Weaving Community as Education Transformation

Reflections on Ed Jam 2023

Rainy season afternoon vibes

Dear community,

I write to you with a rainy season Sunday afternoon pattering on the tin roof. It is a long weekend here in Costa Rica, as we get Monday off for Mother’s Day (celebrated here August 15th).

This week I had the deep pleasure and joy of participating in the Education Transformation Jam 2023, an online offering from YES! World. The four elements guided the themes of our days. We met for 2 hours a day from Monday through Saturday (with an exhale/rest/spontaneous open day on Thursday), with other optional times and open bazaar offerings (more below) sprinkled throughout. We are a diverse, intergenerational, international group of around 25 folks engaged in education in many different ways, but what brought us together was education transformation being at the heart of our work, life, and passion, desire, yearning, hopes, dreams.

Our beautiful Ed Jam 2023 jamily (missing some faces in the screenshot though!)

I want to share some nuggets and gems I am carrying forward from the jam (they use this language rather than taking away, and one of the things I loved about the jam was the intentional and creative use of language, including jam itself).

Jammin’
I kept telling people I was at a conference all week, but it wasn’t a conference, it was a jam. Jam is used in the spirit of a musical jam, how we all bring our different notes and gifts and instruments and riff off of each other. You don’t know what you are going to play til you start playing. It is a very co-created event with a spirit of emergence and allowing space for what is present in the group.

The space is held by a team of organizers called facilitants who tend and care for the space and offer structure. The container felt solid yet permeous, stable yet not rigid. The team took turns playing different roles and their co-facilitation was seamless.

Weaving community and collective care
The heart of the jam was building community and engaging in collective care. One of my favorite aspects of the week - and one I was surprised by - was something called Secret Sunshine. It’s kind of like Secret Santa (if you have played that before). We were each assigned a person to whom we could offer some sunshine, secretly, throughout the week - for example, a poem, a picture, a song, a meme, a recipe etc. On a spreadsheet (another jam gem: make logistics sexy :), we each put what we could offer and what we would like to receive. Then we could ask other folks to help us send some sunshine on our behalf.

This simple yet profound exercise was deeply revealing to me. My initial internal response to this activity was lukewarm. But on the first morning I showed up, someone tapped me in a private chat message to help them with their sunshine and I was excited. I got to send someone (who I didn’t really know yet!) nature pictures from Costa Rica and I was so happy about this. I enjoyed being tapped by others to help facilitate their secret sunshine deliveries, like we were up to something sneaky, mischief for good. I delighted in thinking about what my sunshine might enjoy, based on her spreadsheet requests and also things I found out about her as I got to know her throughout the week. Asking for help intially felt vulnerable (even though we were all needing to do it), but over time was easy and fun.

It took the whole community to make this work. It took asking for help. It took receiving with grace and appreciation and not knowing. It took thoughtfulness and care.

I am struck by my initial hesitance or resistance to wanting to ask for help and support, which I see as deeply internalized capitalism and individualism, how we are indoctrinated from a young age in the US that being “independent” and not asking for help are the pinnacle of existance and what it means to be an adult (spoiler alert: we are not independent!). On an intellectual and philosophical level I don’t believe these myths, and yet… asking for help still felt like a stretch. But I realized that when people asked me to help, I was delighted and elated. I enjoyed helping. Furthermore, by articulating what we had to offer and what we needed, it was quite easy to match these up and support each other. From this seemingly simple Secret Sunshine activity, I (re)learned and was reminded that:

Asking for help is courageous and takes vulnerability.

Asking for help is disrupting internalized capitalism and (false) individualism.

Most people want to help in any way they can and are delighted to be asked.

It can actually be a gift to ask others for support, giving them the chance to offer their gifts.

We did a similar activity at the very end of the jam on the last day, where we were able to make a request of the kind of support we would like moving forward. I put “childcare lol - come visit us in Costa Rica?” and the responses I got were delightful and supportive. It made me realize that I can ask for more help, that people would love to come visit and play with Daphne while I cook dinner or go for a walk (which is really all I am looking for - and side note, that offer applies to you too, dear reader! :). Sometimes the help and support I need can feel overwhelming, to even figure out how to receive it, but it made me realize it may just be about stating it out loud and solutions might follow.

In that spirit, I will name that this Venus retrograde in Leo season (which is my 12th house of unseen realms), I have realized my deep, core need of having alone time, which is very hard to get met as a parent. And part of why I really need alone time is to write. So this year I will be strategizing about how I can figure more of that into my life, such as applying for a writing residency and trying to fit in a retreat as soon as I can. I am calling that in on this Venus cazimi day!

Simple gestures of welcoming and inclusion
The jam was also a really intentionally welcoming and inclusive space, and this was expressed and embodied by the warm welcoming of the faciltiation team each time we gathered. They made sure to welcome anyone who came late, and note if anyone was missing, and just making sure we were more or less on the same page as we moved forward together. Every aspect of the jam’s culture was about fostering community and belonging.

Something else I loved that they did was provide daily summaries between sessions, a brief recap of the day and what we did together. This was so helpful for reflection and keeping us moving along the same page, and is something that I realized I would love to integrate more of in my own teaching.

