Innovating Educational Research Methods to Disrupt Oppressive Systems and Promote Healing: Editors’ Introduction

This introduction frames educational research as a practice of resistance and repair amid systemic oppression. Bringing together five articles, the special issue explores healing through youth participatory action research, Critical Race Feminista quantitative ethnography, spiritually grounded qualitative inquiry, poetic inquiry, and community writing and art. Across these approaches, healing emerges as a methodological orientation that centers community knowledge, agency, relational accountability, and collective possibility. The authors challenge extractive inquiry and reconsider rigor through ethics, care, reflexivity, and analytic precision. Together, the contributions invite researchers to design inquiry that disrupts dehumanization and cultivates dignity, connection, and just educational futures for communities.