The healing is mutual: Students as partners in anti-oppressive education

Abstract

In this essay, two students and one staff member reflect on our surprisingly healing experience developing anti-oppressive education at one postsecondary institution. Our approach to anti-oppressive education connects with French et al.'s (2020) "psychological framework of radical healing for People of Color and Indigenous individuals (POCI) in the United States" (p. 14) because it shifts the focus from surviving to thriving. Instead of teaching students how to survive in an institution where they experience oppression, we teach staff and faculty how to create opportunities for students to thrive by acting as change agents. These students-as-change-agents learn how to: • identify oppression and dehumanization as the problem, rather than perpetuate a deficit narrative about students who are already marginalized in the academy; • connect with their communities or create new ones where they raise their critical consciousness; and • engage in proactive, collective resistance to restore dignity, foster hope, and prevent harm for future generations of students at the institution. (French et al., 2020) When we discussed how we might build a conceptual model to represent our healing, we realized that it was situated within the mutuality of our student-staff partnership. Therefore, to develop our conceptual model of mutual healing through student-staff partnership, we chose to connect concepts from French et al.'s (2020) framework with Healey and Healey's (2019) descriptions of five points along a continuum of student partnership (Figure 1).