education
A very important part of our work at Crafting Gentleness is the provision of workshops, residential courses, online courses, and one-on-one sessions.
The following programme descriptions will give a sense of the type of work that we do:
Other Stories: Traditions of Resilience, Heritages of Peace
Other Stories is a programme that invites people to tell 'other stories' about Northern Ireland. People often speak of the last forty years in Northern Ireland as 'The Troubles' or 'The Conflict', as if this was a continuous experience of intense conflict. By doing this we may pay the high price of blocking out many other aspects of our lives during that time. Our retellings of history in Northern Ireland tend to place the emphasis on hostility, trauma, and violence. Because we usually don't speak about them openly, more helpful aspects of everyday life over the past forty years have been rendered invisible and, as a result, politically irrelevant.
The Other Stories programme invites people to remember and explore the histories of resilience, friendship, family, community, nonviolence, and helpful relationship that have sustained our lives over the last forty years in Northern Ireland. Through workshops and ethnographic research, Other Stories seeks to redress the balance of social imagination, making our helpful experiences more available for future generations.
Crafting Resilience
Crafting Resilience is an emotional self-care programme for peace workers. Working in the cause of peace, conflict transformation, and social change can lead to frustration, sustained anger, burnout, and even despair. In the Crafting Resilience workshops we invite people to take stock of how they look after themselves in peace and community work. This programme aims to raise awareness among peace workers of the difficulties of stress, compassion fatigue, and what is known as 'secondary traumatization'. We suggest techniques, strategies, and other ways of thinking that can allow people to take better care of themselves emotionally, and to become more robust and resilient as they face the challenges of their work.
Kinder Campus
The Kinder Campus campaign invites people on university campuses to assemble campus teams to facilitate and implement practical, meaningful actions to improve the emotional climate of the university. The primary challenge for these teams is how to improve the emotional climate of the campus community without offering prescriptive approaches to ethical interaction. By subtly improving the emotional climate of campuses, we can make universities kinder, more supportive environments. In this way, Kinder Campus addresses issues such as suicide prevention, general mental ill-health, student retention, disability, sexuality, sectarianism, racism, and bullying, among others. The Kinder Campus campaign will be supported by a web archive of possibilities that people have come up with on their own campus, by a networked community of campus teams, and by a series of events to facilitate discussion and social innovation in the cause of kinder campuses.
Crafting Gentleness
The notion of crafting is often associated with activities like pottery, knitting, woodwork, quiltmaking and so on. Engaging in these sorts of crafting can be a great way to remind ourselves that we can make a difference, to remind ourselves that we can learn to listen more carefully to how we make the differences that we make. Crafting materials can be a way to align ourselves to think more in terms of the consequences and effects of what we do, to consider that helpfulness and appropriateness might be friendlier values to live by than rigid rules of right and wrong. By sculpting, shaping, moulding, guiding, building, and by listening and responding as we go, we can become more aware of how we make a difference. Crafting can be a reclamation of the power of life.
Crafting Power
Trying to work towards more gentleness in your life does not have to mean condemning oneself to a path of political ineffectiveness. Working towards greater gentleness can mean working towards a greater presencing of oneself in the world, towards a greater awareness of the political possibilities in your life. In this programme we explore the notion that gentleness may be always-already available to us as an attitude, a baseline of human possibility in relationship and politics. Through an exploration of a range of understandings of 'power', the Crafting Power programme invites you to 'listen to yourself, listen to your situation,' in an exploration of the ways we can always-already make a difference.
Crafting Hope
We often find ourselves feeling trapped and powerless, feeling that we don't make much of a difference in the world, or that our lives don't really matter all that much. In response, we often understand hope as being somewhere else, a utopian aspiration for some other place, some other time, a reminder that what we hope for may well be realised some day, but not yet. Not yet. The Crafting Hope programme invites you to explore how we tend to craft stories about hope. What does hope mean, and for whom? Can hope ever be harmful? Can utopian hope distract us from the present situation, and reduce the sense of possibility that we ourselves can effect positive, transformative change? Can utopias offer possibilities for living in the here and now? What understandings of hope can ground us in the here and now, and make us more fully present to make a difference in our relationships and our lives?
Crafting Creativity
Crafting Creativity invites people to take the playfulness of creativity seriously. What can creativity mean? Is creativity just the privilege of the few? In this workshop we invite people to listen for the ways that an awareness of creativity can make the ordinary moments of our lives ordinarily extraordinary. Crafting creativity will invite you to reconnect with your ability to craft, to make, to do, and to connect. By learning to open up spaces within and around ourselves, we can come to understandings of creativity that bring us to become more uncomfortable with uncertainty, more open to what comes our way, and more confident in our ability to make do, whatever life throws at us.
Crafting Community
This programme invites people to explore the meanings that "community" can have for us in our lives. For some "community" can be stifling, enclosing, and threatening. For others, "community" can mean a source of joy, an intense sense of togetherness and belonging. But how does "community" work?. Can "community" be created? Can rhetorics of "community" be used to manipulate us? Can rhetorics of "community" make us defensive in the face of difference? Can we come to more helpful and inclusive understandings of "community", whoever we are, whatever we believe?
Crafting Education
The Crafting Education programme is an opportunity for people at all levels to explore the possibilities of learning. Most people are familiar with formal education, examinations, and certificates. But what other ways are there to think about education? How have you learned? How do you like to learn? How can you learn? What would you love to learn? What conversations would you love to be part of? How do you go about finding the conversations, communities, and contexts that nourish you and support you? How would you think about your thinking more helpfully? What types of learning suit you best? Crafting Education invites you to think about how education and learning can open up possibilities in your life.
Crafting Theory
This is a programme designed for people interested in re-evaluating 'theory' as a tool for thinking. Do you find the notion of theory intimidating, irrelevant, or irritating? Do you find that the notion of 'theory' leaves you cold? Do you find 'theory' impersonal and distant? Are you tired of trying to make sense of theorists that you can't understand? Have you every considered that you might already be a theorist yourself? Using a broad understanding of theory as 'thinking about your own and others' thinking, feeling, and doing', this workshop invites you to a more inclusive understanding of 'theory', one that brings theory home as a personal and political endeavour. You can become more accountable and response-able for your own thinking, feeling, and doing, and feel better for doing it, too.