage in these histories, stating, ‘Decolonisation is not a movement for Indigenous bodies alone. It is simply led by us’ (Gray-Sharp, 2021, p. 200).

Yet understanding, conveying and engaging students in such histories is neither simple nor easy. Fear of not knowing this history well enough, fear of not getting it right, fear of cultural missteps in the discussion or even the mispronunciation of te reo Māori (Māori language), and fear of managing fraught student conversations, all lead teachers to avoid tackling these histories. Such fear sometimes leads teachers to ‘outsource’ those learning modules to often already overworked Māori colleagues. The desire to tread carefully and not cause offense are valid, but not when they result in ‘Pākehā paralysis’, a term sociologist Martin Tolich coined to describe white New Zealanders’ inaction and sense of incapacity in response to Māori wellbeing (Tolich, 2002).

How do these histories heal in the classroom? As Borell et al. (2017, p. 5) argues, healing often involves an ‘active sense of remembrance, commemoration and recognition of the historical acts of trauma and their current-day effects’. Acts of memory can be tied to healing by actively resisting ‘the master narrative of leaving historical traditions and cultural practices behind in order to integrate better into “mainstream” society that has been a major element in our social and policy environment over generations’ (Borell et al., 2017, p. 5)

In our experiences, engaging colonial histories within classrooms as a healing tool requires a deft and flexible skillset. In the historical discussions that teachers craft for lectures and tutorials, no matter how carefully researched, Māori students might feel disjunctures between official ‘book history’ and family history. They may experience our narratives as partial, as not reflective of what their whanau (extended family) or hapu (subtribe) experienced. They may not, on that day, feel like revisiting such events. They may dread the conversations that result in class, which often focus on addressing the knowledge gaps or assumptions of Pākehā students. Or they may experience teachers or students turning to them, the ‘sole Māori in the room’, as an expert or representative, feeling expectations to personally reveal these historical traumas to people they don’t know well.

Mindful of this, we encourage teachers to consider how the careful and necessary discussion of historical events in our teaching might actively aim to support healing. That is, rather than considering such history as simply evidence for wider processes we wish to discuss, or context for the exploration and illustration of key ideas and concepts, we should ask how Māori students might be included in such discussions in ways that prevent a sense of intellectual objectification. For example, through assessment or class activities, Māori students might put history to the service of culturally appropriate modes of remembrance, commemoration, witness, and recognition. Equally, scholars have shown that healing from history can also involve culturally appropriate and strategic silences (Gone, 2019).

This work asks us to consider not only the content of what we teach, but the rituals around how we engender such memory work in classrooms, and the possible embodied effects such memories might have on Māori students sitting in our physical or virtual classrooms. Ultimately, it requires cognizance that such histories cannot simply be talked about in the past tense, as intellectually interesting objects, but require dexterous ways of communicating, empathizing, and thinking about time, a praxis that acknowledges how distress and historical events might arrive in classrooms as living memories, as collective stories, as enduring trauma, and opportunities for healing.

As Māori Historian Loader argues, we should remain cognizant of how much Māori students might already know about colonial histories through the ways histories are kept alive within Māori communities. ‘Māori have been talking to themselves for decades’ about such histories’, Loader points out, and they have many rituals of memory, including ‘narratives at tangi [funerals] … at trust meetings, at committee meetings, on marae [meeting houses] with tea and fried bread, in homes, in schools, in churches’ (2018 para 5). Care and humility are necessary in making space for students to draw from and articulate their Māori knowledge. Ideally our classrooms are spaces where Māori students are able to demonstrate expertise, and reflect critically on what histories have been stored, cared for, transmitted, or lost within their own whanau and community, and the role or absence of healing in such processes.

Remembering Gray-Sharp’s assertion that decolonization requires non-Indigenous folx to be led by Indigenous Peoples (Gray-Sharp, 2021, p. 200), we should seek to understand the aspirations of local Indigenous people regarding how histories should be confronted. This involves, as a first step, considering the very specific places and spaces we teach, and their histories. Leonie Pihama (2016, 22:58) argues, ‘If you are engaged in these institutions you must know the history of the institutions … the history of the land upon which these institutions sit … That is where we need to begin’.

