A Brief Biography

Dr. Virginia Dearani is an educator, researcher, consultant, and founder of the Wholeness Reimagined framework, an interdisciplinary approach that supports individuals, organizations, and communities in cultivating lives rooted in connection, meaning, healing, and growth. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Thomas College in Maine and brings more than twenty-five years of experience across early childhood, K–12, higher education, community leadership, and professional development.

At the heart of Virginia's work is a commitment to Whole Teacher–Whole Child development and the belief that education is fundamentally a relational, healing, and transformative practice. Drawing from education, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, literacy studies, and social justice traditions, she helps educators, leaders, families, and organizations create environments where people can flourish as whole human beings.

Virginia is the creator of the Roots & Fruits methodology, an embodied approach to teaching and learning that integrates identity development, peace education, creativity, emotional well-being, cultural responsiveness, and community engagement. Developed over decades of work with children, educators, and families, Roots & Fruits serves as a foundation for her broader Wholeness Reimagined framework, which explores wholeness as both a state of being and a lifelong process of becoming. Her scholarship and consulting work focus on developing the Whole Teacher, recognizing that effective teaching extends beyond instructional practice to encompass self-awareness, relational capacity, identity, healing, creativity, and purpose.

She is particularly interested in the intersections of education with psychology, philosophy, contemplative practice, ecology, and human development, and how these disciplines can inform more holistic approaches to learning and leadership. Throughout her career, Virginia has taught and facilitated professional learning across Maine, the United States, and internationally. Her areas of expertise include whole-child education, social-emotional learning, trauma-informed practice, peace and conflict transformation, culturally responsive teaching, identity development, embodied learning, neuroaesthetics, curriculum design, leadership development, and organizational culture.

Prior to joining Thomas College, Virginia taught in teacher preparation programs at several institutions, including the University of Maine at Farmington, Central Maine Community College, Southern Maine Community College, and Maine Roads to Quality. She also founded One Tree Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting peace, partnership, and cultural understanding through education. Through this work, she developed innovative early childhood programming and collaborated with educators, community organizations, and state agencies to advance culturally responsive and equitable educational practices.

Virginia's research explores themes of identity, narrative, place, healing, and wholeness. Influenced by scholars and practitioners such as bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Karen Murris, Thich Nhat Hanh, Four Arrows, Sherri L. Mitchell (Penobscot Nation), and Indigenous and ecological traditions of knowing, her work invites a reimagining of education as a living ecology of relationships among self, others, community, and the more-than-human world. She has presented at local, national, and international conferences, published in educational journals, and appeared on podcasts exploring the intersections of teaching, healing, identity, and social transformation. Her forthcoming book, Wholeness Reimagined: Reclaiming the Sacred, the Storied, and the Spiraled in Education, expands this work by offering educators a new language and framework for understanding wholeness in contemporary education.

In addition to her academic and consulting work, Virginia is a Reiki Master and healing practitioner whose personal and professional interests continue to explore the relationship between learning, healing, spirituality, creativity, and human development. Across all dimensions of her work, she seeks to create spaces where people can reconnect with themselves, one another, and the larger web of life.

Above all, Virginia sees wholeness not as perfection or completion, but as an ongoing practice of becoming, an invitation to live, learn, teach, lead, and love in ways that honor our interconnected humanity and the world we share.