Education for Liberation Learning Marathon Showcase
Education for Liberation A group of 10 women embarked on a peer-led Learning Marathon to reimagine the future of liberated learning; each with their own personal, professional and societal questions. We’re in a moment of multiple human crises: human, climate, education. To deal with the multiple crises of our time, we have to strive for collective liberation. This means: ➔ ➔ ➔
Honing our abilities to sense and respond, rather than to react Healing from the wounds that systems and institutions of control – that have an agenda other than our wellbeing – have pushed on us Being open to radically new ways of seeing things
Freedom is not given, it's something we have to cultivate. We are connected by our curiosity for education as a practice of freedom, our unique perspectives and lived experiences. We came together as a group from a place of love and value for humanity and human development. We are particularly concerned with how education is driven by standards and systems of oppression, and not by the urgent needs we have as humanity. We believe we can be more. But how? And what actions can we take? We don’t have all the answers but we believe that our collective liberation is tied to our personal liberation. We cannot achieve real, collective change without doing the personal work necessary to shift our individual levels of thinking, doing and being. We must become lifelong liberated learners.
We now share our journeys as examples of liberated learning.
Learning Marathon Class of 2021 Anikah How might we support young black and mixed-race people with mental and emotional wellbeing in educational spaces? Imani How can we learn and feel like we belong at the same time? Kati How can the Creative Industries add most value to the liberation of learning?
Mona How can I tell my story authentically and in a way that doesn’t feel confining (and create a space for others to do the same)?
Mayssa What if we radically reimagined education with youth and adults in full partnership? Sophie How can we turn education inside-out?
Kruti How can I empower purpose-driven youth to step into their leadership?
Valerie How can my education serve our liberation?
Lucy How can we undesign broken systems of education?
Zineb How might we enable young people to design the future of education?
Principles of Action Liberation is not a moment – it's a constant state of beginnings; it's independent and collective; it's internal and external. Our Principles of Action summarise our collective approach to liberated learning. They are not linear or static, and to be effective they must be embodied and intentional.
Awareness
Unlearning
The deliberate act of raising our consciousness to identify and explore ourselves (our biases, privileges, traumas) and our times (the systems in which we exist), so that we can see more and value more. It’s about shining light on the shadows, and keeping the light switched on.
The process of identifying and unwiring preconceived ways of thinking, doing and being, and shedding the beliefs that have fixed you in place – the beliefs of “this is the way I am” and “this is the way things are”. It’s about becoming and unbecoming, continuously, and at the same time.
Connecting
Reimagining
The process of seeking out community and shared purpose, and leaning into the growth and the possibility of a group of peers. It’s about allowing the collective energy to push, pull and hold you as you share your vulnerability, broaden your mind and journey together.
The act of expanding your imagination and openly and playfully stepping into the space in between, taking some of what you have and what you know, and leaving parts of you behind. It’s about dreaming, looking back to look forward, and crossing a threshold with the understanding that you will transform and be transformed.
Experimenting
Implementing
The process of allowing yourself to play outside your comfort zone, test out new possibilities, and learn forwards. It’s about developing and aligning yourself with new ways of being and knowing, sitting with discomfort and emergence, and engaging with your body's reaction to change.
The act of being intentional, integrating the shadows, embodying your learning and working purposefully in alignment with your core values. It’s about continuously bridging the gap between what you think, say and do for the growth of yourself and others.
Advice for becoming a lifelong liberated learner Everything and everyone is your teacher. Listen to yourself fully and carefully. Seek the spark! Follow your path of curiosity with openness and purpose. Share what you’ve done and undone. As you grow, bring others with you. Freedom requires a pathway for steps and missteps that inform positive change. Try it!
Let go of judgements about yourself and others. Have the courage to be vulnerable. Reflect, be honest, and then dig deeper. Embrace emergence and change. Dream unapologetically. Be confident and trust in creativity as a process. People. Planet. Purpose. Play together. See interconnection and seek balance.
The end of all knowledge should be in service to humanity.
