This project emerged from my desire to “make it real.” To engage what I’ve been introduced to through academia and connect it with outside organizations that I believe are doing the theory in practice.

 

As I prepared to graduate from Teachers College, I contemplated how to take the lessons I learned and apply them to non-academic spaces. This class, Teaching and Learning with the Land, taught by OreOluwa Badaki, helped me sense possibilities toward integration by facilitating dialogue and movement between interdisciplinary scholars, a quality that ensured an openness and curiosity. The content within the course challenged my notions of physical space, historical context, and relationship with naming. It emphasized the inextricable connections of perceived dualisms, grounding that we do not have to choose one or another, we can have, and often are, both. Recognizing this supports a journey toward wholeness. 

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Beyond the content, zoomed out, the entirety of the class modeled the aims within the readings, facilitating multimodal and cross-disciplinary conversations and practices that worked to consider the local and global meaning of our coming together in an effort to find the productive in-between. This collaboration greatly influences the types of experiences I want to generate after finishing school, the type of community organizing and intention for workshops I envision myself creating. 

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Entitled: “Putting the Body in Context,” I made this accordion book as a sort of mood board/dream vision to begin planning for this work. It is philosophically grounded by six overarching, thematic questions that arose through our course. They are questions that require a level of reflective engagement that I believe is crucial to keep in mind and return to as a leader. In the book, I attempt to respond to and exemplify the importance of these questions through a collaged integration of theory from the course and practice that I’ve witnessed in New York.

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It is a brainstorm for the future that tries to summarize and honor the lessons collected throughout this course.

It is intended to be held, to be a physical form accessible for play and extension, but here's a low res-scan. lol. 

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Six overarching questions:

1. What does useful theorizing look like?

2. How can we tell the truth in as many ways as possible?

3. What histories do we bring to our looking?

4. What is an embodied orientation toward education? 

5. How can we hold different contradictory ideas in productive tension?

6. If freedom is a place, what is a place you want to make more free?