Practice 1: embodied histories

Our classes can open space for Māori students to reflect upon and articulate their past experiences of (re)connecting with their own Indigenous histories. This learning task allows students to engage with and honour their own emplaced and embodied encounters with the past and its capacity to live on into the present. Arini Loader (2018) offers a powerful example to students for how such reflections can be written with affective honesty and a subjectively grounded voice. She describes visiting Rangiaowhia, the historical site of a Māori massacre by colonial troops.

It wasn’t easy to go. It was hard. But I went. I went to work. For myself, on myself – to try to understand, or make some kind of sense of, the things that happened. Here. To them. To us … As I was about to leave St Paul’s church, the little wooden survivor of the atrocities committed that Sunday morning in 1864, a Pākehā woman of a certain age stopped me to share her news. I nodded and forced a half smile while she cheerfully informed me that her son was getting married there in two weeks’ time. The wedding party were on their way to practice for the ceremony. It was all so wonderful. They were all so thrilled about it. Then she looked me in the eyes sheepishly and confessed, ‘It’s sad what happened to your people here’. Your people. Her eyes appealed for forgiveness. Or something. (2018 para .8–9)

In practice, the work of reflecting on emplaced, embodied experiences of history needs to allow for silences, unfinished thoughts, privacy and unsettled emotions. Journal work, with optional group sharing, in which students are not constrained by assessment targets and the quest for a grade, work particularly well for this learning task.

Practice 2: storying survivance

Our teaching can encourage students to see not only trauma in colonial history, but also endurance and Indigenous ‘survivance’ (e.g. Gone, 2021). Aaron Denham (2008) argues against seeing the effects of traumatic colonial events on Indigenous peoples as always pathological. Instead, he takes the example of a family from the Coeur d’Alene people in northern Idaho who, despite having suffered many deep traumas across the generations, had developed a set of shared ‘trauma narratives’ that transmitted ‘strength, optimism and coping strategies that family members internalize and use to “emplot” their own narratives’ (2008, pp. 392–3). One powerful example drew upon stories of historical incursions from U.S. forces onto Coeur d’Alene lands.

Some Si John family members were deceived, captured and hung by U.S. forces. Prior to being hung, one family member was asked if he had any final words. He spoke:

When times get really, really tough, really hard, and you think that there is no way out, don’t lie down and die. Sing this song; I leave this song for you. And it will replenish you, carry you forward, and will save your family and your children.

And he sang his power song for his family. At the completion of this song, they hung him. The story is still recounted and the song is still sung today. Cliff remarks that the song helped him many times while fighting in Vietnam. (2008, p. 403)

Denham shows how this family’s trauma narratives contained ‘numerous strategies for resilience, or a non-pathological adaptive response and ability to maintain or “spring back” to a stable equilibrium after experiencing adversity’ (2008: 392). Collective memory practices, Denham argues, can thus be an active force for recovery.

Learning activities in which students focus upon examples of continuing survivance and the rebuilding and restoration of Indigenous worlds are important, where Māori students can craft stories from their own histories. Forms of digital storytelling have proven one effective avenue for this (see Beltrán & Begun, 2014). Collectively workshopped and developed, this narrative method works particularly well as a practice for all-Māori groups of students.

Practice 3: channeling a haunting

Māori scholar Liana MacDonald offers powerful examples of how students can engage with ‘difficult knowledge’ about the past. MacDonald encourages us to contend with the ‘absent, silenced, and unresolved histories of colonial violence’ (MacDonald et al., 2022) that permeate our landscapes and discourses of nationhood. She outlines a pedagogical method, ‘channeling a haunting’ (MacDonald et al., 2022) that asks students to attend to the world around them, things that hold, hide or convey memory, be they landscapes, memorials, exhibitions, plaques, and museum objects. Through thickly descriptive fieldnotes and affective prompts that encourage students to critically observe such objects and how they impact their senses and emotions, these methods help students ’move past the physical, ontological and affective buffers that cultivate a sense of comfort about contemporary race relations’ and instead confront enduring inequities (see also MacDonald & Kidman, 2022).

In her reflexive and vivid account of exploring two historic sites of battle between Māori and Colonial forces (MacDonald, 2022), MacDonald models a method of observation and of physically moving through such sites. She interweaves a careful reading of memorials, both along and against their grain, and reflects upon the conversations and silences she experienced with Māori and Pākehā local people who inhabit such spaces. She offers a method that gives students permission to ‘question whose history counts but also what counts as history’ (MacDonald & Kidman, 2022, p. 33).