Anikah Cobblah
Find me on: Instagram
Question I leave with:
How can I continue to surrender my purpose and consistently contribute to supporting the mental health of young black and mixed-race people? My Learning Marathon journey began with a little anticipation, as you do with anything new. Surprisingly, I was embraced with a community of 9 other women who were full of creativity, exploration and a willingness to be vulnerable in their own areas of learning. I grew individually and collectively through knowledge and experimentation. Question I came in with: How might we support young black and mixed-race people with mental and emotional wellbeing in educational spaces?
This was my desired area of exploration as I had observed young members of the black community experience indifference in society, which resulted in a significant impact on their mental health. Eager to understand more, the Explore Phase of the Learning Marathon invited me to recognise that young black and mixed-race people had limited culturally appropriate services that were accessible to them. My drive to contribute and provide support was accelerated in the Develop Phase of the marathon. This phase invited me to create a service that would help young black people explore their own mental and emotional identity. Surprisingly, some
lacked understanding of the contributing factors behind individual behaviour(s) and the reason behind emotional and mental struggles in this group of people. In the divergent phase, I quickly realised these young people needed tools and resources that could assist them in taking ownership of their own mental and emotional wellbeing. The structure of the programme provided a dynamic approach to connect and guide me on my journey. The buddy sessions encouraged peer-to-peer accountability, providing clarity and encouraged insightful personal evaluations. The highlight for me on this journey was our ‘Power Up’ days! I would describe these as the catalyst to our learning; an opportunity to share your
work, connect and receive feedback from other Enrollers and members of the group. This feedback helped me to power up onto the next phase with creative insight and courage! By the end of the learning marathon my reflections led me to rename myself as ‘Courageous Surrender’! You might be thinking, why rename yourself? I realised this journey had led me to reinventing the unseen part of me. It helped me to release fear, be courageous to develop something that was hidden within me for some time, and be confident to bring my ideas into reality. I will remain passionate for young people with black heritage as Black Youth Mental Health Matters in modern society.
“Learn, explore and fearlessly reinvent yourself without limitations.” Anikah Cobblah
Imani Clough Question I leave with:
What does a school look like where belonging is at the centre of school life? Question I came in with: How can I only do the work I love, with people I want to work with? In February 2021 I joined Enrol Yourself as a Host, to facilitate a Learning Marathon for 9 people, to explore the theme of Education for Liberation. Each of us had a Learning Question, and for 6 months I have been exploring the following: How can we learn and feel like we belong, at the same time? I journeyed with this question to bring to light the work that some people are doing to “fit in” to our education system, as well as help us acknowledge ways that we can provide space, tools and resources for more people to feel they have the opportunity to belong.
To put this in some sort of personal context, when I was made redundant whilst completing my Masters degree last year I experienced an intense amount of anxiety. For the first time the direction of my future felt very uncertain. Something I wasn't used to – and it got me thinking about my relationship with education, learning and my identity in and out of academic institutions. I have suffered from ‘imposter syndrome’ for most of my early twenties and reflecting back on the past years, it has definitely affected my sense of belonging, and as a result, my self-esteem and ability to see my own capabilities at times.
The past six months allowed me to see we all have our unique belonging stories that influence the way we move through and experience the world. Engaging in peer-led learning with a group of people all passionate about education as the practice of freedom (word to Bell Hooks), allowed me to look inwards, rethink and reimagine the future of education for myself and those I engage with and support.
I created this deck for myself and I am extending its use in the form of 1-2-1 coaching, to anyone who could use a boost of care, centering, and confidence in meaningfully moving forward. I hope that the Belonging and Becoming Cards are valuable. My Learning Marathon question started out as an exploratory societal question and quickly became quite personal.
