School Crisis Recovery and Renewal

As of June 1, 2025, SCRR is no longer funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration or a National Child Traumatic Stress Network Category II site. Learn more

Re-writing Our Narratives: Cultivating Awareness and Collective Care through Critical Literacy
A Critical Friends Group

June – October 2022

Online via Zoom

This event has passed and registration is closed.

A Critical Friends Group

“To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself.

And that’s political, in its most profound way.“

June Jordan

Our lived experiences are complex and multifaceted, influencing the ways in which we care for ourselves and others. Trauma and crisis are really good at creating chaos, disrupting and distorting our self-perception, and altering our worldviews in ways that impede our well-being. In light of tremendous loss and unprecedented change, we recognize the vital need to catch our breath, make meaning and better understand our way forward. One powerful path towards healing is self awareness; inquiring into our own stories to create coherent narratives of ourselves and our experiences.  To sift through the debris of it all and create a bridge or barge between the personal to professional.

Join this six-part auto-ethnographic research experience, designed to guide educators through the process of exploring personal and collective barriers to mental health and wellness for our trauma and crisis repair work.  

Using the structure of Critical Friends Groups (CFG), we will draw upon our lived experiences and explore scholarly texts to identify protective factors and barriers to our wellness as well as develop a trauma-informed praxis to implement within our personal and professional lives. 

In building a safe and radical container of our CFG, we will:

  • Create a space for self and community reflection and inquiry, interrupting isolation and disconnection and fostering co-regulation. 
  • Investigate root causes and the impacts of barriers to our wellness.
  • Co-construct a toolbox of practices for our self and collective wellness through and beyond crisis.
  • Develop a fellowship of peers, skills and practices to implement CFGs at your workplace (school, agency, CBO, etc).

Session Overview

CFG Orientation and Launch

Critical Friends Group Sessions

Each session starts at 1:00 pm PT / 4:00 pm PT and wrap up at 2:15 pm ET / 5:15 pm ET

  • September 7, 2022
  • September 21, 2022
  • October 5, 2022
  • October 19, 2022
  • November 2, 2022

Each session will elevate tenants from core text (sessions are titled accordingly). Texts will be provided to CFG members

Session Information

Each session will start at 1:00 pm PT / 4:00 pm PT and wrap up at 2:15 pm ET / 5:15 pm ET

Orientation and Launch: Opening and Orienting – Creating Light in the Dark

June 28, 2022

  • Claim the importance of wellness in our lives
  • Collectively generate our barriers to health and wellness as educators
  • Process specific themes to make sense of our educator lived realities
  • Core text: Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro (Gloria Anzaldúa, 2015)

Session 1: We Were Made for These Times 

September 7, 2022

  • Constructing coherent narratives of self: making sense of our lived experiences, articulating what we do and don’t deserve, and providing a space to interrogate internalized stories of ourselves
  • Core Text: We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons on Moving through Change, Loss, and Disruption (Kaira Jewel Lingo, 2021)

Sessions 2 and 3: Pause, Rest, and Be 

Session 2: September 21, 2022 and Session 3: October 5, 2022

Session 4: Emergent Strategies for Our Collective Care

October 19, 2022

  • Craft new narratives that support us in developing a healthier sense of self, creating healthy boundaries, and building meaningful connections to people, places, and ideas that support us in completing the stress cycle 
  • Build our own wellness toolboxes through a variety of evidence based and community valued mental health offerings that strengthen our skill and capacity for self and co-regulation
  • Core Text: Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (adrianne maree brown, 2017)

Session 5: Closing and Integration

November 2, 2022

  • Share outs, celebration, and action planning (how do you want this to live and land?)
  • Protocol packet to implement this experience in your own site
  • Core Text: A New Spelling of My Name (Audre Lourde, 1982)

Who is invited?

Anyone who tends to the well-being of young people in school settings (school leaders, educators, community service providers, guidance counselors in higher education, social workers, etc.).

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Will sessions be recorded? Recordings will be available to participants only.
  • Where sessions have closed captions? Zoom generates automated captions and a transcript that participants can enable during the training.
  • Can I receive a certificate of completion? Participants will receive a certificate of completion within 2-3 weeks after the last session on October 26.

Questions about this CFG?

Contact Oriana Ides at oides [at] cars-rp.org

REGISTER

Faculty

Oriana Ides (she/hers), MA, LPCCI, PPS,  is an SCRR Field Coach who approaches healing the wounds of trauma and oppression as core elements of social justice.  She has worked with young people across life courses from elementary school to college, and has served as teacher-leader, school counselor, classroom educator and program director.  She is committed to generating equity within school structures and policies by focusing on evidence-based mental health techniques and institutional design. Her work to forge a more just world is motivated by and dedicated to Amilca Ysabel Mouton Fuentes.

Noor Jones-Bey

Noor Jones-Bey (she/hers), MA, 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 PHD in Urban Education at the Steinhardt School and holds fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Urban Doctoral Research Initiative at NYU. Noor 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, Noor has served as an equity consultant and serves as a founding member of the Radical Listening Project to assist educational professionals. Noor 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.  Noor’s interests engage across disciplines of sociology, education, Black and Native studies, and visual culture to examine issues of liminality, identity, space and power as they relate to education. Her dissertation work examines intergenerational knowing of Black womxn and girls navigating in and out of schools. In her spare time, she loves to cook, dance, run marathons, travel, and stir up good vibes.