Accreditation affirmations
Plus, making December magic begins!
Dear beloved Enchantable readers,
It’s December. Can you believe it?
Costa Rica celebrates Army Abolition Day on December 1. Did you know that Costa Rica does not have a military? It is possible to abolish war, and this day serves as a reminder to keep our sights on a world where war is obsolete.
I am not ready to reflect on this year yet - I have a week of teaching left, and then I feel like I am likely going to need to compost myself in the canyon before I can make sense of the past 12 months, which have felt simultaneously so challenging and so rich. They’ve been so much, as I am guessing they have been for you.
}This cartoon always makes me laugh - although substitute “school year” for “semester”…
…and I started the academic year with dengue fever, so I very much started feeling like the owl on the right. I keep thinking of this “how it started/how it’s going” meme as I think of this year. I think of telling time through Daphne’s growth, and how big she has gotten in the past 12 months.
If you are ready to begin your own year-end reflections and make meaning of 2024, I invite you to check out my Making December Magic series, which some of you may have taken part in last year:
Making December Magic Series
Welcome to the Making December Magic series, an end-of-year reflection process for reviewing the past year and calling in the new year. I have been making December magic since I was a teenager, and while the process has changed shape over time, it has very much shaped who I am, and is living testament to the idea that what
I will share about my own process for 2024/25 as the month goes on!
And save the date! I will have a Making December Magic live call for Enchantable subscribers on December 18th from 6-7:30pm Costa Rica time (currently aligned with US Central). I will send the Zoom info as we get closer! I have been wanting to gather folks to honor this time of year for a long time, and this year feels like the right time to do it. The call will be a chance to gather, honor, celebrate, meditate, share, and go through some of the exercises of the Making December Magic series leading up to to the Solstice. Mark your calendar and stay tuned for details!
Over the past couple of weeks, our peace education master’s program at UPEACE has been undergoing the accreditation process with the national accrediting agency here in Costa Rica, SINAES. It has never been accredited before, and the way SINAES does accreditation, it is by program (rather than by institution). The other programs in my department went through the process last year and successfully received accreditation. It is peace ed’s turn.
I was nervous. The peace education program - which is celebrating its 20th year - has a track record and long history. It is academically rigorous and produces graduates who are doing impactful work all over the world. And yet, peace education offers a critique of dominant education systems and doesn’t fit neatly within their boxes. I was afraid that our holistic approach might be seen as lacking rigor by outside evaluators, as can sometimes be the case.
I spoke to some colleagues - folks who had been through the process in their own institutions, and someone who works for an accreditating agency - and their advice was so helpful:
Think of it as a harvest, a chance to deeply reflect on what you are doing and why. Go into it knowing what you know, stand in your expertise, and share that. Stay calm.
The morning of the process, I woke up and wrote these accreditation affirmations:
With a deep bow to Mercury Retrograde….
I value and honor this time for program review and harvest.
I stand in the power that my students and colleagues value who I am, what I do, and what I offer.
I stand in the rigor of over 15 years dedicated to this work of studying and practicing peace education.
I stand in my dedication to this work and wanting to see it expand and flourish in the world.
I stand in knowing this process could serve to bring more abundance to the program:
I stand in the confidence of my work and expertise, knowing it is valued and valid.
I am confident in myself and my work.
I am proud of and love my program.
I call in abundance for myself and my program and my community.
I am powerful. I stand in the power of my love.
I also spoke to Mercury, which I share as an example of how I work with the astrology of the moment. When we were scheduling the process, if I had noticed it was the day Mercury went retrograde, I might have suggested we look for different dates (I say half-jokingly), as Mercury retrogrades are known for communication hijinks, lost messages, lost internet connections, etc. However, the energetic signature of a Mercury retrograde is to review and reflect - precisely the intention of an accreditation process. I tried to dwell in knowing that the intention of the process was aligned with the energy of a retrograde. I made a call to Mercury:
Dear Mercury,
I ask for your guidance, support, and collaboration in this review process and my syllabus creation. I ask for your support to make this review and reflection process as fruitful and generative as possible.
The process, while intense, feels like it could not have gone better. It was affirming, and validating. While we won’t know the official results until sometime in 2025, the reviewers told us they loved the program. They encouraged me to write more. Their biggest feedback seemed to be to do a better job of letting people know about the program, and about peace education in general.
I share this in the hopes that it might help you if you have to do something hard. Write yourself affirmations. Call on your support networks, seen and unseen, known and unknown to send good energy and offer advice and wisdom. Call on support wider than you can see.
One of the guiding pieces of wisdom I have been drawing from this year comes from Vanessa Andreotti:
“You need to trust the invisible to make the impossible possible if you are working in an entangled way.”
As we near the end of the calendar year, may this trust guide us into 2025.
Where do you find support when you need to do hard things?
The energy of Mercury retrograde, which we will be in through mid-December, is also very supportive of the review and reflect themes of Making December Magic. Thank you, Mercury, for making magic with us!
Love you! More soon!
Steph
