We’ve Designed a New Style of Virtual Learning: the Xdesign Experience
We’re excited to introduce our newest offering, the Xdesign Experience: Accountability in Reconciliation. Unlike our courses, which are self-paced, this new experience is a hybrid online course that combines audio playlists, weekly Hatha yoga classes, and live monthly design sessions to create a more immersive learning journey.
The premise of the Xdesign Experience: Accountability in Reconciliation is to create shared language around oppression and highlight why it’s important to create and design schools and learning communities where students of all races, socio-economic status, creeds, gender identities, home languages, and sexual orientations can be seen, heard, loved, and find belonging.
The Xdesign Experience
We need to talk about race, equity, and belonging in schools, and how we talk about it needs to be designed by educators, students, and parents. Oppression is often hard to see and name for two reasons. First, the engagement of these ideas often generates feelings of deep hurt, vulnerability, and humiliation. These feelings silence us. Second, these ideas are often disregarded or denied by those who hold significant power, privilege, and position.
We believe it’s important to name these ideas to denature their catalytic power.
In the Xdesign Experience: Accountability in Reconciliation, audio playlists will shine light on the historical context of the 10 big ideas that fuel oppression, so learners can start breaking down barriers to freedom and inclusivity. For a somatic experience, because oppression is a heart-disease, weekly yoga classes in the Gosh lineage will attend to the body, spirit, and mind. Body work helps us realize that because our bodies can change, our minds can change too. Live monthly design sessions will also help learners design for radical inclusion.
Once participants are aware, activated, and directed, connecting to others is the next step. We provide the knowledge and space participants need to plan their next steps to encourage activism to educate their family, friends, neighbors, and others.
The Fight Against Banning Critical Race Theory
As many educators know, there has been hot debate and landmark censorship in education recently surrounding critical race theory (CRT). Critical race theory recognizes that social institutions in the U.S., such as the education and criminal justice system, are embedded with racist laws, regulations, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes and racial inequality.
Many states have passed legislation attempting to ban critical race theory from being taught in classrooms, such as Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Arizona, and North Dakota.
According to The Brookings Institution, “The legislations mostly ban the discussion, training, and/or orientation that the U.S. is inherently racist as well as any discussions about conscious and unconscious bias, privilege, discrimination, and oppression. These parameters also extend beyond race to include gender lectures and discussions.”
In Montana and South Dakota, state actors have denounced CRT teaching concepts. State school boards in Florida, Georgia, Utah, and Alabama introduced new guidelines barring CRT-related discussions, and school boards in Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia have criticized CRT.
While many scholars and critical race theorists assert that this social theory is not being taught in schools, we know that CRT is white supremacist dog whistle for conversations about race and belonging. These legislative moves are designed to keep all American children ignorant, impotent, and conserve the status quo. These moves are designed to ensure that our public school teachers do not have the competencies to teach in ways that can create a multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial democracy. A shield of comfort is being manipulated in the public discourse to prevent us from doing the hard work of healing, transforming, and becoming. Our stories—both present and ancestral—are our superpower. Connecting to them, understanding them, and sharing them helps us all emerge as more compassionate and loving humans.
School districts have become contentious battlegrounds pitting parents against elected officials, curriculum, and the professionalism of the practice. As white supremacist groups and the moral right make intentional moves to block the curriculum and instruction that would enable a healed, multicultural, multiracial democracy, concerned citizens, educators, and advocates need a way to access the stories, connect to the community, and design, organize, and influence their local policy makers.
The legislation that is being put forth across many states and communities informs educators about what not to do. But what is the alternative? We must continue to gather and connect with one another in order to innovate and create positive change. We need to redesign the relationships in our schools and communities to create spaces where all of us belong, regardless of how our bodies appear.
Creating Equity and a Sense of Belonging
The Xdesign Experience: Accountability in Reconciliation is designed to provide people who live on the land the tools, instruction, and community that fits their roles as designers and co-creators of a multicultural and multiracial democracy. This new experience is designed for us to become better teachers and leaders.
What if teachers, parents, and leaders all did something together to foster a sense of belonging and equity? In togetherness, we can figure out what we want the conversation about race, equity, and belonging to be like in our schools and communities.
What would a diverse coalition of community members who have been informed and activated together look and sound like? Moments of coming together challenge the systems of oppression—our goal with the Xdesign Experience.
What’s most important is creating new relationships and redesigning the future from a local level with a spirit of accountability. If the product of this process is new norms, agreements, or legislation, then so be it.
It is possible to live without fear and create a free, inclusive, life-giving world that’s worth putting our time and energy toward. The sky's the limit if we can learn to work together to counteract oppression. One of the institutions we can use to accelerate a world like this is the education system. If systemic racism and sexism can be taught, what’s the counteractive curriculum? What do kids need to learn right now in order to get us to a multicultural, multiethnic, multi-geographic, demography?
If we want to design a future for radical inclusion, we have to understand historical forces of separation and implement change ourselves. It’s not about where we are and how we stay, it's about where we’re going and how we get there. The Xdesign Experience will help us get there.
Register for the Xdesign Experience using the link below—we can’t wait to share this revolutionary format with you.
https://www.228accelerator.com/welcometoxdesignexperience
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