The SCRR 2023 Winter Institute for Educators
A Call Inward: An offering of space and grace for collective renewal

A no cost virtual event

One of our project’s central tenets is to listen and learn from educators: What is most needed at this moment? What is most needed to recover from a school crisis? How might we create spaces for educators to experience their own processing so that they feel more resourced and supported?

Start the new year with a collective breath, together.

Join us in community on Thursday, January 12th, for an opportunity to slow down, remember, and forge meaningful pathways towards renewal.  During SCRR’s half-day institute, we hold space that allows us to catch our breath and dive inward for healing and exploration using processes that uplift storytelling and coherent narrative construction and visual arts.

This year, our institute focuses on growing our attunement skills and understanding what activates us so that we can reimagine activation as an opportunity for our growth and healing.

Holding the wisdom that our ability to authentically connect with ourselves is the transformative work that allows us to return to purpose and do the work, our time together will fortify us as we embark on the new semester. This winter, we focus specifically on building deeper self-awareness and attuning to our emotional landscape so that we might welcome the new year and semester more deeply reengaged in providing for and protecting our personal and collective needs.

2023 SCRR Winter Institute Goals

• Create a safe, generative, and regulating experience for educators, school-based mental health providers, and people who tend to the emotional well-being of youth.
• Provide an opportunity for attunement, wholeness and healing for educators and other school professionals through connection, storytelling and art after a big thing (crisis event).
• Engage participants in community values and evidence based, art centered, ritual activities that positively impact the process of recovery and renewal after a crisis.
• Support participants in imagining new ways to incorporate ritual and art into their personal practice in crisis recovery.

Intended Audience

Anyone who tends to the wellness of young people within a school setting (school leaders, educators, community service providers, guidance counselors in higher education, social workers, etc.).

Our time together will consist of:

9:00 am – 9:55 am PT / 12:00 pm – 12:55 pm ET
Welcoming and Arriving

• Introduction to SCRR & orientation to the day
• Framing the day with Oriana Ides: Attuning and attending to activation as a pathway towards healing
  
  
  Oriana opens our day by introducing us to the framework that steers our day’s learning: What is “attunement”? What does it mean to be “activated”? How might understanding both of these concepts aid us as educators in our individual and collective recovery and renewal?
  
  
• Keynote Address with Amber McZeal: Afro-Indigenous Concepts of Renewal
  Attuning and Attending Practice: Naming, Norming and Nurturing through an Embodied Practice
  
  
  Over the past three years, our global human family has confronted multiple pandemics–from COVID to racial reckoning, from environmental upheaval to education frontline battles. Our compassion has been stretched to incredible limits and surprisingly, many have found a wealth of resourcing within the self, community and the more-than-human natural world.
  
  This session is an homage and celebration of all of these phenomena and an invitation to re-member the wealth and resiliency within that continually sparks the flame that brings educators back to one of the most crucial sites in our society–our schools.
  
  In this session, we’ll explore the micro, meso, and macro layers of school ecosystems through an Afro-Indigenous epistemology, along with the principle of renewal deeply embedded in this ancient worldview. We will close with somatic engagement practices to center the principle of embodiment for the day’s event, honoring the body as a site of knowing and being.

10:00 am – 11:00 am PT / 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm ET
Workshop One: Workshop One with Michelle “Mush” Lee

• We Are The Whole Story: Collective Healing and Storytelling Beyond Trauma
  Attuning and Attending Practice: Storytelling and Coherent Narrative Construction
  
  
  Narratives are created by a constellation of stories. As stewards of collective health in, and for our school communities it’s important to notice the stories that run us, as well as identify strategic stories of healing: air, and collective radiance during these improbable times.  What are our automatic stories? How are they influencing our movement through school spaces? What stories need to be put to rest and what stories do we know in our bones need to be told?
  
  This workshop introduces school crisis leaders and educators to the culturally affirmed and valued practice of introspective storytelling. In this space, we honor that each of us arrives at this moment with complex histories, cultures, and identities. And although we are not representatives for all who share those identities, there are lines of memory and experience that bind us and to which our healing is bound.
  
