Introduction

The Trump administration's 2018 policy of separating nearly 2,700 mostly Central American children from their families as they cross the US– Mexico border in search of asylum is yet another iteration of the US's long history of harming diverse people(s) of colour (Menchaca, 2002; Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006; Gomez, 2008; Almendrala, 2018). From slavery, to Indian boarding schools, to Japanese internment camps, children of colour have experienced schooling policies of cruelty, dehumanisation, criminalisation and trauma (Wilkins, 2012; Desai and Abeita, 2017; Emdin, 2016). Dominant schooling has inflicted soul wounds (Duran and Duran, 1995) upon the academic, psychological, emotional and spiritual well-being of marginalised communities. Educators who work in these communities must act as healers to treat these soul wounds through wholeness of mind, body and spirit, while instilling education as the practice of freedom (hooks, 1994). In Rendón's (2009: 2) work lies a similar call for a ‘refashioned dream of education based on wholeness, consonance, social justice, and liberation’. Rendón utilises Latino/a place-based ancestral knowledge to challenge the colonising and increasingly market-driven Western paradigm of education, which privileges intellectual/rational knowing, separation, competition, perfection, monoculturalism, goal-oriented outer work and socio-political and interpersonal unconsciousness.

In this chapter, we detail the painful histories of US schooling, outline its modern-day manifestations, connect it to the neoliberal school reform agenda and contextualise it within the institutionalised racism, intellectual invalidation, economic disparity and educational inequity that people(s) of colour have sustained (Stovall, 2013; Au, 2016). We summarise six pedagogical tenets comprising Body-Soul Rooted Pedagogy and conclude by focusing on tenet six, which illuminates the ways in which educators may counter the traumas of schooling and curricularly harvest health and well-being. We define Body-Soul Rooted Pedagogy as a soulful and living pedagogical framework wherein teaching, learning and knowing take root within body/spirit/land epistemologies of resistance, resilience and wholeness. This decolonising pedagogy galvanises the complex lived realities, intersectional identities, contested bodies, intellectual legacies, spiritualities and ancestral healing practices of communities of colour to bring about social and educational equity, which provides a vibrant source for resistance (Sosa-Provencio et al, 2018).