In working to reconnect with my culture in recent years, one of the greatest difficulties I’ve come up against is time. Re-syncing myself with ancestral time seems foreign, laborious, and distant–incompatible with the functions of the capitalist, colonial, white Christian supremacist clock.
Read moreBRIDGING: How Do We Begin With Collective Care?
This is not an essay about bridging in relation to my work; but rather an approach to connection in relation to my identity.
This writing is part of my processing of the past several years and a reflection of my own identity, grounded by an intersubjective lens into other people’s perceptions of me. I do not tell many people this story, because I have come to expect that my words will be misunderstood and that I will only be blamed for mistakes I made. Writing it on my terms has required my active participation in the cycle of learning, unlearning, and relearning where I have been and, reframing what I mistook for mistakes in the past as choices I made with the tools I had available to me. This is my way of sharing what bridging is from my perspective as a Chinese-Jewish Queer Disabled woman living, and not truly fitting in, in the Western world.
Read moreBRIDGING: Systems Change to Improve Pedagogy, Policy, and Practice
In our campaign for 2022: Building Creative Features, we have decided to focus quarterly themes on the four inquiry-based processes emerging from our research on leadership in arts and cultural education. This campaign is forward-looking and plural in nature: we are not hoping to creatively build one singular future that will have the most benefit for us as individuals, but rather we are all employing our creativity in order to build a plurality of futures which provide a multitude of pathways for us all.
This quarter’s theme is “bridging”, and the topic where I would like to frame our discussion. (Be sure to check out the series on “unlearning” and “navigating”…and stay tuned for “holding tensions” next! Check out all posts in the 2022 Campaign here.)
Read moreTowards an Enriched Understanding of Arts Integration
When arts integration (especially through this expanded view) is implemented by educators, artists, and institutions, extensive evidence shows - particularly in the scholarly fields of social justice youth development that youth have a deeper understanding of self, their community, and the world within which they live.
Read moreEmploying Our Adaptive Impact Plan
An adaptive impact plan is created through a deliberate planning process that addresses the reciprocity between mission and programming through the eyes of the stakeholders at every level. It combines tactical flexibility with practical mission application, and is driven by choice. The planning process is centered on the organization’s constituents and it begins with and returns to the organization’s mission, vision, and values.
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