Workshop Descriptions
Our workshop themes include identity and socialization; the history and power of racialized ideas; seeing racial ideas in thoughts, actions, and systems; facilitating communication and understanding; challenging racialized ideas and redirecting conversations; strategies for individual and organizational practice; applications to healing, care-giving, mentoring, and leadership; and more. These workshops can be scheduled over a few hours or a few days.
Discerning Whiteness: The Unacknowledged Barrier
We will explore the ways racial dynamics play out in and about us every day, in both personal and institutional spaces. We’ll practice developing the ability to identify and interrupt whiteness–––while exploring the mindset, feelings, social communications (conscious and unconscious), and contexts that support the racial hierarchy in all sectors of our society. Participants will share and participate in honest and deep dialogue. Facilitators will provide a context of safe space for risk-taking and relationship-building toward strengthening community bonds in our common struggle against racism.
Racial Equity: Beginning the Conversation
Join us as we examine the history and legacy of race, socialization into race practices, and the ways that history and legacy influence our behavior. How do we come to receive and internalize racialized structures of thinking and understanding? How do these lead to stereotypical imagining, thinking, irrational emotions, and bias?
We'll identify the ongoing operations of racialized structures in our lives, giving attention to whiteness–––what the structures look like, where they are found, and how they influence our thinking and behavior.
This workshop is designed to help participants build an understanding of key concepts such as racial equity and institutional/structural racism, then develop tools and practices for counteracting racial bias. We’ll learn to talk about race constructively within our particular context or organization, then identify next steps for applying concepts and strategies to advance racial equity.
Addressing Race-Related Beliefs: Sleight of Mouth Patterns & Practice
We will address racial and related beliefs by loosening racialized certainties, allowing alternative ways of seeing and knowing, and challenging participants to consider antiracist perspectives. We’ll help participants understand and practice Sleight of Mouth techniques as a tool for unbinding racial certainty, deflecting and re-channeling hostile or defensive speech, and deepening reflective, critical thinking.
Crossing Cultural Boundaries: Understanding, Skills, and Practice
Together we’ll identify the complex factors of social location, psychology (intentions, needs, pre-definitions), and understanding of the setting (nature of the event, significance of the activity) influencing how we interpret others. We’ll practice raising our awareness to the ways our socialization and social location (race, class, gender, culture, sexuality, locality, belief convictions) influence our perceptions, interpretations, feelings, and behaviors. This workshop provides an introduction to culture theory–––cultural patterns, styles, and cross-communication practices, with application to interracial and inter-ethnic encounters in organizations. We will practice the cross-cultural communication skills of perceiving and responding.
The Doctrine of Discovery & Legacy of Colonialism
We’ll examine the Doctrine of Discovery and its legacy in the ways it intersects with race, religion, and politics. This workshop looks at how the Doctrine of discovery still influences ideas, relationships, views, and behavior. We’ll examine contexts, lives, and relationships through the lens of the Colonizer-Colonized paradigm to uncover what we are yet unable to see through the race/racism paradigm; universal and particular elements (time, place, peoples, histories) characterizing colonization; differing impacts; ways colonizer-whiteness impinges on the lives of colonized peoples; and how they may be complicit in the perpetuation of colonizer whiteness. We will consider potential means to counter colonization and support decolonization, self-actualization, and self-determination of colonized people.
Multicultural Foundation for Helping & Healing Practices
We will study and apply culture and intercultural communication theory and practices in support of helping and healing professions. Together we’ll investigate the historical-political context underlying helping and healing practices with attention to socialization and racialization experiences of US Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, Latinos, Asians Americans, and European Americans.
Explore with us what “culture” is and why we need to incorporate culture in our understanding of human behavior, examine the notion of “helping professions,” and the ways these professions are deeply rooted in “mainstream,” middle-class, Euro-American culture. What consequences result from this and how might they be remedied through increasing our own awareness of unarticulated attitudes and assumptions towards individuals from other cultures? What are consequential impacts and interactions?