Crucial was the supportive, reflective conversations that she and a fellow friend and Indigenous scholar offered each other as they moved through the sites together and encountered Pākehā discomfort and historical erasure. Māori students working collaboratively can offer greater safety in voicing their observations and sharing their reactions together.

Principle 2.

Respect Indigenous modes of knowledge

Māori students have asked us to create room for ‘experiences that are more healing than hurtful’ and to design learning spaces that make them ‘feel supported in our journey exploring our own matauranga [knowledge]’ (Gifford et al., 2018). At the heart of teaching should remain a commitment to respecting Māori students’ cultural expertise. This involves, as Sosa-Provencio and colleagues argue, designing ‘assessments across multiple modes of expression to position diverse, subordinated literacies equal in value to dominant literacies’ (2020, p. 352).

To teach in such a way that seeks to strengthen these cultural tools requires subtle but significant shifts in running classrooms. It involves creating opportunities for Māori students to provide expertise about their own worlds and ways of being Indigenous, to reflect on the diverse ways of being Māori today, rather than reading or listening to descriptions of themselves through detached language and analytical frames. Correspondingly, it involves not creating shameful situations in which Māori students must stand in as experts for cultural rituals and knowledge that they may not have had the opportunity to acquire. Such a mode of engagement involves both avoiding reifying singular versions of te ao Māori (the Māori world) while simultaneously avoiding skepticism and hostilities towards Māori who sometimes need to speak broadly on behalf of Māori communities to advance urgent needs.

Seeing the strengths of Indigenous peoples sometimes means broadening western conceptualizations of intellectual virtuosity. As Nayantara Sheoran Appleton notes, this work involves looking to Indigenous and marginalized folx to ‘learn how we think, read, and write. Learn from us the ways we see and seek to change this oppressive world. Respect our refusal to write like you, even after you train us well to write like you’ (Sheoran Appleton, 2019). This means trusting the ability of Māori students to identify the strengths they value and how these shape their diverse educational aspirations, even when they do not easily align with established academic conventions. For example, many Māori students aspire to strengthen their capability in Māori performance and would like support in connecting and translating their own cultural knowledge practices into academic criteria for success.

Practice 4: performing knowledge

Incorporating performance assessments into our classrooms can support all students to engage with Māori modes of knowledge. Students can choose to perform the development of their knowledge through chant, dance, song, and speech connected to their own ancestral knowledge. Here Māori and Indigenous students have the opportunity to highlight expertise in performance that may be undervalued in the academy. Virginie Magnat sees performance methods as a key element of healing as it privileges ‘a form of embodied knowledge that includes feelings, the senses, and intuition’ (Magnat, 2012). This approach is inspired by teaching innovations within Pacific Studies by Teresia Teaiwa, including Akamai, a creative option for assessment. When describing the impact of this assessment, Teresia noted that ‘Through Akamai, students start to understand art and performance not just as artifacts of cultural heritage but also as crucial elements of the intellectual heritage of the Pacific’ (Teaiwa, 2017, p. 277).

In developing students’ appreciation for the intellectual heritage of Indigenous performance, critical reflexivity is valuable. Students can reflect on the implications performing knowledge has on their learning and the learning of others. Moreover, they can critically engage with the ethics and politics of knowledge production. Students can thus be asked to consider:

• How did the performance task articulate and develop your learning?

• What did it allow you to say, think, feel, realize and be, that other forms of assessment might not allow?

• What counts as knowledge? How does this task inform your answer to this question?

• Beyond knowledge, what was the value of this task to you?

• What do these reflections reveal to you about the process of producing knowledge?

Cultural performance and personal reflection can create spaces in the classroom for students to feel more authenticity seen. Reflection encourages students to critically apprehend and debate the ‘big picture’ rationales for education, a process that engages them more deeply in the meaning and purpose of their studies. Being seen, meaning, purpose, and feeling like they have a stake in their education as it relates to their Indigenous selves, are crucial to pedagogies of healing.

