Healing-Centered Writing in the Secondary Classroom by Ioanna Pettas Opidee

This book offers an expansive vision of what writing can look like and feel like, both in classrooms and in our lives. In a time when automation of the writing process is being normalized at every stage and level, it challenges readers to remember why writing from our own bodies still matters.

The book presents the concept of a healing-centered framework for writing, which covers five tenets: 1) “Who Is ‘I’?,” which focuses on identity and authorship; 2) “The Body of Writing,” on embodiment and form; 3) “Forgot, but Then Remembered,” on memory and reclamation; 4) “Found Joy in Pieces,” on fragmentation and collage; and 5) “Stones to the Pile,” on civic engagement and purpose. Each tenet is designed to help teachers foster conditions for a healing-centered approach to writing—one with the capacity to be humanizing, affirming, empowering, liberatory, trauma-sensitive, restorative, and transformative for student writers and for their teachers.

This book is especially well-suited to high school and middle school teachers who assign and teach writing in any subject area.