Wounded Healers

In 2023, Acosta Institute is building on the success of the podcast series, through five main activities:

• Release the portraits and stories digitally on the Wounded Healers website
• Produce large-scale, framed copies of the portraits and host one or several  art exhibition in collaboration with a New York museum or gallery
• Organize a series of public programs that engage educators and the public in these stories, and in telling their own Wounded Healer stories, starting with a Summit to explore a Wounded Healer pedogogy
• Promote the project to expand the number of educators it reaches
• Gather data  to understand the impact of the  project and consider how it might evolve  and grow in a second Phase

The Wounded Healers Portrait and Podcast Series is a multimedia healing arts project that profiles educators, through interview and creative portraiture, who have dedicated their lives to creating spaces for children to thrive, flourish, and heal.

The concept “wounded healer” finds its roots in Greek mythology and is interpreted in Carl Jung’s work. For Jung, the wounded healer’s sensitivity to and understanding of their own wounds enabled them to help others heal. Jung was especially attuned to physicians or those who administer medicine. In our portrait and podcast series, we reinterpret the concept with attention to the lives of exceptional educators.

Stories are curated to feature practitioners who are deeply aware of the impact of racial and socio-economic trauma on their communities and know the importance of engaging in their own personal healing work as they implement healing-centered teaching methods with their students.

As wounded healers, they embrace the challenge of working and teaching in systems that perpetuate violence and inequality.  They are resolute in moving through the challenges to bring about a better world. In essence, this project aims to send messages of inspiration, affirmation, and hope to depleted educators who are trying to stay the course. In a time when there are multiple crises and those who educate and care for people are experiencing difficult conditions, this project aims to send messages of inspiration and hope.

The project’s theory of action, borne out in initial project events, is this: 

• Individual healing and well being of educators are necessary for those people to create healing spaces for others - it is the fuel, not the barrier, to educators creating relationships and spaces where students can heal and thrive
• Sharing educators’ candid personal stories in the form of majestic portraits and intimate interviews, in revered creative contexts,  using high end production values and large scale imagery and telling the stories in ways that celebrate the storyteller’s dignity, courage, and vulnerability, together cause a shift in how we understand trauma, vulnerability, and wounds; presenting them  the context of an art gallery, in sophisticated digital media, coffee table books, and in public art, serves to subtly reframe vulnerable  stories of healing as something to be revered and celebrated, as somehow both  normal, and heroic.
• Wounded Healers tells stories in ways that celebrate educators and their paths to creating successful healing environments for those they serve. The project honors vulnerability and inspires a shift from woundedness as a flaw or sign of insufficiency, to the very source of  our unique gifts, and a path to becoming whole, in community
• Sharing these stories acts as a catalyst, creating the possibility for healing community in the form of public and online discussion circles, dialogues, and teacher professional development.
• The stories act as a catalyst, inspiring other educators to reflect on and  tell their own stories, and have conversations with peers, both of which strengthen their own capacity to attend to their own well being, and create  learning spaces where they and the young people they serve can thrive, flourish and heal.
• Through engagement with these vulnerable stories of healing, especially when presented with high end production values and in celebrated settings (books, art galleries, etc. ) other educators are inspired to touch into their own vulnerabilities, to reframe them as gifts, and start or continue on their own paths to wholeness.  These portraits and stories  act as the seed, inspiring others to tell their own stories, which then weave a new healing community fabric focused on strength and connection.

Initial community dialogues bringing the public together with these educators suggest that this approach creates a mutuality and vulnerability that makes a different way of being together possible, and that that way of being together is in itself a form of healing and solidarity. Educators whose vulnerable stories are told via the project find themselves celebrated and presented with dignity and respect. Their majesty in vulnerability serves as an inspiration to others. By featuring educators who speak tenderly to the ways in which racialization and structural barriers have created wounds, the stories help us see deeper into the many ways–personal, relational, and systemic–we acquire our wounds, and the ways that both individual and collective healing are intertwined.

These stories become the fabric for weaving stronger relationships, community and learning. They become catalysts for teachers, and potentially students, in school communities to tell their own stories, and shift teacher and school culture.