I leave with a professionally focused question: What does a school look like where belonging is at the centre of school life? Find me at: imaniacademy.co.uk
Kati Russell I’m applying for the learning marathon, I’m feeling my learning question deeply, it excites me and it scares me. This question is a bubbler, effervescent, the process of exploring it could be the change I’ve been longing for. My second child is eight months old, I’m tired, really tired but I know I’ll soon want to reconnect to this strange pandemic world, purposefully, playfully and as connected to myself as possible. We’ve left London, moved the family, I’m a Cov(entry) girl now living by the coast. I’m seeking to create liberatory experiences of learning so I ask:
How do I go feral and who with? Let’s go, get messy, set me free. Then, at the last minute, I change my question to:
How can the Creative Industries add most value to the liberation of learning?
Find me at: katirussell.co.uk
Press submit. Ha. More like submiss. This safe, more pedestrian question, linked to what I know/knew then sets about sending me in a head, body and soul spin for the first few months of my journey and I’m still spinning. But this confusion has helped me confront and deepen the unlearning process I’d already started a number of years ago. It’s reminded me to keep up the transgression. The spinning has changed (mostly) from that puke-inducing, room tumble to a welcome freefall, rolling and scratching, playfully stomping and sinking deeper into the themes and territories that I know are important to the evolution of me and my contribution to the world. No end point, just constant beginnings. Since the beginning of the marathon I’ve been poking, squeezing and chewing on the process of how we can reintroduce ourselves (thanks Imani for the articulation of reintroducing). If we take away our given names and build temporal, semi-autobiographical characters to represent who we are but also to reflect who we are becoming, can we more confidently explore ourselves and the world? By creating these characters, do we have enough distance from ourselves to experiment more freely and joyfully?
Through collaboration with my buddy Val, I brought back an exercise that I’ve done occasionally over the years to one of our group meetups to explore this process. Building our characters as a group was so energising and insightful. I felt like I knew everyone more deeply than before. This slice of creative adventuring not only facilitated experimentation with our own identities but also opened up what our collective narrative might look and feel like if we pushed beyond our current realities. My journey was always about creativity, not just industry (yet).
I’m leaving exploring my own reintroduction, setting the pace of my own story and still immersed in these evolving themes and learning chapters: Race and Dismantling whiteness – Vibes not tribes (the power of affect) – Undomesticated learners – Immersive Autobiographies – AI IA – The Multicultureverse – Creativity as process My departing questions are:
How do we repair our creative identities and reintroduce ourselves? And with conviction…
How the fuck do I go feral? And who with? Stay up Forever Rest is Resistance Pace is Power* *Thanks: Stay up Forever label (😜 ) Nap Ministry (😴 )
Kruti Shah
Find me on: Instagram or LinkedIn
Image: An exercise depicting my Learning Marathon using a core set of shapes & symbols.
Some of the best things in life are difficult to explain; they must only be felt and be experienced directly. This Learning Marathon has been one of those things for me.
What I didn’t realise was that I was tunnel-visioning myself in this Marathon by setting myself that specific outcome, instead of being free and exploratory of possibilities. This was Education for Liberation after all, and there I was sub-consciously rejecting liberated learning!
Question I came in with:
How can I empower purpose-driven youth to step into their leadership? I am inspired by the passion, focus and power of many young people who take ownership of their futures. I was drawn to the notion of nurturing their passion and purpose with my coaching skills, and I had my end goal in mind early on – to create a programme which can support young leaders to thrive.
Through my peers though, one of the concepts I grasped was emergent learning, which I found challenging at first but really embraced halfway through. It is exactly the approach I needed to bring my creativity to the surface again, to ideate and realise that my Learning Question has evolved (and that, that’s okay!). This journey felt much more personal than when I entered it, but one theme stayed consistent in my quest, and this was ‘leadership’ or personal
leadership, in particular. It’s been a theme that I have explored on and off for over 10 years, and now I could look at it with an updated lens. I took stock of times where my personal leadership has been tested, and where I have observed good and bad leadership displayed in others. An example that stands out is my (bad) memory of my art teacher at college who consistently demotivated me and led me to give up pursuing the subject further altogether. Naturally, I resented him for this ever since, because of how it affected me and my confidence, until this Marathon experience where I finally found it in me to leave that behind. I wrote him a letter he would never get, of forgiveness - so that I could feel at peace more than anything and quit undermining myself. I realised what an important trait it is to be
forgiving, which a good leader must hold capacity for. If forgiveness is one ingredient to authentic personal leadership, what is the rest of the recipe? So I “leave” this Marathon with a refreshed question:
What do I need to understand about leadership, including my own, so that I can guide others to theirs? I am excited to continue this enquiry, which I plan to do by publishing blogs and articles, which reflect my musings on it. Come and say hello over at my Instagram if my question intrigues you, and to get updates! Image: My story map of who I am at the core and how I bring her to the surface.
