The Art of Gathering
Students, Families Communities, Nations
27 April 2018
“I’ve always found a way to
communicate.”
~ Stephen Hawking
(1942-2018) Physicist,
Cosmologist
With wrecked body and the use of one cheek
muscle,
confined to a wheelchair
he refused to surrender his narrative.
"Without diversity and
contrast, life's meaning is lost.
We complete each
other."
~Taleb Al-Harithi, Hebron,
Palestine
"We were
together. I forget the rest."
~ Walt Whitman, poet
Today
1. The Art of Gathering
2. Gathering Educators, Teaching Gathering in Israel
3. Ongoing Gatherings Continue Preparing the Path for Palestinian-Jewish
Youth Together
4. One Educator Gathering Students, Gathering Their Stories, Becoming
More, Becoming Community
= = 1 = =
The Art of Gathering
THE ART OF GATHERING:
How We Meet and Why It Matters
-- http://www.thrivelabs.co/the-art-of-gathering/
-- is a new 21st century trail guide for what we need the most and
understand the least -- being together at home and work, in our
communities, among nations and peoples.
In the early 2000s, the author -- undergraduate student, Priya
Narayan Parker -- championed Sustained Dialogue at the University of Virginia,
saying it "was by far the most amazing experience I've had, and I look
forward to it spreading to other campuses."
True to her passion, Priya became the first Program
Director of what's now the international Sustained Dialogue Campus Network -- http://sustaineddialogue.org/our-work/campus/
Since then, Parker has facilitated race relations on American college
campuses and peace processes in the Arab world, southern Africa, and India.
She has a history of creative, healing gatherings for activists, elected officials,
corporate executives, educators, and philanthropists. . .sometimes adversaries.
May 15, 2018, fifteen years later -- globally experienced, married, mother of
two -- Priya will release THE ART OF GATHERING, and
writes: "I've been working on this book for the last four years, and
couldn't be more excited and relieved to get it out into the world!
"I wrote it in large part to help anyone and everyone bring more
meaning and purpose into their gatherings, and change the way we think about bringing
people together."
= = 2 = =
Gathering Educators
Teaching Gathering
in Israel
Perhaps re-directing
history while responding to increasing "tribal divides" within Israel, President Reuven Rivlin with Minister
of Education, Naftali Bennett, have initiated a new epoch of cross-cultural
engagement across the land.
Monday and Tuesday, April 23-24, 2018, "Israeli Hope" sent its
first busload of 33 leading educators traveling together to experience a
variety of communities and peoples throughout the state -- often unseen and
overlooked -- and for powerful, unexpected experiences of sharing their own
personal narratives.
This first tour was guided by Elad Vazana of Tours for Change -- http://www.tour4change.com
In the 2018 pilot program, 20 more diverse "educational teams"
will leave on similar "Journeys of Hope" that include supervisors,
school principals, and teachers from the presently-divided sectors of society,
with pre-tour training and post-tour assimilation.
This is the leading edge of committed, experiential educator training to
facilitate a new, culture-changing evolution of inclusive, participatory
education planned to expand to hundreds of schools and close distances
between Jewish and Arab students -- everyone.
Tour guide Elad Vazana:
"It's only the beginning. Listening carefully and sharing life
stories was deeply planted in the hearts of the travelling educators --
hopefully to be the core of the thousands of journeys for all educators in the
next five years."
Professor Mona Khoury-Kassabri is already heading the
Steering Committee for "Israeli Hope in Academia" at The Center for
the Study of Multiculturalism and Diversity at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem
-- http://csmd.huji.ac.il/book/israeli-hope-academy
President Rivlin: "I hope that more will follow, and that very soon meetings
among Israeli society will be part of the basic training and professional
development of every school principal, supervisor, administrator, and teacher
in Israel."
SEE PHOTOS and NEWS reports:
ISRAELI HOPE:
A Potential Universal Model
Within or Across Borders,
for
Multi-cultural Dignity and
Appreciation for Parallel Narratives
http://traubman.igc.org/israelihope.pdf
= = 3 = =
Ongoing Gatherings
Continue Preparing the Path
for Palestinian-Jewish Youth Together
Young women -- Palestinian and Jewish
Israelis -- video-recorded what they learned and what was awakened in two years
of follow-up gatherings after participating in summer programs of Creativity
for Peace -- http://creativityforpeace.com.
They describe their powerful experiences of hosting each other in their
family homes for further skill-building and relationship-strengthening.
Palestinian and Jewish Israeli Young Women
Engaging
7-1/2 min video
= = 4 = =
One Educator
Gathering Students
Gathering Their Stories
Becoming More, Becoming Community
Ms. Erin Gruwell chose teaching because
she believed in change.
She trusted that her students could choose their own, better futures beyond self-doubt
and victimhood, teen pregnancy, tribal pressures, or gang violence -- going to
war in one way or another.
"We all have a story," educator Erin Gruwell said.
Gruwell co-discovered with her 150 "at-risk" students that gathering
to write and tell their personal stories marked the atrophy of fear and the
upswing in classroom closeness and learning.
Her "low potential" students compiled a best seller,
"Freedom Writers Diary" about re-writing their own stories --
creating their own new realities, their better relationships.
Beyond inspiring, "Freedom Writers" is the 2007 Hollywood film
about Gruwell and her students worth viewing in its full length by every
student and educator in search of gathering and becoming our collective, very
best...together.
Trailers begin with https://youtu.be/JhXMJlm852A
and accompany it online
And WATCH:
Becoming a Catalyst for Change:
Educator Erin Gruwell
TEDxChapmanU -- July 2012
19-min video
- - -
This message is on the Web at https://traubman.igc.org/messages/712.htm
Hundreds of other success stories are preserved at https://traubman.igc.org/messages.htm