Seeding and sprouting dreams

And a reminder about this week's equinox-anniversary celebration-ritual

Dear friends,

This week I get to see the seed of a dream come to life, and the equinox gives us ripe energies to seed more dreams in. It is a week for sprouting and planting.

Amidst the chaos and destruction of this moment, we must keep planting seeds for better worlds. We must continue to find joy and celebration, and carve out spaces for them.

Join me on Saturday, March 22 to celebrate the equinox and Enchantable’s second birthday. Register here!

On Friday a friend texted me that their university had been placed under investigation by the US Department of Education for anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination. It is a university where I used to teach peace studies. The DoE is now notably run by the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment- you can’t make this stuff up, friends, and I feel like we need to name these absurdities every time we talk about them lest they become normal. The letters warned of potential “enforcement actions.” Many of the sixty universities that received these notices had large student protests against the war and genocide in Gaza and students were calling on their universities to divest (it’s also worth noting that I had to dig to find any information about this because it was buried under the many other headlines about things that were being dismantled, destroyed, etc.). While any actual acts of anti-Semitism should be investigated, the administration seems to be conflating protest with attacks, and anti-war with anti-Semitism, both of which are dangerous conflations to make, which should alarm us all.

Meanwhile, I am preparing for a class on Monday - Contemporary Topics in Peace Education - that I have dreamed up with two cohorts of students, that after over a year of planning is coming into being, a living organism of a course that puts modernity and the metacrisis at the heart of our learning. Meanwhile, I get to speak freely and teach exactly what I want and what feels most pressing in this moment. My students and I have the privilege to explore what is on our minds and hearts in a highly co-creative, collaborative, emergent way.

This juxtaposition - knowing professors in my position teaching the things I teach about are under threat in my home country and other places, while experiencing such profound freedom and creativity in my own work to create meaningful learning containers - has me contemplating: How can I best use my place of power in this moment? How can I support educators in the US who are under threat for even speaking these words, let alone teaching about them? What does it mean to have relative freedom at this moment, and how can I do the most from the position I am in?

One thing I know I can do is teach the course that we designed (you can find the syllabus here) - one that names the metacrisis of modernity we are living through, the possibility for us to choose life (Joanna Macy, the Great Turning), and to name education’s role both in the crisis and the possibilities for otherwise. One thing I know I can do is to use the space I have as best I can to propagate this work for a more peaceful, loving, kind, caring, just world. I can sit with a profound awareness of the preciousness of getting to be in a space where I can teach with and from my values, and be in an exploration with students around how education can help us through the metacrisis (the only way out is through).

Friends in the US, I invite you to let me know how I can best support you from this position where I am still able to teach radically and lovingly, from a relatively safe space in Costa Rica. Please let me know I am with you and I am here in whatever way I can to provide solidarity and support.

The seed that is sprouting this week is my class on Contemporary Topics in Peace Education, the seed of a dream. The story of the how this class came to be is one I will perhaps write about in greater detail at another point, perhaps for a journal article, but I do want to share briefly about the process. During my second year of teaching at UPEACE (2023-24 academic year), I did some curricular visioning and re-imagining with my peace ed students, to think about what felt missing from the curriculum and what changes they’d like to see. We came up with three new courses out of this collective dreaming and visioning:

• Identity, Community, and Peacebuilding - a course to serve as a foundation for the whole department, that highlights the importance for peacebuilders to understand their own identity, positionality, and place of anunciation vis-a-vis the communities they are a part of, and the essential role of community-building in peace work.

• Facilitation and Training for Peacebuilders - also department-wide, this was answering the request from the peace ed students about having more training on pedagogies, and broadened to include the whole department to situate facilitation as an essential skill for peacebuilders and leaders.

• Contemporary Topics in Peace Education - intentionally broad, this course seeks to fill the gap of there being fewer peace education-specific courses in the curriculum than there were when I was a student 15 years ago, and to be more flexible and adaptable so as to be able to respond to students’ desires and needs for what they want to study. In our intro to peace ed course, we did an initial brain-and-heart-storming session on the day we talked about learning design to identify topics they wanted to explore. I began to put some of these topics together, as well as some of my own that I feel are important and essential for this moment, and then we met again in February to further plan and put it together. I love syllabus planning, but this was by far the most joyful process I have ever experienced. And on Monday, we begin this iteration of our learning journey!

It took two years to make this happen - one year to dream and propose and push for the changes in the curricular structure, and the second year to plan, and now implement. It is long, slow work, but so worth it, and I think all of us entering the bamboo hut classroom on Monday feel invested in a different way than we have ever felt in a learning experience. We are designing it, co-creating it, and living it together. I will surely send updates along the way! Teaching always feeds my writing.

In the spirit of fostering joy and creativity as resistance to the moment’s destruction, I just want to extend another invitation to the equinox ritual and birthday celebration for Enchantable that I will be hosting next Saturday! You can find details and register here.

I will be celebrating this class coming to life, and the many gifts Enchantable has given me these past two years - among them, you! And we will plant seeds for the futures we dream of together.

Hope to see you there!

With love and care,

Stephanie