Healing Artist Profile
Kylan Gould and Michiko Ng
How does a multidisciplinary approach to education impact one’s engagement in healing?
Overview
Research Question: How does a multidisciplinary approach to education impact one’s engagement in healing?
When we think of multidisciplinary education, we often think about combining and relating disciplines. This is the mindset in which we began this project. But Katy Hawkins invites us to expand these notions. Multidisciplinary learning, when taken not only as a way to expand our thinking beyond the boundaries of subject-learning, but as a mode of healing, becomes transgressive.
Key Takeaways:
While we use the phrase “healing artist,” it may do more justice to refer to Katy Hawkins as a “healing crafter” in her words. Drawing from her Quaker background, a formal education in comparative literature, and work in dance, yoga, post-secondary teaching, and embodied social justice, Dr. Hawkins offers valuable insight into the ways we can benefit from embodied education. As the director of Shiné: Mind/Body/Spirit and founder of Moving Poetics, Dr. Hawkins emphasizes the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual work that can be�gathered from playful sensory and bodily experiences. Her sensitive approach to scholarly and spiritual teachings �promotes the accessibility of learning and healing.
“Everyone in your life cares if you are grounded, sane, and able to anchor yourself in the reality of every moment of your day. Everybody who loves you cares about that and everyone who counts on you needs it for you.”
Healing Artist: Katy Hawkins, Ph.D
Discussing
“soft spaces”
Healing Arts (and Crafts):
Taking risks to minimize risk
“...in a classroom setting, when you’re using creativity, it seems to me that things are going to flop; things go awry. Acknowledging mistakes, speaking to it, learning from those mistakes, continually sort of resculpting, pivoting, realigning in different ways is part of the healing aspect of it…”
The Body is a
Learning Environment
“Body, not just thought of as a tool or an impediment or a machine, but body as a deep, rich environment for experiencing truth and spirit.”
The island of the self—returning to the inner child
“I think everybody can find something in their childhood where they resonate with the sense of self as safe and then we lose it.”
Hawkins refers to Thich Nhat Hanh’s dharma of the self as an island we must return to and care for.
Let’s get scientific...
“Three-brain theory is nothing new: The gut-brain, the heart-brain, the head-brain and the way that different parts of our body alchemize different things in different ways”
Education is artistic, spiritual, AND scientific! The instinctual, emotional, and logical aspects of the mind and body are important to learning and well-being. We must stimulate and be attentive to the whole being.
“...all of the really intuitive work that comes along with recognizing that the cognitive mind and rational mind is not where all the learning happens, that if it’s not connected to the intuitive mind and the body mind, then you’re learning with one part of you”
Want to know about the Gut-Brain Axis?�https://psychscenehub.com/psychinsights/the-simplified-guide-to-the-gut-brain-axis/
The role of a teacher
Positionality
Taking care of one’s self
Continuity
Pausing
Multidisciplinary education = Building (inter)relationships
“You’re going to encounter expectations from students that take so much time and effort to reframe.”
“It’s gonna take rewiring all of us to create classrooms… where everybody feels like they’re in power.”
power
authority
Accessibility
Adrienne Maree Brown
“...that agenda also kept me from doing my best teaching because I wasn’t giving people what they needed which was respite, which was comfort, which was openness, which was an organic space of however long we had.”
Accessibility comes in many different forms. In the physical, the mental, the ability to connect with one another and/or the material.
Silence as a Practice
Class connection: Stop Talking: Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning and Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education
“... taking a pause to regulate your nervous system and what the words of another [are] as the judgment starts bubbling up is a deep healing collective practice and it includes the silence and it includes the ambient surrounding and it includes connectivity and listening and it includes self-regulation but not just to calm and heal ourselves.”
“engaging in listening”
Final thoughts for the Future
“...it’s certainly way easier for somebody who has a well-paid university position that is tenured to make radical changes in the classroom than it is for somebody who is teaching, for, like, less than minimum wage… You can talk about accessibility in a really different way when you have power.”
“A practice that truly integrates body, mind, and spirit is going to have some tiny, humbling moment of touching in with all three of those things and to experience an environment where all three are being spoken to and touched and worked with and you’re really inhabiting all three planes—That’s the most revolutionary thing we can give our students.”