Practice 5: cultural toolkits of wellbeing

We can encourage students to apply Indigenous toolkits for wellbeing to a wide range of class exercises. For example, in seeking to understand and address whānau violence and healing, Kruger et al. (2004) provide a framework for understanding te ao Māori. Specifically, they identify a set of cultural tools that uplift and maintain wellbeing. These include ‘wairua (spirituality … passion for life, self-realization), tapu (brings us to a state of our own knowing; self-esteem) mauri (inner values; sense of power, influence and identity) [and] mana (outer values; external expression of achievement, power and influence)’ (2004, p. 17).

Existing assessment, exercises, or class discussions can be adapted to this exercise, even if they are not specifically focused on topics of wellbeing. Indeed, this learning strategy works well if the topic/task appears unrelated to questions of wellbeing. Ask the class to consider what it might mean to apply the principles of wairua, tapu, mauri and mana holistically to the task, in the ethics of student interaction, the task’s focus, the form of the task outcomes, and the criteria for assessing the task’s success. Give Māori students opportunities to lead discussion. Active support, cultural knowledge, and careful facilitation skills are required from the teacher. Māori students should be able to approach the task with their own embodied experiences and knowledge of the key concepts, rather than having to provide a ‘correct’ or narrow set of cultural definitions.

This task allows students to see how Indigenous frameworks for wellbeing can transform a wide array of activities, both within education and beyond it, such as workplaces, organizations, and community spheres. It also helps students notice the common absence of Māori modes of wellbeing within such spaces, and to consider the challenges and sense of alienation Māori experience when engaging such spaces.

Principle 3.

Resource healing in our students’ research.

Each year and across a range of disciplines, young and emergent Māori researchers develop tools for enabling healing. We can celebrate and utilize these scholars’ work and support more of it. This work, we have observed, can have profound effects in the classroom on both Māori and non-Māori students. They challenge deficit narratives of Māori culture and provide the nuanced resources necessary for engaging students in healing pedagogies.

Such works include Jade Gifford’s master’s thesis on the ‘dynamic value of Kapa Haka [Māori performance arts] for alleviating cultural disconnection and facilitating healing within the context of contemporary challenges such as the mental health crisis, climate change tensions and discrimination’ (Gifford, 2021, p. 2). It includes Mera Penehira’s PhD thesis on tā moko, traditional tattooing practices, amongst hepatitis C positive Māori women. As she shows, ‘traditional knowledge and healing practices are central to Māori getting well and keeping well, and that the use of cultural frameworks and practices have potentially restorative, therapeutic and healing values that are not yet researched or understood by the health field’ (Penehira, 2011, p. 2).

Not only do these works uplift the students who read and engage with them, but the graduate students who produced these theses report the healing and empowering effects of conducting such research on themselves and their relationships to their community and culture. Supporting our Indigenous students to produce such work is one of the most powerful and tangible ways we can help strengthen the future Indigenous scholars and leaders needed within academia.

To support students in producing such work is not to shy away from stories of trauma. Indeed, the above-mentioned theses carefully consider trauma. But they refuse to make a spectacle of suffering, or bend under the hopeless weight of large social and structural forces. Neither do they tidy their narratives into simple trajectories of ‘hurt to healed’. Instead they offer models of how to write into an open future. Such an approach helps our students to locate their work within a pedagogy of hope.

Practice 6: Before the complex pragmatics of research begin

One activity to support Māori graduate students involves exploring examples of Indigenous research methods centered on healing concepts, and then supporting students to design research projects inspired by these methods, but rooted in their own cultural frameworks.

For example, in their article on Medicine/Healing Stories, Starblanket and colleagues (2019) offer an adaptation of the Collective Consensual Data Analytic Procedure into an Indigenous research method that seeks to include participants deeply in data analysis. Another example is Lavallée’s discussion of using sharing circles and Anishnaabe symbol-based reflection as research methods that facilitate nonjudgmental sharing, respect, and ceremonial listening. Her work provides students with concrete examples of how to alter accepted methods like focus groups and photovoice and situate it within an Indigenous cultural frame (Lavallée, 2009, see also Ferrazzi et al., 2019; Geia et al., 2013).

Exposing Māori students to ideas of research that foreground healing, or research as ceremony (Wilson, 2008), supports them to see research and healing as naturally interwoven. Connecting Māori students to other Indigenous knowledges helps them critically explore diverse articulations of Indigeneity and prepare for collaborative work between Indigenous communities.

