Liberating the Classroom: Healing and Justice in Higher Education

How universities can become centers of healing and social justice.

In Liberating the Classroom, Tessa Hicks Peterson shows how universities can transform into places that directly disrupt injustice and work toward personal and collective liberation. Instead of reproducing social inequity, higher education institutions could become engines of healing. This transformation, however, requires a major conscience shift at the level of the individual (student, educator, leader), the classroom (teaching and learning), administration (culture and policy), and the institution (structures and systems).

Peterson examines innovative models, practices, and theories that students, teachers, and administrators can apply to implement both personal and systemic change. This book represents a major contribution in placing the claims of social justice, personal and social healing, and holistic pedagogy in a dialogue that is at once passionate and deeply considered. Peterson presents a vision of teaching and learning in which these three claims are mutually transformative. This guide offers a cadre of thinkers and practitioners who provide distinct but connected resources for realizing that vision and explores what changes in pedagogical practice, campus culture, academic-community relationships, and institutional structures would be needed to create spaces in higher education that could fully braid these values together.

Tessa Hicks Peterson (LOS ANGELES, CA) is the Assistant Vice President of Community Engagement and a professor of urban studies at Pitzer College.