Lucy Williams
Find me on: Twitter and LinkedIn
Question I came in with:
How can we undesign broken systems of education? “Most change happens slowly and in the excellent dark. Most large things are learned while we are busy with sleep. This is your life. You don’t need to force it this way or that. There is a source running through you that is wiser than the head. Let go sometimes. Flow sometimes. Be a friend to your thoughts and let them rest sometimes.” – Yrsa Daley-Ward It’s the dark that has given me the deepest insights, the sharpest moments of clarity, the biggest sense of urgency to change something in my life. Yet we are taught to be scared of the dark. Cut back to January. My lovely Dad had just died and I felt lost. I was aching for connection, and had been for a while. Not just ‘people to connect with’, but that deep sense of energy you feel when you share a purpose and can truly be yourself.
My learning question has a lot of baggage. I came into the theme of Education for Liberation from a ‘work’ perspective, having worked both for and with education companies that control and benefit from the existing ‘system’. I saw and took part in so much compromise between pursuing commercial goals and doing something that would lead to real, positive change. Fighting against this had taken me to some very dark places. I’d experienced extreme stress and burnout, and had been left with a deep sense of personal failure. What was it about me that couldn’t ‘succeed’, couldn’t ‘cope’ in this system? Why couldn’t I just ‘separate’ life and work? For the last 5 years, I’ve been slowly shaking off the sense of individual failure and asking, “If it isn’t me, what is it about the ‘system’ that’s making me and others feel like this, and how can we change it?” Our group meetups helped us to explore the interconnections between our learning questions, and led me to
refocus around the idea of ‘work as a learning system’. How work is where we do most of our learning as adults, and how our workplaces play such a big part in growing and shaping us as humans. But how difficult it is for organisations to do the inner work alongside the outer work. How being busy gives us a false sense of purpose. How work in general is no longer fit for purpose, even when you work with kind, supportive people, who genuinely care about doing good in the world. And so this experience has also shaped my organisation’s story. As an organisation, we were lacking the embodied understanding that we needed to look inwards – and we also didn’t know how to talk about it. I was able to bring ideas from the Learning Marathon into conversations with my colleagues at LearnJam, and together we began to explore our own ‘system of work’ and what might need to change. We have started to find the right words, to create space for deeper, honest conversations. We have begun a process of organisational healing and unlearning, and a reorientation towards purpose. This collective learning experience has pushed me to dig deeper; to ask myself the really hard questions. Through conversations, workshops, experimentation and connecting with this incredible group of women, I’ve been able to look within in such a fundamental and self-shifting way. I’ve been able to unlearn that I’m not a
spiritual person. I’ve gained the confidence to show and be proud of the emotional, irrational me, and to trust my intuition. I’m learning to see the shadows, and to value them. I leave this magical journey with: A North Star: What if the systems of education and work were living, learning systems that welcomed everyone, nourished happy, healthy humans, and cultivated the knowledge and skills that we need now, for the future? A new question: How can we create and prioritise space for shadow-gazing, emergence and unlearning at work? With huge thanks to my fellow Eduliberators, who have shone light on the shadows and brought me back to the excellent dark.
Mayssa Rezgui Question I leave with:
Find me on: Instagram or LinkedIn
What will be the role of each stakeholder in education, and what is their shared responsibility?
Question I came in with:
What if we radically reimagined education with youth and adults in full partnership?
