2023 EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION JAM

WHAT IS THE YES! EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION JAM?

The YES! Education Transformation Jam (Ed Jam, for short)  is a unique gathering for folks engaged in education.  We bring together about 30 leaders and visionaries from across the oft-divided education world: public, private, independent, and charter schools, unschooling, homeschooling, after-schooling, learning communities, youth empowerment, youth activism, leadership development, adult education, early childhood, community college, higher education, and more.  For our ninth year, we are experimenting with our first hybrid structure jam (Zoom + in-person cohorts!)–read on to learn more!

Students, educators, designers, parents, care-givers, policy-makers – all are welcome!

The Ed Jam creates opportunities to explore our experiences and visions of education, build lasting and collaborative relationships, deepen our perspectives of challenging questions, share places of growth, struggle and healing, and have a lot of fun. It weaves the personal, interpersonal, and systemic together — from the deep motivations of why we are called to be in this field, to the challenges and community that race, gender and class diversity offer our learning spaces, to imagining and manifesting the full possibilities of what education can be in this emergent and ever-changing world. 

Unlike many education conferences that focus on systemic questions and rarely weave together connections to our own life journeys — or personal retreats that focus on self-transformation and leave out systemic issues — the Jam seeks to address both of these levels, as well as the very vital area of interpersonal connection, learning and healing.  All fields of transformation are brought together in a shared space co-created by all of the participants.

The Ed Jam will make space to listen and learn from each person present, engage in new synergies, find inspiration and rejuvenation, and build towards a common vision with each of our own unique contributions.  Though some dialogues about education end up being debates about “the right way forward”, the Jam connects people from very different educational approaches to share our fields’ strengths and challenges and to explore our ‘unknowns’ together. We invite you to join us!

WHY THE EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION JAM NOW?

The Jam creates space for us to slow down, ask questions, and listen deeply.  Where are we right now? As individual teachers and learners? As people who have weathered personal and professional losses, transitions, and transformations during these years since the COVID-19 pandemic began? As human beings living with the grief and rage, the tensions and questions that come with living within ongoing violence, white supremacy, militarism, colonialism, environmental destruction, patriarchy, corporate greed and an attack on the ability of educators and students to speak openly about these truths?

When our organizing team sits with these questions, even more questions arise.  Here are some of the questions at the heart of why we are moved to host this Ed Jam now…

• What are you learning, unlearning and uplearning right now? What are your growing edges, cliffhangers, transitions, and pivot points?
• How does your heart fully enter and sustain your work? As a teacher? As a student?  
• What does actual equity and liberation in education look like at this moment? How do we relate to these words that are thrown around in our personal and professional worlds?
• How can we best acknowledge and understand the complexities of teaching and living through COVID? Who have we become because of it? Who do we want to be?
• In this time when our teaching and learning has been politicized, where many of us have been told what we can and cannot teach, what we can and cannot learn… What is an education that we are willing to risk for? How do we navigate the terrain of risk and safety for ourselves and with our families, colleagues, communities, and  students?
• Why education? Why are we in this work together now? What compels you?
• What and who have you been leaning on during this time? What are you missing? What do you crave?
• What about your own educational journey? What are your triumphs and your traumas around education? How do they shape your work in the world?
• When you see hopeful visions for the future, where do they appear?
• What kind of support do you need to help come into deeper alignment with these visions, your values, your self?  What kind of support can you offer others for their journey into deeper alignment?
• What stories or strategies must be left behind in order to make room for what’s coming next?
• How do we build bridges across different identities like race, class, gender, sexuality, geography, religion, professional spheres that heal, sustain, and amplify our work? How might we practice that bridge building here and now? How do we care for ourselves and tend to each other when those bridges wobble, collapse, or need rebuilding?
• What are the opportunities and challenges before you right now?

The roles we play in ensuring seeds of knowledge, care, creativity, wisdom, and compassion are planted in the uneven soil of our world are, day after day, mixed with the weight and urgency of our times.  It can be easy to feel overwhelmed, take on too much, and hold a lot of weight in our minds, hearts, and bodies.  Each of us has ways of navigating this, of living with and balancing the heft.  With this jam, in particular, we want to offer space for unpacking, for deep listening and stretching to grow towards the light of what is actually possible, for lightness and play, for the opportunity to put down what is not ours and redirect energy into the transformations we most deeply crave and need..

WHAT HAPPENS AT THE YES! EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION JAM?

First, what are your questions? Bring all of them to the Jam! You can begin to reflect and share when you fill out your application here.  That’s the first step!

A Jam is not a traditional workshop or seminar. Instead, each Jam is co-created by everyone who attends and the questions we all bring to the mix.  Imagine musicians gathering together with their different instruments and styles… that’s us, and our applications are the first opportunity to start weaving our questions and stories.  From there, the facilitation team will begin to map out a flow for our time together.