The gestures of welcoming and inclusion were so simple yet so profound. Greeting people, learning their names, learning their likes and dislikes, needs and desires, is weaving community. When you are working together as a group, getting everyone on more or less the same page (or at least same book) is important.

I always put weaving community at the heart of my teaching and facilitation. In any class I teach, I set that as our day 1 foundation, a foundation that we grow and build together throughout our time. I also always tell students that it’s often the hardest work we do, and it’s the most important work. What I felt deeply this week was weaving community is education transformation. Collective care is the education transformation we so deeply need (at all levels).

To be in community
To be vulnerable together
To listen and share one another’s dreams, aspirations, hopes, hardships, life paths
To see each other
To laugh and dance together
To offer care and support to one another

And when we do that, anything is possible.

Dreamwork
Another thrilling part of this week was that my dear friend and co-author Minna (who was on the facilitation team) and I held an open bazaar dreamwork session and it was beautiful and mindblowing. We had been talking about offering something on Zoom for a while, and this finally got us to do it and it was deeply profound. We are going to start offering regular (bi-monthly for now) community dreamwork sessions, and if you would like to be a part of this, please reach out :) I will perhaps write another whole post later about the magic we conjured during our dream session.

A little drawing that emerged after our Divination for Liberation session

Trust
Weaving community and collective care also have me thinking-feeling a lot about trust. Trust came up a lot this week - especially (re)learning to trust ourselves, our hearts, our guts, our intuition. It was also a key theme of my dissertation research on (re)orienting education toward serving life, especially learning to trust each other amidst cultures and systems of domination, violence, and hierarchies. Weaving community inherently means (re)building trust.

Most modern formal schooling actively teaches us to distrust ourselves: to seek knowledge and answers outside of ourselves, to discount knowledge that comes from anywhere besides a textbook, to ignore the signals of our bodies’ needs. Imagine the transformation in education that could occur if we centered learning to trust ourselves, our instincts and intuition, and building trust with each other. Education transformation is an invitation to unlearn this distrust and (re)learn to trust ourselves and each other.

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As they say, “the jam is always on,” and I am so grateful to end this week dwelling in gratitude and appreciation for this new community that I am a part of, and grateful for the communties I am already a part of that also engage in this community weaving and care, such as Plum Village, Ecoversities and Re-Imagining Education Conference, and UPEACE. I am grateful to you, dear community of readers - as we say in the Plum Village community, “I know you are there and I am very happy.”

Editing to add: Secret Sunshine logistics!

By request (I take requests! :), here are the logistics for how to facilitate the Secret Sunshine activity (note that these logistics are based on my experience as a participant and not facilitant). This activity is not found in the Jam Facilitation Manual, but I do highly recommend checking it out (two activities in the manual that I use frequently are the Systems Game and Common Ground).

Secret Sunshine (like Secret Santa, if you are familiar with that) is an activity where participants are paired up and the “secret sunshine” secretly offers small “sunshine” moments to their receiver. These can be things like pictures, poems, songs, artwork, memes, videos, stories.

The purposes of Secret Sunshine are:
-to build community and relationships
-to bring joy and play into the community
-to practice pleasure activism (adrienne maree brown)
-to practice the art of giving, receiving, and asking for help and support (which is essential to building community, and is an active practice of dismantling internalized capitalism and hyperindividualism!)

1. The facilitator will need a list to match people up. This spreadsheet should be private. You can do this randomly (copy the class roster, divide in two and insert second half in another column in a random way).

2. The facilitator introduces the activity to the class using the purposes above or their own as applies to the group, and lets the group know they will receive a secret sunshine matchup later that day.

3. In a shared spreadsheet that everyone can access, have three columns: NAME, WHAT YOU CAN OFFER, and WHAT YOU WOULD LOVE TO RECEIVE. Each person should fill this out that day. This serves as a place that their sunshine can get ideas for what to send them, and also where in the community they can ask for help in sending sunshine. Here is an example of what this looked like:

   

   For example: the person I was secret sunshine for wanted to receive recipes, but I don’t use recipes much when I cook, so I enlisted someone else who listed recipes as something they could offer to send my person a recipe.

4. The facilitator sends out individual emails letting people know who their receiver is. Sample text: Dear X, you are the secret sunshine of….Y!” The facilitator should also offer to be support to folks if they need help with ideas, etc.

5. The community then engages in secret sunshine practice, where the secret sunshine looks at what their receiver would like to receive and enlists others to help them send it along! For a week-long jam, we had a goal of sending about one sunshine per day. If you are doing this over the course of a semseter, that might not be sustainable, so you might want to check with the group as to what makes sense (for a 12 week class, maybe twice a week might make more sense). You don’t want this to feel like a burden - it should be fun. Since the secret sunshine is trying to stay secret, they need to ask other community members to help. This can be hard at first but gets easier over time! And it doesn’t take much time once you get the hang of it.

6. Check in with the group to see how it’s going periodically. It is also a good idea early on to make sure everyone has received something (and if not, you as facilitator can follow up with their sunshines to see if they need help). You want to make sure no one is inadvertently being left out.

7. On the last day, set aside time for the secret sunshine reveal. The way we did this was let each person have one guess as to who their secret sunshine was. Then the sunshine revealed themselves. It was fun and celebratory!

Let me know if you have any questions, and if you try it out, please let me know how it goes!