Teaching As Selfing: Empowering Our Students by Becoming Who We Are
For ALL EDUCATORS including teachers, staff members, and administrators
In Teaching to Transgress, scholar and activist bell hooks (1994) wrote that teachers “must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students,” but that in her experience, “the objectification of the teacher within bourgeois educational structures seemed to denigrate notions of wholeness.” For many teachers, hooks says, there is “fear that the conditions of that self would interfere with the teaching process.”
Do you want to be an educator who fears that embodying your self will somehow interfere with your teaching, or do you want to celebrate the ways your self informs and expands your teaching—and the ways your teaching informs and expands your self?
In this highly experiential workshop, you’ll learn to bring your full and authentic self to your teaching practice, and to self-actualize through the process of teaching. Although one goal is to empower students, this workshop is not so much “PD” as a series of reflective exercises that will empower you. Drawn from evidence-based psychological science, these exercises will include writing, drawing, putting sticky notes on windows, serious discussions of our identities and values, and developing a stronger sense of who we are.
Session 1: Locating Our Identities in Our Teaching. Build your awareness of your multiple sociocultural identities and how they show up in your teaching practice. (90 minutes)
Session 2: Bringing Our Values to Our Teaching. Explore what values are and how you can bring your values to your everyday work as an educator. (90 minutes)
Session 3: Becoming Ourselves through Our Teaching. Discover how the significant moments in your teaching life have shaped you not only as an educator, but also as a person. (90 minutes)