  We explore these connections, and ask: What strength is there in connecting our stories? What do I need to move beyond trauma? How do we use culture and storytelling to name our suffering, while also inspiring narratives of joy, hope and healing?
  
  Leaders and educators will explore their own stories during this time, and identify ways they can hold and make space for the communities they work with to engage in introspective storytelling of their own.
  
  

11:05 am – 12:05 pm PT / 2:05 pm – 3:05 pm ET
Workshop Two: Workshop Two with Noor Jones-Bey & Emeka Ekwelum

• In Dialogue with the Heart: Art Making for Self and Community Care
  Attuning and Attending Practice: Arts- based Therapeutics
  
  
  Dear educators: what is the status of our hearts right now? How do our hearts remind us about the truth of who we are? What can our hearts help us to (re)member about ourselves and our communities? The heart is a sanctuary, a fertile space for which to ground and deepen our connection to our whole selves. The heart is also a drum, offering us a rhythm to activate our deepest desires and operate from a place of power.
  
  Understanding that connection to self is critical to our healing and renewal, this workshop makes intentional space for us to slow down, listen deeply and sort through our emotional landscape so that we may better understand what exists within us presently and where we must go in the new semester.
  
  In this interactive session, participants will have the option to create an embodied landscape collage digitally or on paper. Through guided processes, we will listen to what our hearts need to feel safe and whole as educators, friends, family members and those embedded within systems of care. We will gently explore the terrain of our bodies, hearts and minds as a form of self and community care.
  
  In preparation, we invite you to bring art supplies such as paper, colorful markers, scissors, adhesive, uplifting images, pictures of loved ones, and/or mementos that empower you (these items can be gathered digitally or tangible depending on the mediums with which you choose to work).
  
  Leaders and educators will also be able to identify methods by which they can support their communities in art based therapeutics toward recovery and renewal.
  
  

12:10 pm – 12:30 pm PT / 3:10 pm – 3:30 pm ET
Integration, share out and closing

• We close our day together sharing our learnings, takeaways, and intentions for our renewal.

Materials

• SCRR 2023 Winter Institute Slide Deck
• SCRR 2023 Winter Institute Recording
• SCRR 2023 Winter Institute Quotes from the Chat Box
• Suggested Article from Dr. McZeal: “Why Groups for People of Color And Racial Justice Allies in CLE?” by Helene Lorenz & Susan James
• Suggested Book from Dr. McZeal: “Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples” by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
• “We Are The Whole Story: Collective Healing and Storytelling Beyond Trauma” Slide Deck
• Instructions for “In Dialogue with the Heart: Art Making in Self and Community Care”

Facilitator/Presenter(s)

Amber McZeal, M. A. in Somatic depth psychology and Ph. D. in Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Ecological depth psychology; Founder, Decolonizing the Psyche

Writer, vocalist, sacred scholar, and artivist, Amber utilizes sound therapy and guided somatic imagery to engage the knowledge of the body within an interactive and liberatory arts practice. In 2018, Amber launched her organization, Decolonizing the Psyche, where she weaves somatic praxis with Afro-Indigenous spiritual technologies and social justice—deep decoloniality—in efforts to end oppression and create more humane social relationships.

Her approach centers imagination as foundational to movements to end oppression and create more humane social relationships. Her research explores the decolonial turn in maternal healthcare for Black women.

Michelle Mush Lee, M.A. Education, Equity, and Social Justice; Executive Director, Youth Speaks

Mush is a poet, narrative strategist, and pioneer of spoken word pedagogy. A Harvard University Project Zero Fellow, Mush is frequently a featured speaker on the intersection of emergent cultures, racial justice, and solidarity movements, and women of color in leadership. Her talks and writings have been featured on Vogue, HBO, PBS, AfroPop, Summit Series, Social Venture Network, National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE), and the Berkeley Communications Conference.