My journey “If everyone is moving forward together, success can take care of itself.” – Henry Ford
It’s a concept that I deeply believed in but never got the chance to elaborate on practically until joining the Learning Marathon experience. From a young age, I joined the civil society mainly with my organization “The YOUTH CLUBs Association,” based in Tunisia. During this journey, in which we aimed to advocate for a better quality education, we came to a conclusion that if that is what we wanted, stakeholders’ implication is the key. We cannot change or transform if we don’t join forces.
do, and work hard to prove the credibility of our ideas. In my opinion, that is a very good price we need to pay to have the long-awaited collaborative vision that we want for education: A liberated learning journey that serves the best interests of its stakeholders. My journey went from focusing on the principles of awareness and implementation at the beginning through my training sessions, mainly into experimenting and transforming through real projects based on needs. It’s now time to go beyond words and into action!
With that being said, we faced one of the major issues: collaboration between youth and adults in education. Two generations with different backgrounds, positions and status regarding education, but both equally essential and necessary for the much-needed transformation. The funny thing is that working together is not that hard and the opportunities it presented were beyond limits. All we needed was to eliminate pre-judgments about each other, have some shared values, clear objectives about what to discuss or
Image credit: Journal of Interprofessional Care (JICare) Blog
Mona Question I leave with:
How can I tell my story authentically and in a way that doesn’t feel confining (and create a space for others to do the same)? As a Muslim Asian immigrant child, I often felt the weight of expectation to do well, to become something significant. It would be untrue and unfair to say that this pressure came from any particular person or institute. Rather it was present in the culture at large. Present in the way my mother would talk about how her father longed to have a doctor in the family. Present in the way my teachers would tutor me extra during lunch break and even after school so that I could top the batch. Present in the way I was always lauded for doing well. And I did do well. By society’s standards I did extremely well. I went to the top medical school in the country. I worked hard (and I also
hardly worked). I got a coveted job as a doctor in a London Hospital. And I was wholly miserable. So I left. I wish I could say what followed was a period of introspection. Rather, I jumped from one thing to another trying to find my niche. I did know from experience though that the answer didn’t lie in just studying facts and doing well. I was living proof of that and the ever changing world we live in showed me how easily replaceable jobs can become. I knew it lay in critical and creative thinking.
My journey So when the opportunity arose to join Education for Liberation, I came with the following question: How can I create and deliver workshops for Muslim parents on the importance of nurturing creative and critical thinking habits in themselves and their children? However, the more I explored the question, the more close ended and constricting (the opposite of liberating!) it felt. As I talked to my learning buddy about my concerns, I began to realise that I was looking outward instead of first looking in. I needed to explore and tell my own story in an authentic way (as well as give other people the opportunity to do so) and unravel my own beliefs about what learning means, what success means and what being a Muslim woman means.
So I changed my question to this: How can I tell my story authentically and in a way that doesn’t feel confining (and create a space for others to do the same)? What I loved about this question was the level of me-search it required me to take. As I grew more aware, I could see lessons in everything. I learned to unlearn previously held beliefs about myself and others and started forming deeper, more authentic connections. It’s inspired me to begin a project with a friend on creating a series specifically for Muslim women on helping them to explore beliefs and ‘truths’ they hold about themselves. I leave the Learning Marathon, grateful for the experience but even more so for the amazing women I journeyed with.
