These workshops, facilitated by Senior Assistant Dean of Student Veteran Initiatives, David Keefe, and current GS students, are designed to utilize art, culture, and creativity to focus on the skills of close reading and reflective writing to connect people over important issues and our relationality between one another amid an ever-changing world. These workshops are an hour of community discussion following an assigned creative reading and 5-minute writing prompt. Using art and culture, and the natural elements of the virtual space in which the workshop takes place as “grounding elements,” participants are effectively made aware of their “sense of place” relating to history, society, culture, and the current environment. Craft-making is a direct connection to nature and a mediator between people. The goal of these workshops is to utilize participatory craft-making, through writing and storytelling, as the action to build a capacity within our Self to listen to the Other. Through a making experience, stories are expressed and received in a new co-created narrative of witnessing and collaboration. In this interaction we find relationality to others around us and can draw on both the positive and challenging understandings of recognition, empathy, and acceptance. In this newly defined safe space, rather a Creative Connective Space, we find commonality by recognizing both our similarities and differences with one another. The Zoom link to participate will be emailed to registrants 30 minutes prior to the start of the event. If you have not received the Zoom link at this time please email
[email protected].
