What Is Your Metaphor? Disrupting Wholeness in Teacher Education

In our teacher education programs, preservice teachers are taught the “whole child” (Miller, 2009; Eaude, 2019) conceptual framework; however, most preservice teachers have witnessed many dimensions of their own identities or lived experiences being excluded or erased from their classrooms as K-12 grade students. While some scholars call for a post human (Murris, 2016) approach to wholeness, others are calling for a simple acknowledgment of all humanist variables of wholeness within a humanist lens (Howlett, 2018) in our classrooms. The rapidly changing society of today requires teachers who are able and willing to cope with the many challenges of change. This calls for teachers who are real change agents and also calls teachers to be healers (Whitfield & Klug, 2004), affirming experiences of others in daily life, sharing personal knowledge, and blending individual points of view into shared insights for the community. As preservice teachers are developing their complex identities and formulating their teaching philosophies in preparation to teach to the whole child, there is a gap in the research on preservice teachers’ perspectives of Wholeness and Healing, and their own development as a Whole Teacher. This study used narrative analysis and case study analysis to investigate preservice teachers’ perceptions of the concept of Wholeness and to explore the role healing plays in being a whole person. The study was guided by the questions: How do preservice teachers from a particular cohort of students in Maine, perceive themselves in relation to wholeness and how do they describe the relationship between healing and wholeness? Preservice Teachers’ voices, through stories and art, were analyzed and examined to provide more perspectives on wholeness and healing in teacher education. Their stories suggest a reconceptualization of the word, wholeness, honoring the complexity and intersectionality of healing in one’s development of being a whole person today.