Here are a few givens:

• Zoomy Hybrid Structure: This will be our first time hosting a hybrid structure.  The program will occur on Zoom, but we are encouraging people to apply with co-workers, friends, neighbors, colleagues so that we can have mini-cohorts gathering in-person throughout the week.  This will give us the opportunity to be in deep community with folks across the globe (in the past, we’ve had participants from North America, the Middle East, India, New Zealand and Mexico) and ground even more deeply in our immediate communities.
• In–Breaths & Out-Breaths: We won’t be on the computer for HOURS and HOURS.  Every Jam is structured into in-breath sessions from 12-2.30pm EDT/New York Time each day (where we’re all on Zoom) and out-breaths (where we take time for rest, individual reflection, informal connections, and integration).  This design is intentional: we need rest and integration to learn and grow!
• Variety, Stretching, Growing: Together, we will engage a variety of learning modalities – small group dialogues, whole group conversations, movement and bodywork, systems thinking, storytelling and myth making, visual and performing arts, and more. There will be time for silence and for connecting with nature.  The Jam will unfold to make space for our whole selves, and also for gentle stretching—to try new things, learn new ways and un-learn old ones.
• Co-Creation: A jam, fundamentally, is a co-creation. It is a space to share your hopes and fears, to showcase your work and brainstorm, to seed new and different questions into the mix, and to share your passions and gifts… Our week will be designed to maximize what we can create together and spend time developing relationships that will seed forward.  

We like to say that “the Jam is always on.” Facilitators offer sessions each day that engage the common themes from participants’ applications with a variety of activities using body, heart, spirit and mind. These sessions shift and change based on what emerges from the group. Outside of the sessions, even in a virtual jam space, we make time and space for resting, playing, scheming, reflecting, connecting, exercising and the Fine Art of Hanging Out — whatever the Jammers present choose to do.  

We are prepared to be surprised!  One hope is that people will have the opportunity to integrate their learnings and carry them home, to be able to find and connect with people who have the heart, spirit, skills and knowledge that they are needing for the next steps of their personal journey and the next steps of our collective journey.

I’M INTERESTED!  WHAT ABOUT COSTS AND LOGISTICS?

The 9th annual YES! Education Transformation Jam will take place from August 7-12th from 9 am-11:30 am PST / 12-2:30 pm New York Time on Zoom.  (There will be no fixed session on August 10th to create space for rest, integration, and participant-led sessions). 

You are welcome to join from anywhere in the world!  And, we invite you to think about the whole week as the Jam, as we will have lots of fun things happening outside our main session timing too.  The more space you have, the more you will be able to JAM. We’ll send more details, and feel free to ask us any questions.

We offer the Jam for a sliding scale of $100-$400, and ask you to contribute what you can.  If it’s available, we encourage you to access your institution/organization/school’s professional development budget to help to cover some of these costs. 

After you apply to the Jam, if you like, we can share with you a customized letter that focuses on the professional-development benefits of the Jam that you can then share with your institution/employer.

Apply today!

WHAT DO ALUMNI HAVE TO SAY?  TESTIMONIALS

“The Jam felt like a beginning to me. I have spent so long in the daily grind of my job feeling disconnected from myself and from my dreams and goals. Particularly during Covid and remote work, it is difficult to connect with students and coworkers and difficult to focus on anything outside of fear and uncertainty. The Jam was a space to remember the original reasons I wanted to work in education and to feel myself beginning to reopen to larger possibilities.” – Laura Hillebrand, 24, assistant director of Cornerstone Community, New York City, New York

“It was so refreshing to hear from the perspective of established educators who work to resist and reform as I’ve spent so much energy in reimagine and recreate. I can’t believe how many kindred connections have come my way and I can’t wait to deepen with them all.” – Gabi Jubran, 32, HAPPI, INC. Menlo Park, California

 “ Oh Jam, I am grateful for your solid presence in my life.  I am grateful for being able to see the world through some of the other’s eyes and presence.  I feel a bit more hopeful knowing that there are lots of people out there, wide eyed and beautiful, contemplating how to be and create in brilliant ways. “ – Sumika Motoki, 43, Educator,  Winlaw, British Columbia, Canada

“ I arrived with many questions – most of them how do we…? How can we? How how how? And I don’t know that I got answers to all those hows, but I found hope. I found a simplicity to what felt so complicated. Loving across difference. Listening deeply. Daring to dream. Being supported and supporting. Making room for all the feelings and honoring each person. Seeing the interconnectedness of all things. Cultivating space and willingness to slow down – even when it feels like there is no time. I think this is the how. Our collective vision doesn’t feel so far away.” – Shannon MacMullin, 45, Gaelic language and culture community educator, Conrod Settlement, Nova Scotia, Canada

“Thank you for all you have given me. I appreciated meeting educators who work outside of the traditional classroom setting and those who were classroom teachers like me. I was most moved by how open everyone was, both facilitants and participants. I was initially intimidated by the group, but the organizers created a beautiful, judgment-free zone and I felt connected to everyone. The Jam is about connecting and that is so important to me, and I loved being in an environment where everyone shared similar values. Thank you for hearing me, seeing me, and helping me find my voice again.” – Neemu Reddy, 43, English Teacher, St. Andrew’s School, Middletown, Delaware

“I am healed and transformed in ways that are fueling so many concrete, tangible, and lasting changes in my work. What I want to make clear is that not only have I been healed (which makes the way for more healing) within myself, in my relationships, and in my role in the systemic world of institutions and social systems, but my day to day work will never again be the same.” – Angela Sillars, 32, early childhood educator and PhD candidate, Los Angeles, CA

We would love to have you apply for the Education Transformation Jam 2023.  Our priority deadline is June 15, 2023, and our final deadline is June 30, 2023. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so the sooner you apply, the better!

 If you have any questions, please contact our participant liaison, Joy George at <EducationYESJam@gmail.com>

Looking forward to Jamming with you!

– Joy, Jen, Jonathan, Minna, Eric, and Catherine

WHO IS PUTTING THIS ON?  MORE ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS AND FACILITATORS