By day, I work at George Brown College as a coordinator and faculty member in the Transitions to Post-Secondary Education program. I am also a community-based facilitator and activist.
I work with groups to help them bring more care, complexity, and collectivity into what they do.
Here are some examples of workshops I have facilitated before and would love to do again with you:
Teaching & Facilitating with Neurodiversity in Mind
It is such a gift to get to facilitate other’s learning. It can sometimes feel challenging, though, to account for all the ways in which learners’ brains work differently. If there are as many minds as there are people, is it even possible to “get it right”? In this hands-on workshop, we will explore some essential things to keep in mind when teaching towards learner complexity and neurodiversity. Using your own ‘sticky’ teaching practices as a jumping off point, we will explore how these practices might be received by different kinds of learners. We will then brainstorm how to make these practices more accessible for neurodivergent learners without leaving your own needs behind.
Building Consensus: Making Group Decisions Together
Attending, facilitating, and participating in meetings are a major part of movement building. When we make decisions together in meetings, developing a transparent, structured process that focuses on building a shared understanding and making sure everyone involved has a say can mean that whatever we come up with is more creative and more supported by the whole group. Join us as we spend time exploring effective group decision-making in social movement organizations. Together we’ll discuss and share strategies for fostering good communication, embracing dissent in our groups, solving disagreements with creative thinking, and addressing informal group hierarchy through intentional, structured group process. This workshop will be especially relevant for groups who are used to using “informal” consensus (aka “basically consensus”) as an approach to decision-making, and who tend to have meetings with 3-20 people.
Playful Rebellion: Humor as Activist Tactic
The injustices that face our world today are enraging, devastating, and quite often immobilizing. In our resistance and our attempts to build new kinds of worlds, we can come to take ourselves very seriously. Many of us break down, burn out, and disconnect from our communities in the process. This workshop will explore how activists can use humour, play, and satire as strategic tools to build bonds with like-minded (and not-so-like-minded) folks, to help people understand the ways that power works in our society, and to lift the spirits of our movements. Specifically, we will explore: how to wield humour respectfully (i.e. the ethics of humour); “punching up” vs. “punching down”; and case studies of satirical actions. We will provide opportunities for participants to brainstorm ways to incorporate more humour and play into their own organizing.
Interested? I’d love to hear from you! Reach out at info@rebelpedagogy.ca.
Rebel Pedagogy 