Education
a process of community based learning and unlearning
As facilitators, we hope to bring tools and frameworks that can support you in deepening your work and strengthening your community. Our educational opportunities center on relationality and unlearning as key frameworks to support and guide our work. Whether we are in the process of reimagining curriculum, exploring storytelling as a tool for epistemic justice, or diving into the critical dilemmas of human rights work; these guiding principles invite us to engage with social change and justice questions in personal, interpersonal, collective, and structural ways.
Relationality
Learning and harvesting knowledge/wisdom is a relational and contextual practice. While we seek to question the individualistic notions of knowledge production, our main aim in our relational approach is to honor and foster the richness of co-creating. Additionally, relationality insists we illuminate, reckon, and reimagine the many ways we are interconnected and in relationship with the earth, each other, systems of oppression, and possibilities for liberation, which means that our explorations won’t stay in the realm of theory but in that of praxis.
UNLEARNING
We are not interested in “getting things right.” We are interested in questioning, re-imagining, re-wiring, re-storying, re-creating, and re-worlding to cultivate more pluriversal practices/ways of being. Unlearning gives us a space to take off our masks as we recognize that none of us are perfect, nor should we be, and none of us know it all.
Our methodologies create powerful spaces to play and experiment while being free to make mistakes along the way. There is much to learn, and much that we have learned needs to be questioned.
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Unlearning mobilizes us to be vulnerable with each other and foster a community grounded in authenticity, accountability, and justice. Weaving and wrestling in community is not easy, but it is worthwhile.
Workshops: education for liberation
Radical Imagination
To change the world, we must be able to imagine it first. This workshop invites participants to engage in radical imagination to respond creatively to current and future challenges. Radical imagination is the ability to imagine our lives, systems, structures, relationships, and organizations otherwise, acknowledging that the world can and should be changed. This praxis inspires us to create roadmaps toward new forms of solidarity and liberation as we bring the past, the future, and the present into dialogue. Join us to dream our utopias into reality collectively.
Unlearning workshops
The personal is political. As we reimagine our world or strive for change, we need to embrace and exercise our reflexivity. We all have been instructed in the logic of harm and separation. This workshop provides tools for unlearning that center on accountability, consent, and care.
Curriculum Development
Are you interested in designing or reimagining a course with participative and creative methodologies? This workshop would work closely with participants depending on their needs and interests.
Epistemic Pluralism
How do we build a world where many worlds can exist? This workshop invites us to 1) identify the dominant epistemologies and ontologies that shape our world by grappling with their history, 2) learn about epistemologies that have been excluded and belittled, 3) collectively reflect on the potential of engaging in epistemologically plural ways of thinking and being.
Storytelling as worldbuilding
To change our world, we must change our stories. Stories are how we understand who we are and want to become. We always tell stories, but rarely do we stop and think about them. When we consciously use the power of stories to reimagine our world, we turn the word story into a verb. We “story” our world.
Josep Alba-Salas
"I had the pleasure of participating in a departmental workshop on epistemic justice co-facilitated by Chelsea in spring of 2023.
The workshop was conducted on Zoom and featured four monthly two-hour sessions. The first session provided an introduction to the concept of epistemic justice and an overview of the entire program. Session two zeroed in on the notions of epistemicide and radical listening as well as Catherine Walsh’s call to unlearn discourses and practices of rational modernity that perpetuate violence and systemic injustices, to learn to think and act in the fissures and cracks of colonial thinking, and to create collective spaces where seeds of change can be planted. Building upon Walsh’s decolonial praxis, session three explored the role of our bodies and collaborative story-telling as sites for social change and transformative epistemic justice. Finally, session four highlighted the collaborative process of nurturing the seeds of epistemic pluralism and recapitulated other main workshop themes. To prepare for each session we completed brief individual reflection activities as well as short readings, including a thought-provoking, yet very easily accessible article that Chelsea herself had recently coauthored (“Re-storying participatory action research: a narrative approach to challenging epistemic violence in community development”).
Although the workshop was solidly grounded on Decolonial Theory, it did not involve purely intellectual discussions. Instead, it primarily involved an experiential and embodied exploration of other ways of knowing, being, and connecting both with the issues at hand and with each other. After a brief presentation by Chelsey and her co-facilitator to review key concepts, the bulk of each session was devoted to hands-on, interactive activities. These included, among others, whole-group and small-group discussions, guided meditations, drawing, free writing, and mindful body movements.
My colleagues and I found the workshop to be extremely relevant not only to our department’s continued efforts to decolonize the curriculum and explore non-canonical epistemologies, but also to our institution’s commitment to anti-racism and social justice. The activities and discussions required a degree of honesty and vulnerability that in the hands of less capable facilitators could have felt uncomfortable or even too “touchy-feely.” Instead, we all found the experience to be substantive, energizing, inspiring, and deeply meaningful. In fact, we enjoyed it so much that we are hoping to enroll in a follow-up workshop next year.
Our very positive response to the workshop is a testament to Chelsea’s wonderful skills as a facilitator. She came across as warm, patient, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic. Coupled with her professionalism and refreshing sense of humor, her kind, welcoming, and open-minded demeanor put everyone at ease and set the tone for a collaborative exploration of the intellectual and affective dimensions of the issues at hand. All along, she gently invited us to push our boundaries while also honoring our different comfort levels. She was outstanding, and it was truly a pleasure to work with her!"