Building up students’ skills to craft Indigenous research methods should be scaffolded, as students navigate the relational, ethical, and practical work of formulating a method that is appropriate, safe and beneficial for their own or another community. The emphasis on community collaboration within Indigenous methods ensures ample attention to working these complexities through in concert with research partners.

As a first step, aspirational activities encourage students to compare and contrast elements from existing Indigenous methods that might translate to their research setting, allowing them to ponder how this research could feel, smell, taste, and sound in ways that would enliven and heal those involved.

Prompts encouraging aspirational thought are effective:

• How would you design this project if you had an unlimited budget?

• If anyone from the past, present, and future was available, who would you seek guidance from to help you design this project?

• Putting aside real-world constraints and barriers, what would you hope this project could achieve?

Indigenous students are used to seeing the messy and compromised possibilities of action and social change, and giving them space to aspire and imagine encourages them to seek out radical possibilities for research.

Practice 7: mentors on the page

Catherine taught Tarapuhi’s master’s thesis in a medical anthropology class for seven years. On class evaluations, students regularly reported it as a class highlight. For Māori students, it was particularly powerful. This thesis on urban Māori families foregrounds the healing potential of whakapapa [genealogy], whanaungatanga [positive relationality and kin ties], and wairuatanga [spiritual wellbeing of the collective and individual] for addressing whānau [extended family] trauma and internalized racism (Bryers-Brown, 2015, p. 5).

This was an impactful teaching tool. First, the individual and family stories were richly narrated and vividly told, and students could recognize aspects of their own mothers, cousins, aunties, neighbors, or fathers in the narrative. Second, students were moved by the vulnerability and openness of Tarapuhi’s autoethnography, a teacher and mentor in the department, which broke down hierarchies and encouraged their own self-reflection.

Third, this was a master’s thesis, completed only two years further advanced from students’ stage of study. They could see themselves achieving such a thing, and many were inspired to undertake further study. And fourth, they encountered a scholarly piece of student writing that felt culturally, proudly Māori, a model for how they might write academically as Māori. Its frequent use of te reo [Māori language], its dedication to ‘my mothers, aunties, kuia [grandmothers]’, and its situatedness within kaupapa Māori [Māori methodologies for knowledge] were all points of connection for Māori students.

Students read the entire thesis over three weeks, with discussions over three tutorials. As a consequence, its significance was conveyed, and it recursively occupied students at a deeper level than did the 20–40 minutes that students often spend skimming an article for tutorials. This is a deceptively simple practice: ensure Indigenous students read Indigenous student work, and read it deeply. But in our observations, this practice remains rare, despite its powerful effects.

Reflecting on effecting change

In reflecting on the wider implications of our approach, we note three opportunities and challenges: how to enact structural chance, how practical principles can extend theorizing of healing pedagogies, and the wider applicability of our practices.

The challenges of structural change

Healing pedagogy practitioners often experience a tension: while the objective and engine of change is seen as societal, structural, institutional, political, and long term, the demands for healing within teaching spaces are personal, interpersonal, and immediate. While, as outlined above, healing pedagogy proponents decry neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility and individualized approaches to wellbeing, there is simultaneously a necessity to act in immediate, incremental ways that minimize harm within the spaces we facilitate. But this imperative can, as noted, lead to teacher burnout.

The teaching principles and practices discussed above need to be accompanied by three systemic processes to be healing. First, such practices are far more effective and safer for staff and students if they are developed at departmental or faculty level, with clear Indigenous governance, to enable resourcing and peer support and sharing amongst teaching staff. Second, staff need to be highly reflexive about the time the work takes, and the emotional support they and the students need to continue doing it. There needs to be built-in time and mechanisms within workloads for such reflection, and safely feeding back such reflections to those who are resourcing and overseeing programmatic change. And third, leading this collective work extends beyond managing people and processes, requiring strong advocacy for wider systemic and institutional changes to normalize and embed healing pedagogies within the university structure and challenge wider neoliberal logics of care.

Theorizing healing pedagogies

The second opportunity this work presents is in theorizing healing to critically generate change. How do the principles outlined above help us conceptualize healing and pedagogy more broadly? First, our three principles challenge epistemologies that separates knowledge from the body. Teaching that is healing for staff and students requires that we rethink how teaching and knowledge production include or excludes attunement to our bodies, emotions, and wellbeing. It requires that we make greater room for knowledge stored in and expressed through the body, such as performance, or in activities that require attending to the emotional effects of history and its ongoing trauma. Māori concepts of wellbeing and learning represent a holistic approach and are thus well placed to undergird such epistemic shifts.

