Extending the experiential adult learning cycle: a Hologram? 
Friday, January 26, 2018, 02:08 PM - Adult and Popular Education
A key element of transformative learning is experimenting with real-world problems. David Kolb's experiential learning cycle continues to be central. Yet cycles, even spirals, don't capture the dynamism now possible with online and blended learning. Frames have never had more possibility to engage with such a complex range of realities and inter-sectionalities. But emergent paths are also unclear and frustrating, subject to norms. How to bring critical pedagogy (andragogy) to these spaces? Working on a paper to extend the learning cycle with a hologram which helps to capture online multi-dimensionality.

Holographic visualization offers multiple dimensions, movement, refraction, doubt. Likewise, online learners can be supported to move freely where they find meaning between their online community and their own deliberations. All the while, they are embedded in life and work. This shared reflexivity and muddling is key to the transformative potential of online learning. The lag between insights and experimentation, negotiation is gone. The space also collapses gender and power dynamics in interesting ways as learners shape their own paths and voices at their own pace for reflection. Framing is even captured to better support both self-directed and collective learning. Facilitators and peers can act more like coaches, real-time in real messiness.



Changing the gender narratives 
Friday, December 1, 2017, 03:42 PM - Adult and Popular Education
Working with The Story Kitchen and the Coady Institute in Nepal co-facilitating with an inspiring leader, Jaya ji Luintel, who heads up this organization. Increasingly, I've found in my work that technical solutions around alternative economic or community based models bump up against gendered social norms. Turning more and more to address these issues where media, artists, elders play such important roles. Jaya ji and I facilitated on the Rao/Kelleher feminist framework for change that has so grounded my work around gender and power. We met in a feminist leadership course at the Coady Institute.

From their site: "The Story Kitchen (TSK) is driven by the passionate belief that upholding the stories of women can unravel systems of gender oppression and patriarchy that continue to exist in Nepal. The domination of stories from men's perspectives leaves women out of the history of Nepal and fails to recognize the extent to which women are currently contributing and have always contributed to the development of the country." TSK works with women of different castes, ages, communities to share their stories nationally. They also train justice reporters. Their work with survivors of armed conflict, particularly the self-formed network that came out of it, has led to meetings with the Truth and Reconciliation Council as well as a special meeting with the President.
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Power and Love 
Wednesday, January 25, 2017, 08:17 PM - Adult and Popular Education
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that the year I was born in "Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community?" Timely given all that is happening right now.

I'm speaking in LA at a social entrepreneurship workshop (Starting Bloc) about how I use these ideas practically in my work, especially in network building. How we balance saying what needs to be said with widening the tent.Tricky beautiful stuff. How being a mutt or at the edges has always felt a bit lonely but I've come to realize is a unique and helpful vantage point. Well placed to help build the bridges.

Feminist Arts Conference, Toronto 
Monday, September 28, 2015, 01:18 PM - Adult and Popular Education
Had a lot of fun facilitating at the Feminist Arts Conference in Toronto. Inspiring and provocative discussions, art work, initiatives. Queer dance collective that has revived and subverted burlesque, what they call Unapologetic Burlesque. A print collective that used street signs to campaign and raise awareness around street harassment, the Street Talk Project.

Fran Rawlings and I facilitated a session on Claiming space: navigating gender and power. We adapted the flower power exercise (inter-sectionality) and did some human sculptures and dialogue around power analysis and strategies for change. Some great discussions about how we have agency in some areas and not in others, our negotiability. How we open spaces of power in these small ways as well as the ways that we challenge, hold accountable and organize. The general use of the flower power I find much too binary a treatment of oppression.

I was really moved by the work of Karen Miranda Augustine- Painted Love: Requiems for Salacious Sex Queens. Funeral wreaths for women involved in the sex industry with re-used or discarded tires, hair, nail polish. She led a fascinating discussion on eulogy. Click on the link below to go to her site.
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Is Transformative Learning Online Possible? 
Wednesday, October 15, 2014, 02:40 PM - Adult and Popular Education
With colleagues Catherine Irving and Joan Francuz, presented a paper at the Transformative Learning Conference at Columbia University in NY October 23-25. The paper describes our experience putting a face to face course in community-based microfinance that I taught for several years online.

Can online be transformative? Our experience is that it can be as powerful and altering as strong face to face education in the right conditions and we are only beginning to understand what that means. The key is leveraging what online learning can uniquely offer. We found three things unique to online:

- Participants are embedded in their work allowing for real-time experimentation in their field work and inquiries. Things are messy, complex, power-ridden in our work. We all need time and space to ask the right questions and experiment with peer supports and conceptual analysis.

- Space and time is expanded allowing for emergent issues to arise. We often don't know what we don't know. Online courses have the time to be more emergent- pulling in resources (human and conceptual) as they arise. In the mix of canned vs emergent content, there is much more potential here to be student-centred.

- Private space and deliberation are key. Literature and our experience has found that online provides opportunities to alter power and gender even personality dynamics. One participant in Egypt reported greater comfort in formulating her thoughts online than being drawn upon in a class. People can draft, revise, even return to earlier dialogues. Critical for those for whom english is not a first language. Or certain frameworks or approaches are new. Even introverts benefit. This collapses the power and space dynamics compared to a face to face environment considerably. The extended time and space allow individuals to take what is relevant to their own life and work- synthesize, integrate.


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