SEEDS for Change Learning Without Borders Series

This global collective learning and teaching space of exchange of knowledge materialized in the winter months of 2020 just as the wave of Covid hit. Week after week and in some semesters four days a week, the space was lit by the energy of humans who, for hours and hours each week, filled virtual and in-person rooms and outdoor spaces, joined circles grounded in the teachings of global scholars, leaders, multi-disciplinary artists, healers, sociologists, teachers-in-the-making, seasoned professors, administrators, caregivers, political mothers, and students from all ages. Together and grounded by the Seven Teaching Principles of the Anishinabek people, we crawled in an inquisitorial journey, and continue to do, that tickles the surface of questions like “Who are you without colonialism?” and “Who Are you without the patriarchy,” “How do you read beyond the binary,” “Where is colonialism located in your body,” “How do you write beyond the binary,” “How do you read math,.” These questions are intentionally integrated as part of the radical, innovative, transformational, politically creative and land-based curriculum of Dr. Clelia O. Rodriguez, who was born and raised in corn fields, surrounded by rivers and volcanoes and with ways of knowing passed on to her by grandfather Vicente Rodriguez, grandmother Olimpia Rodriguez, Aunties, great-grandmothers and the spiritual presence of sacred seeds.

The Series welcomed an astral diversity of hearts-minds to teach and share their knowledge across an interdisciplinary and intersectional spectrum on Popular Education, what is Anti-Discriminatory Education given the absence of Dignity in educational spaces, experiences of existing in a racist and societies dominated by patriarchal attitudes and behaviours, Settler Colonialism and the urgency to address it from a land-based approach, pedagogies of liberation, and healing (physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually) as a political act. The series featured provocative questions that impact the real world across all subjects, history, geography, geology, botany, art, mathematics, the art of learning as a political agent,  politics, sociology, holistic health, philosophy and more.