Integrating Learning and Hummingbird Medicine to Heal Academic Harm

Schooling practices and institutions of schooling have harmed racialized K-12 students, teachers, undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. How we define learning plays a significant role in understanding and ameliorating this harm. To envision a more hopeful future for education, in this article, we explore the relationship between learning, academic harm, and healing. To do so, we bring insights from Curanderismo—an oral healing and spiritual tradition—and sociocultural perspectives on learning into conversation to foreground the historical and cultural dimensions of learning in everyday practices. To breathe life into these connections, we share three stories inspired by hummingbird medicine, one form of wisdom found in Curanderismo. The stories illuminate the fluidity of time and space to support expansive views of learning and healing, the need to acknowledge the winding paths of learning and how they often grow through missteps and failures, and the need to offer ourselves and our students love as we try to heal ourselves from academic harms. Bringing learning and healing together intentionally can move us toward creating educational systems that allow for the flourishing of people in mind, body, spirit, and heart. We conclude with questions that can guide the design of learning environments characterized by healing and dignity.