Whole Person Pedagogy, Whole Person Care: How Black Feminist Healing Arts Praxis Expands Medical Education and Beyond

Abstract

“Whole Person Pedagogy, Whole Person Care” explores how Black Feminist Healing Arts Praxis can expand traditional notions of Medical Education within and beyond the classroom and the clinic. 

While Medical Education is traditionally referred to as the required courses needed for medical students to receive their medical degree, I speak here about alternative sites of learning and experiencing care within and beyond classroom settings that center community medicine and community healing. In particular, I share my own journey of arriving at the ancestral and communal implications of teaching within the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine as a Black Feminist Healing Artist. 

More broadly, I ask, what does it mean that medical clinics and hospitals and healthcare institutions have become the antithesis of wellness care comfort and well being for Black women and marginalized communities? How might we reimagine medical education so that we train doctors differently, modeling care and holistic wellness as an embedded part of the curricular model, a foundational expectation for what it means for our care providers to be well, and to center the wellness of all of their patients through a commitment to culturally relevant care, creative healing, and communal accountability?

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