In 2019, Mush was invited to serve the City of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Division as a Cultural Strategist-in-Government (CSIG), where she worked in City departments to infuse policymaking and practices with radically creative and culturally-competent thinking and problem-solving to promote civic belonging. Mush is the Vice-Chair of the City of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Commission and a member of the City’s Funding Advisory Committee. In her spare time, Mush enjoys running, organizing her bookshelf, and laughing at mom jokes with her son.

Noor Jones-Bey, Doctoral Candidate, NYU; Program Director, EXCEL Academy, Educational Consultant

Noor Jones-Bey is a transdisciplinary educator, researcher and artist from the Bay Area, CA. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Urban Education at the Steinhardt School and holds fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Urban Doctoral Research Initiative at New York University. Jones-Bey is program director of EXCEL at NYU, a critical literacy and college access program for youth in the South Bronx housed at the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools.

As a scholar deeply interested in the movement between theory and practice, Jones-Bey has served as an educational equity consultant for public schools and serves as a founding member of the Radical Listening Project. She received an M.A. in Sociology of Education from New York University and a B.A. in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Jones-Bey’s scholarly work engages sociology, gender and sexuality studies, Black and Native studies, cultural studies and visual culture to examine issues of liminality, identity, space, and power as they relate to education. Her dissertation examines intergenerational knowledge of Black women and girls navigating in and out of schools.

Nnaemeka Ekwelum, Ed.M and Doctoral Candidate, Northwestern University, Educational Consultant

Nnaemeka (Emeka) Ekwelum is a transnational, multidisciplinary researcher, educator, artist, and curator from Boston, MA. He currently lives in Chicago, IL, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Black Studies (African American Studies) at Northwestern University. Emeka’s scholarly and creative interests converge at the intersection of history, critical theory, creative expression, comparative ethnography, and curatorial practice. His current research project examines the role of wonderment in contemporary and craft art collaborations between and amongst Black creatives. Prior to beginning his doctorate at Northwestern, Emeka held a professional career as an educator in his home state of Massachusetts, formally and informally working with youth and adult learners across a range of cultural contexts in the Boston/Greater Boston Area. His teaching philosophy reflects his training in Comparative Ethnic Studies (Columbia University, B.A.) and Arts in Education (Harvard University, Ed.M.), drawing on theories of Black feminist and political thought to interrogate ideas of power, privilege, and personhood through art and artmaking.

Oriana Ides, M.A. Clinical Psychology, APCC, PPS, SCRR Field Coach
Oriana Ides approaches healing the wounds of trauma and oppression as core elements of social justice and liberation. She has worked with young people across life’s course from elementary school to college, and has served as administrator, school-based therapist, classroom educator and program director. She is deeply committed to generating equity within school structures and policies by focusing on community valued mental health techniques and institutional design.

FAQs

• This is less of a space to learn how to do for others (training) and more of a space that centers how to be for yourselves (centering).
• Can I come to some of the Institute if I can’t make the whole time? Yes, please come to as much of the program as you can!
• Are CEs offered? 2 Continuing Education credits available for LCSW, MFT, LPCC, LEP & RN.
• Are certificates of completion offered? Yes, upon request.
• Will this space be recorded? Yes.

Resources for Extended Learning

• Recording of the 2nd Annual SCRR Winter Institute in 2021 (Workshop 2 “What Color Is Your Heart Today? An intentional Practice of Checking In” with Francine Ostrem was not recorded to respect confidentiality of the content shared during the event)
• 2nd Annual SCRR Winter Institute slide deck with welcome practice, interlude, and closing practice (PDF)
• How to Use Affirmations by Brittany Together (PDF)
• My Body is a Vessel: Cultivating Joy and Wholeness playlist by Shirley Johnson

In the words of the participants from previous SCRR Winter Institutes:

“A beautiful, loving, and healing day. Thank you!”

“It felt so good to have a chance to recalibrate my body and mind as an educator towards feeling joy and connection again.”

Questions? Email program designer and SCRR field coach Oriana Ides
Oides [at] cars-rp.org