Sophie Craven
Find me on: LinkedIn
Question I came in with:
How can we turn education inside-out? My question for this Learning Marathon started out as ‘How can we turn education inside-out?’. What I meant by this is: How can we enable young people to learn about themselves, their values, and how to cope with change or cope with making changes as a core part of the learning curriculum? How can we prioritise personal understanding and self-development over rote memorisation and standardised testing? This felt important to me because I’ve been going through a few years of pretty mindful life change. I had previously participated in a learning marathon with EY in 2018 in which I explored questions around mental health and values, so I had already gone a decent way into Awareness, Unlearning and Experimenting. As part of that journey, I had a total lifestyle
upheaval; starting therapy, changing jobs and leaving a partner who didn’t have the same idea of what a good and meaningful life feels like. I picked up this current Learning Marathon when I was halfway through Implementation! I’d moved down to Cornwall, gone freelance/part-time and was painting more and learning to make pots. Having gone through several major transitions, I became fascinated with change and how it feels, and how we can feel courageous enough to make necessary life changes to live more in alignment with our values. The last few months with the most amazing group of powerful, liberated and honest women have given me the opportunity to look at patterns of change, the similarities and discrepancies around how we
experience different types of transition (planned and unplanned). As part of that, I’ve created Change Cycle cards and I’ve been running Change Story interviews with some willing victims. The aim is to help us make sense of changes that we’re going through – whether self-initiated or otherwise – and give us an alternative language with which to navigate different types of transition. One of the biggest things I’ve realised during this journey is that I will always have more unlearning to do. Isn’t that a relief?! Life would be quite boring otherwise. I’ve started to understand that sometimes I can’t do everything, and actually I’m not doing justice to
one project or to one change cycle by taking on a lot at once. I’m learning to take the time to tend to what I care about slowly, lovingly, with less guilt about taking time off to rest (well, still working on that). Just because I could, doesn’t mean I should. That’s been the biggest liberation for me as a lifelong learner: cycling mindfully between depth, breadth and napping. I’m not sure what question I leave with. I want to publish my Change Cycle cards along with a handbook, and run group workshops using them. But you know, I’m renovating a house this summer, and I want to do that justice. Change Cycles sound like a great, cosy winter project to me.
Image: A big part of learning is making sense of your journey. Throughout this Learning Marathon, I’ve been discovering the power of symbols and metaphor to articulate transition for yourself and to communicate it to those around you.
Valerie Watson-Vega Question I came in with:
How can my education serve our liberation? I’m from Lima, Peru, a huge chaotic city, where "Urban-Peruvianness" exists in a delicate balance between the native cultural traditions and the traditions of the different cultures that immigrated to Peru throughout the last 500 years. We can add that it’s one of the most dangerous cities in the world for women, and that there are no LGBTQIA+ rights. I’m also a Londoner, 6 years now, and perhaps it was in my difficulty to find words to introduce myself to the group on day 1, that the starting point became evident: I am, undeniably, an intersectional being and I have no idea how to articulate it or understand it. As a result, my journey focused on experimenting, exploring, and resonating (connecting). What do I mean by my education? Based on my lived experience, my education is a compendium of
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moments, and then memories, organised in my mind from “someone taught me this” (e.g. a teacher, a friend) to “I learnt this’' (e.g. I observed and registered, I tried and failed, and did it again). This exercise raised my awareness as a culturally complex person, and led to another realisation: my construction of “being a girl” was based on all the times I was told to not do something, making me feel that "being a girl" = "you're limited, girl". It's not a surprise I disliked most representations of ‘femininities’ when I was a kid. This
Image: Have you thought about the expectations behind the gifts you used to get? How much of that stuff is (was) you?
"aha" moment felt like an invitation to play and experiment with my gender expression freely, without anyone telling me what I had to be, and what better way to do this than to drag myself? I felt free to be feminine, and had so much fun with it, but at the same time, I felt compassion for little me feeling limited in the past without understanding why, and that was even more liberating.
Image: WHY NOT? Just let yourself play. Promise to work on my eyebrows.
Based on this experience, I then continued with what is our liberation? If my new awareness and unlearning empowered me to experiment freely with a conflictive part of my intersectional self, how can I use this realisation to support collective liberation? A big question that I plan to continue exploring, but to start with, I’m examining how autobiographical narratives of liberation can help ‘join the dots’ of liberated thinking and action, and leave the audience, reader, listener inspired to take stock of their liberation. It's still a work in progress but you can see this.
Key takeaways from this experiment: Gender is way more fluid than what most of us have been taught to think and ‘allow’ in our emotional world, and you can easily feel it when you play with it, but you need to allow yourself to play with it* to feel it. *Unless you already feel it, which means you’re winning.
