The Work

What is Transformative Pedagogy in Times of Crisis?

We started using the term transformative pedagogy to describe something our students were demonstrating and naming to us. There were experiences in and through our classes that not only changed the content of knowledge the students had, but changed their way of understanding and relating to the world. That is to say, in these classes students transformed their perception of reality– including who they were– as well as what the role of truth and education were in that. And once changed, they could not go back. This is why we call it transformative: like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, the transformation is irreversible.

In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire describes the poverty of the banking model of education in which teachers fill learners with knowledge in a linear, uni-directional and transactional relationship, and offers what he suggests is a liberatory one. For Freire and many that came after him pedagogy is not simply something that happens in the classroom, but is the process of conscientization that all people must go through to get free. Parker Palmer and bell hooks elaborate on this…..
The notion of Crisis is very important because the existential experience of uncertainty, despair, fear

Pillars and Principles of the Work

In the course of three years working with faculty, attending and organizing numerous workshops and trainings, experimenting with and studying in a rather wide variety of disciplines, some core pillars, modalities and principles for this Transformative Pedagogy in Times of Crisis became clearer. In what follows we will elaborate on four sources or bodies of work we build on ; why we use the word Transformation (as opposed to Change); and finally why understanding that all of this takes place upon a background of Crisis is so crucial.

Sources of our Work

Liberatory Pedagogy

Contemplative Pedagogy

Trauma-Informed & Resiliency Oriented Approaches

Holism, Ecological, and Relational Thinking

Times of Crisis

Crisis … uncertainty, change, darkness

In many ways liberatory, contemplative, and trauma informed practices are all ways of addressing crises, because as Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön reminds us :

“The only time we ever know what’s really going on … the only time we ever know what’s really going on — is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep.”

The centrality of Crisis–understood as both challenge and opportunity– is important to this project, both because how we define and understand the multiple crises facing us and the way it impacts the kinds of people we are trying to help grow and learn, but also because it is in learning to face and be with crisis, a period in which what comes next is not a given—both personal and collective, internal and external (structural)— that true transformation can take place.

Why Transformative?

…for us to transform as a society, we have to allow ourselves to be transformed as individuals. And for us to be transformed as individuals, we have to allow for the incompleteness of any of our truths and a real forgiveness for the complexity of human beings and what we’re trapped inside of, so that we’re both able to respond to the oppression, the aggression that we’re confronted with, but we’re able to do that with a deep and abiding sense of “and there are people, human beings, that are at the other end of that baton, that stick, that policy, that are also trapped in something. They’re also trapped in a suffering. And for sure, we can witness that there are ways in which they’re benefiting from it. But there’s also ways, if one trusts the human heart, that they must be suffering. And holding that at the core of who you are when responding to things, I think, is the way — the only way we really have forward — to not just replicate systems of oppression for the sake of our own cause.”
rev angel kyodo Williams

Goals & Elements of TPTC

Know ( work on and accept) yourself ¹
- Your positionality & your default culture (the water you swim in)
- Your nervous system including habitual responses and styles of coping.
- Learning how default settings (cultural and nervous system) lead you to show up.
- Your methods of regulating/self-soothing/grounding
Developing a Trauma-Informed (Resiliency) Perspective.
- Learning how to track and regulate your nervous system
- Gain tools for recognize other people’s patterns.
- Employ tools from TI to have difficult conversations
Cultivate a Relational or Holistic View of Reality (and a critique of the Modernist/Dualist one)
Learn a variety of practices and tools to use in the classroom (and in life) to generate more holistic learning and responses even on difficult, uncomfortable or controversial topics.

^{1 As bell hooks reminded us, so much of what we teach doesn’t have to do with the content or material we are presenting, but in who and how we are, in other words we teach through modeling. Being able to be our full-selves inspires and enables students to do the same.}