Teaching as Healing: Social Science Pedagogy and the Emotional Repair of Teachers’ Professional Lives
Abstract
In contemporary classrooms, teachers navigate landscapes fraught with emotional strain, systemic inequities, and relentless policy pressures. These conditions often fracture professional identity, erode ethical agency, and obscure the aspirational trajectories that once fueled commitment to education. This essay re-conceptualizes teaching as a ritualized practice of healing, proposing that social science pedagogy functions as both a restorative and transformative site where educators engage with emotional, ethical, and relational repair. Drawing on feminist pedagogy, care ethics, queer theory, and sociocultural perspectives, it explores how dialogic learning, narrative praxis, and critical reflection enable teachers to confront historical trauma, structural injustice, and moral dilemmas, transforming vulnerability into renewed professional purpose. Classrooms, in this framework, become ritual spaces where collective and individual healing unfold, where educators reconstruct identity, reclaim agency, and cultivate resilience. Professional aspiration is reframed not as mere ambition but as the emergent capacity to imagine and enact justice-oriented, ethically grounded, and relationally attuned pedagogical futures. Through the lens of healing, teaching becomes an act of world-making, where pedagogical practice extends beyond content delivery to the co-creation of ethical, inclusive, and reflective communities. This paper contributes to scholarship at the intersection of emotional labor, social justice, and critical pedagogy, offering both conceptual insights and actionable implications for teacher education, reflective practice, and policy frameworks that prioritize affective well-being alongside educational accountability. Ultimately, it argues that the act of teaching is inseparable from the work of emotional restoration, ethical engagement, and imaginative world-making, positioning educators as agents not only of knowledge but of relational repair, social transformation, and collective flourishing.
Keywords: Social science pedagogy; Teacher healing; Emotional repair; Professional aspiration; Feminist pedagogy; Care ethics; Queer theory
Neha Srivastava