Liberation is also healing, and healing is liberating. Please stop anyone telling a girl she can’t do something because she’s a girl. Tell her to be daring, always!
How powerful can it be to see someone else connected with their liberation? Can this fuel collective liberation? If I tell you how I use my education to liberate myself, will you feel more motivated to use yours to liberate yourself? Let’s see. I’m leaving the marathon transformed by the journey I’ve lived with the Power-Ranger group of women that I’ve had the privilege to learn and resonate with, my Eduliberators, amazing friendships, my buddies, and lucidity to see the love in collective power, y’all. Thank you. Question I’m leaving with:
What learning experiences do we need for collective liberation?
Zineb Mouhyi Question I came in with:
How might we enable young people to design the future of education?
My journey The Learning Marathon started in February 2021, a month after I had launched YouthxYouth – a youth learning festival, welcoming 200+ global youth education activists into a conversation on the question “What if young people designed the future of education?” with an amazing team of co-conspirators. This event was the culmination of the exploration I started on my previous Enrol Learning Sprint, a catalyzing journey I shared with an incredible group of people facilitated by Alana Bloom (and the reason I immediately applied to Enrol Yourself again). I entered the Education Liberation Learning Marathon with the principle of “Implementing” very top of mind as the YouthxYouth experiment birthed a community – the perfect way for me to explore my learning question in action. However, a few weeks into our Journey I felt like the YouthxYouth work was going to happen regardless and wanted to use this time to go
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deeper into the exploration of personal and collective liberation. “Awareness” then became the most important principle as I sought to understand what I needed to become aware of in order to contribute to collective liberation from a place of understanding, possibility, and love. I created a taxonomy where I mapped my questions under two simple categories: Understanding the World and Understanding Ourselves/Myself. I feel that this set of questions will be a guiding structure behind the research I’ll engage in while starting a PhD in Anthropology and Social Change this September. In the next phase of life, I hope to study these questions systematically while practicing social change through my work. However, the principle that was more salient throughout the journey was undoubtedly “Connecting”. I had the privilege to meet a group of truly inspiring women; beacons of light committed to the meaningful work of personal liberation serving collective liberation. Question I leave with:
How can I set myself up to be a lifelong liberated learner serving collective liberation?
I leave this meaningful Eduliberator journey with:
The friendship of a group of incredible warriors for the human spirit
An Activist Toolkit
The dream of co-writing a book with them A Taxonomy of Becoming to start organizing my research as I embark on a PhD in Anthropology & Social Change
May we be... May we be learners flowing through life. May we be children who don't fear questioning. May we be birds that fly freely. May we be explorers, living in and speaking from our own bodies and making our homes in the wild. May we be filled with light. May we be friends who lift each other and spread our warmth. May we be flickering with deep vision to illuminate the world around us. May we be like fire, a powerful and cleansing force creating a space for renewal and regeneration. May we be free to move in and out, both peaceful and crashing, like the waves. May we be free flowing in our journeys. May we be a harmony of thoughts, emotions and passions. May we light a flame of passions. May we be like a symphony, coming together harmoniously into a new music to dance to. May we be wild. May we be explorers of the mountain tops. May we be exploding stars bursting with energy and spirit. May we be open to grow and evolve through time. May we be immersed in ourselves and our world. May we be. The above poem was composed during a group meetup led by Zineb. Each of us was asked to look at a selection of images and spend a few minutes composing at least one line or stanza of a poem inspired by the image.
Enrol Yourself is an award-winning social enterprise redesigning lifelong learning by harnessing the power of peer groups to multiply individual and collective development. The Learning Marathon is a 6-month peer-led learning accelerator designed to integrate into life alongside work. WEB: enrolyourself.com BLOG: medium.com/enrol-yourself TWITTER: @EnrolYourself INSTAGRAM: @enrol_yourself EMAIL: hello@enrolyourself.com You can continue to follow our collective Education for Liberation journey here: WEB: https://msha.ke/educationforliberation/ TWITTER: @eduliberators INSTAGRAM: @eduliberators