Second, healing should be conceptualized as a process that interlinks front of stage and backstage practices of pedagogy. It is both subject matter and process within teaching, a topic of study/teaching and a way of studying/teaching. These principles are thus necessarily lived praxis that refuses to separate theory from action. Healing pedagogies require constant simultaneity: How does this transform the student and how does it transform me? How does this practice both enable change and act as a form of change in itself? How does this practice help us understand trauma and history while also having an effect on that trauma and history?

And third, healing pedagogies require a re-conceptualization of the temporality of pedagogy. Moments in the classroom are typically parceled into discrete units and objectives that unfold within linear models of progression. Yet when students enter our classrooms, so do the long histories that live within them and their families. It is far easier to individualize student conduct, engagement, and disengagement within a classroom rather than situate it within the larger temporal frames and superstructures of colonization. Reconceptualizing our students and ourselves as potent with their own/our own histories, interlinked to wider histories, shifts pedagogical design towards a more trauma-informed practice.

Working in diverse disciplines

The third opportunity and challenge this work presents is its wider applicability to diverse disciplines and locations. We write from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences, and our principles in no way exhaust the creative possibilities for action. Adaptations will be necessary for other fields. However, we caution against seeing our approach as only relevant to the humanities. Science, medicine, engineering, mathematics and law are also socially embedded disciplines and knowledge practices that have long histories of entanglement with colonialism, and Indigenous students within all fields deserve a culturally safe, healing environment for learning. New Zealand offers the example of a nationwide Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) strategy, which has led to Māori knowledge and learning approaches being adapted in university disciplines as diverse as law, astronomy, ecology, medicine, biodiversity and geology (Muru-Lanning 2018). Moreover, many of the key skills that non-Māori teachers require to engage with this work are non-discipline-specific. These include, most importantly, critical self-reflection, humility, an open-minded approach to what knowledge is and can be, and a willingness to engage with and be led by Māori.

The futures of pedagogies and indigenous futures

Healing pedagogies are necessary for many reasons, crucially, the demonstrable risks to wellbeing and success that Māori and Indigenous students face in university spaces and beyond (Durie, 2011; Lawson–Te Aho, 2013). These principles are an attempt at responsive partnership: Māori students are asking for them, and they see a clear, positive place for them in the classrooms they enter. There exists an ethical imperative to answer their call.

Māori students have noted what success will ideally look like to them at university: when Māori students feel welcome and

excited to explore matauranga Māori [Māori knowledge], to look at the rest of the world through Māori eyes, to express our knowledge through Māori modes of expression, and where our whānau [families] feel confident to participate in our journey and celebrations

(Gifford et al., 2018). Healing pedagogies are a potent avenue for addressing these aspirations because they offer more radical possibilities for collective practice, social critique, and personal reflection than the individualized approaches to health that dominate neoliberal universities. We end by expressing gratitude to our students for engaging and prompting us towards pedagogical methods of healing, for which we are not spectators or facilitators, but partners in learning and healing, equally transformed by this process and aspirations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Trundle

Catherine Trundle is a senior lecturer in public health at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She researches and teaches on health and inequality, healing methodologies, environmental justice, and environmental health. She also works with creative, collaborative modes of knowledge that exist alongside and outside of traditional academic practice. She has worked alongside Tarapuhi Vaeau for 10 years in writing, teaching, and experimenting with building Indigenous-non Indigenous collaborations.

Tarapuhi Vaeau

Tarapuhi Vaeau is a Māori scholar and descendant of Te Āti Haunui a Pāpārangi, Ngāti, Raukawa ki te Tonga, and Pākehā [white] settlers in Aotearoa. She is a lecturer in the Cultural anthropology programme at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, and a design consultant for an Indigenous design organization TātouTātou. Her research, design work, and teaching focus on bringing community, ancestral, and academic knowledge holders together to work towards more joyful, flourishing, and connected futures. This includes engaging with the dynamic notions of historical-trauma and healing, in theory and in practice, in familial, community, political, and business spaces.