Overview
Task: Create a video of a healing environment (Considering psychological health for subjugated students).
Merriam-Webster’s definition of environment: The aggregate of social and cultural conditions that influence the life of an individual or community.
Background: Considering that many students impacted by the achievement/opportunity gaps come from under-resourced families/communities. Some of them also move to Davis from communities plagued with violence. Available evidence surrounding the achievement and opportunity gaps show that these students are primarily of African and Latino backgrounds. As such, they confront ongoing micro aggressions and reduced quality of life due to historical and structural racism. As a result, these students find it difficult to use their environments and or backgrounds to find healing and or get positive reflections that ignite their sense of hope and self-motivation. How then do we provide hope and a sense of connection for these students?
Problem statement: What happens when your external world and aesthetic beauty of your environment fails you…even conspires to make you feel depleted?
Answer: It then becomes important that healing environments are contained internally, through hope! For example, as students carry the weight of their own trauma and that accumulated over generations; healing environments might offer them a form of refuge. However, since there is little control over one’s external ecosystems, it is important that these healing environments develop as internal processes.