Infusing Healing Energy into Education (Gifts from Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian Insights)

The unprecedented crises that the contemporary educational world and global society are facing, intricately interwoven with traumas of human tragedies and eco-disasters, call for responses based upon the awareness of the connectedness within, between, and among individuals, groups, nations, and our shared planetary environment. We desperately need to heal, to heal from the injuries of wars, dominations, and polarizations, and to heal education’s instrumental disconnections from its own existential roots. It is in this context that wisdoms of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism with their abundant and diverse practices of healing are approached in this volume as gifts to contemporary educational thoughts and praxis. In these wisdom traditions, healing is a holistic, ongoing process physically, psychologically, philosophically and spiritually to integrative pathways.

This book, through engaging in intercultural, transdisciplinary, and international conversations and dialogues, intends to synergize our collective energies to enhance our resilience and create a space for strength-based, community-based, and experience-based, and inner-outer connected restorative approach of healing in education. This book also serves as a 20-year celebration of the Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and Education SIG at AERA. It is a timely collection for addressing today’s challenges and will make an important contribution to transforming education, curriculum, and pedagogy internationally.