Woolman is seeking faculty to teach workshops for the Jorgensen School for Nonviolence. This program envisions a world where positive social change is achieved through personal awareness, societal understanding, and nonviolent direct action.
Since the early 1960s, Woolman has a history of teaching peace, justice, nonviolent communication, dispute resolution and activism. These are some of the most fundamental underpinings of Woolman’s Quaker values.
The Jorgensen School for Nonviolence provides meaningful and collaborative learning experiences that enable individuals to see their own role in the perpetuation of violence, to change those ways of being, and to respond to the violence they encounter in their own lives, relationships, workplaces, communities, political systems, and world through the use and understanding of nonviolent methods and direct action training.
The first phase of the JSNV is to offer a variety of workshops to interested students, who can select from a menu of choices. Examples include:
Personal Awareness
- Nonviolent communication
- Alternatives to Violence project
- Somatic practices (taijiquan, yoga, Pilates)
- Artistic practices
- Communal and individual physical projects
Societal Understanding
- American history and the violence narrative
- History of the oppressed (writings, music, material culture)
- History of political and humanitarian struggle
- Games workshop – exploring alternatives to the violence narrative
Direct Nonviolent Action
- Exercises in historical re-creation of nonviolent tactics
- Confrontation simulation (Alternatives to Violence Project)
- Capstone projects in students’ home communities, including preparation in class, reports in progress, and debriefings and analysis in classroom settings.
Woolman expects to roll out the first workshops in Fall of 2021. We invite feedack from prospective faculty who have ideas for workshops based on personal experience. If you are interested in learning more about this developing program please contact info@woolman.org.
Marty, our weekly book group right now is working with Kazu Haga’s book, Healing Resistance, which comes right out of Kingian Nonviolence Training. He’s POWERFUL, very hands on, involved in both prison work with groups, and community actions, like the Occupy and the BLM. It would be wonderful to see him and his group do events here. Also, he would be an excellent contact for current knowledge of who is active in this today in Northern California and maybe even who he might recommend we check with. Dean Olson