Radical Healing: From the Clinic to the Classroom

Post by Janet Gu, Saleha Mian, Soe Young Lee, and Michael A. Medina (Boston University).

For youth of color, psychological well-being is often a community effort. Whether they live in an ethnic enclave or attend a racially diverse school, a young person’s emotional health may depend largely on their engagement with the communities around them. Yet supporting this process may require educators to deviate from traditional teaching methods that focus primarily on avoiding discrimination or reducing harm. While necessary, these approaches rarely envision schools as sites of empowerment, agency, and joy. A potentially more positive alternative for educators may already exist in the counseling practice of radical healing.

What Is Radical Healing?

The radical healing framework defines psychological well-being and community advocacy as complementary (French et al., 2020). Initially applied in counseling psychology, this practice encourages clinical practitioners to guide youth in drawing strength, support, and well-being from their social connections during times of cultural trauma. For youth of color, this trauma can take many forms: experiences of discrimination, exposure to negative stereotypes, erasure or devaluation of their histories and languages, or the chronic stress of navigating disaffirming environments. Such harms can compound over time, negatively shaping how young people see themselves, their communities, and their futures. The radical healing framework uses positive reframing—reinterpreting painful events as opportunities to affirm one’s worth, resilience, and agency—to help youth navigate these experiences within the everyday developmental work of adolescence, like exploring their identities and forming peer relationships.

Educators may potentially use the same approach to support their students. They might foster students’ awareness of unfair systems, such as racism and inequity, through lessons that examine how these systems operate in everyday life. They can create peer spaces that emphasize both group learning and mutual support, and celebrate cultural values through uplifting student narratives or volunteer work. Further, educators can leverage radical hope, an element of radical healing that imagines a world that stands up to injustice, by encouraging community action, organizing school initiatives, participating in local advocacy, or creating projects that address community needs. These approaches not only demystify the structural forces and societal histories that perpetuate cultural trauma, but they also provide youth with an increased sense of confidence to resist and confront these experiences in their own lives.

A School-Based Example

Some educational organizations already implement these practices. The Boston Debate League’s Resolved Program creates discussion-based spaces for Black and Latino middle and high school boys. During school hours, students and facilitators of color explore culturally relevant issues (e.g., the racial wealth gap and professional opportunities for men of color) through peer dialogue, personal narratives, and evidence-based argumentation. The Resolved Program is student-led and focuses on developing students’ skills, aiming to be a space of simultaneous empowerment and healing from cultural invalidation. Students and facilitators co-create this space by jointly setting group expectations and reflecting collectively on what it means to find empowerment and joy within white-dominant spaces.

Guidance for Educators

Integrating care and justice into the daily rhythms of teaching is often a challenge. A curriculum that validates students’ cultural backgrounds and lived experiences, connects them with culturally relatable mentors, and creates spaces where they can imagine a better future is reachable but takes work. Below are a handful of starting points for interested educators.

1. Include identity-affirming dialogue. Integrate lessons with opportunities for students to share stories of familial and cultural strengths. Encouraging students to find similarities across each other’s stories can foster group belongingness.
2. Balance safety with accountability. Aim for a combination of honesty, respect, and personal accountability during difficult dialogues. Mutual openness and an awareness of differences in perspectives help create a space where everyone feels safe and challenged to grow.
3. Pair academics with reflections. Pair content learning with reflection on its relevance to their own reality and experiences. Ask students to consider who benefits from the systems they live in, whose voices are missing from common social narratives, and how they can prioritize wellness and community action within oppressive spaces.
4. Build collective efficacy. Support student-led initiatives—like peer mentoring, service goals, or schoolwide projects—that place the impact and planning in their own hands.
5. Remember the reciprocal benefits. Healing-centered approaches may protect teachers from burnout by reframing their role from crisis management to co-creating hope with students.

Radical healing invites schools to be more than educational spaces. They can be places where young people of color build pride, voice, and solidarity. When students get to share their own stories and experiences, educational programs like Resolved can foster radical hope and healing, motivating students to envision and embrace their role in creating a just world. Similarly, when educators support this process, framing social justice as a part of wellness work, they help transform classrooms into sites of not only learning, but also collective healing.