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Zimbabwe: Theory X theatre Project

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PROJECT EARTH-TO-ART  

Tapping Local Natural Resources for Sustainable Art Education Development in Anglophone Ghana and other Modernist African settings

Call for Applications for 2008 AfriCOAE Artist-Teacher Workshop, Ghana  

African Community of Arts Educators (AfriCOAE) is inviting applications for its 2-week workshop residency program for art teachers and art teacher educators at a suburb of Accra in Ghana, from the 17^th until the 31^st of July 2008. The eco-pedagogy workshop entails mini-labs, independent practice, and Southern Ghanaian Culture Plunge; it is to bring together art educators in Africa and the rest of the world for intensive ideation, reflections and interchange on the harnessing and using resources from the local natural environment in art education.

Submissions Deadline: February 22, 2008

For more information: http://afropoets.tripod.com/eta or download the application form provided in http://www.insea.org 

SHORT DESCRIPTION: The eco-action research project seeks to redress the imbalance between the reliance on technological advancements, in light of imported industrially produced art materials, and eco-pedagogical dispositions of in-service art educators towards the abundance local natural resources for school teaching and learning in art with a focus on Ghana. The action plan is to put the national art educators’ pedagogical habits on the spotlight to stimulate for an alternative to the industrially produced art materials (often hazardous) to instil reliance on adept local resources to lower cost and to ensure availability. The project collaborators, therefore, seek deeper knowledge of the praxis status quo, while we re-introduce eco-awareness and praxis in an era of modernist manufacture in hope of some significant change in the pedagogical habits.  

On the account of creating eco-desirable teacher capital, a cohort of art educators will come together for a two-week workshop residency in Ghana. The workshop will entail formal discussions and mini-lab tours of regional sites to explore the Southern Ghana environment for eco-materials and test their effectiveness in art making. Upon return to their place of teaching, the cohort will work with their students to likewise explore- identity, collect, and design art materials from the local environment and test them by art making. Exploring adept local natural resources may entail recycling materials for art from one’s environment. In the following year, the cohort will reconvene to share the results of their school-based laboratory and engaged in papermaking workshop using local-ecological materials.  The methodology is to enable a context for eco-praxis with reciprocal stimuli for cross-fertilization of ideas through hands-on and face-to-face seminal dialogues to create a synergy for experience sharing and habits change for sustainable art education development in the Anglophone, Lusophone and Francophone African settings.

African Community of Arts Educators (AfriCOAE) is a community of arts specialists in and out of Africa and ambassador others in the rest of the world with interest in participating and promoting the work of shaping arts education in Africa. Membership in the community offers you an opportunity for continued education, service, leadership, travel, exchange and collaboration with colleagues worldwide. Membership is free through December 2008. We seek resource teaching artists, school arts teachers, teachers of arts teachers, scholars, and other individuals, institutions, and sponsors to create a synergy for interchange through hands-on and dialogue initiatives as stimuli for cross-fertilization of essential ideas and praxis for sustainable arts education development in the Anglophone, Lusophone and Francophone African settings. In collaboration with national government agencies, universities, arts/education associations, and with the foreign cultural agencies, the Community seeks to provide opportunities for meetings, projects, research, exhibitions, and other professional development activities to improve quality and access to creative arts education in national system schools across Africa. Members travelling to African countries can be provided with lists of members in the countries they intend to visit. Lastly, you can invite the group to advocacy for the arts, or assist in a project development in your country.

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The East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy is an international research and training center dedicated to creating and supporting radically humanistic practices and understandings of being human. To us, this means freeing psychology from its scientific pretenses and transforming it into a cultural activity and study.  

As psychology's failures become more glaring, its authority -- its institutional claim to expertise on human beings and how we tick (and how to "fix" us when things go wrong) -- is being seriously questioned both inside and outside the discipline. Thousands of practitioners and scholars worldwide object to institutionalized psychology's basic premises: (1) that the individual is the fundamental unit of human psychological life; (2) that behavior is what's important to study and understand about human beings; (3) that diagnosis, explanation and interpretation are ways/// to understand; and (4) that prediction is both possible and desirable. Millions of ordinary people want growth and hope -- not tests, diagnoses, identities and labels.

New psychologies are needed: Psychologies of possibility , not prediction. Psychologies concerned not merely with what is but with what is becoming. Psychologies created not by a few experts, but re-created in many places and many times over with the participation of ordinary people. Psychologies that do not tell us who we are, but instead help us actively create our lives in new ways. Psychologies that create community -- continuously. As progressives we have come to believe that if people address the issue of human development -- in direct and practical ways-- we might indeed change the world.

At the Institute, we have created our own "non-psychological" psychology -- a cultural-performatory methodology known as social therapy. The Institute's discoveries about learning, developing feed back continuously into the practice of social therapy. They are the backbone of the Institute's training of therapists, social workers, psychologists, educators, doctors, nurses, business and organizational leaders. They inform the consultation and project development we provide to programs and organizations in the U.S. and around the world.

 Contacting the East Side Institute

by e-mail: lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org
by telephone: 212 941-8906
by fax: 212 941-0511
by postal mail:
Att: Lois Holzman, Director
East Side Institute, 920 Broadway, 14th floor , New York, NY 10010

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TOPLAB

Interactive theatre workshops for social change

The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory Mission Statement
The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory of New York is a group of individuals assembled without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation or physical limitation. It is a collective of educators, theater workers and artists who have extensively trained and collaborated with Augusto Boal, founder of the Theater of the Oppressed. The purpose of The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory of New York is to provide a forum for the practice, performance and dissemination of the techniques of the Theater of the Oppressed. The Laboratory works with educators, human service and health care workers, union organizers and community activists who are interested in using interactive theater as an organizing tool to analyze, and explore solutions to, problems that arise as a result of conditions brought on by discrimination and
injustice in the workplace, school and community.

TOPLAB
122 West 27 Street 10 floor
New York, New York 10001 
(212) 924-1858
(212) 674-6506 (fax)
for more information on TOPLAB and what they do go to http://www.toplab.org

Contact TOPLAB at  toplab@toplab.org

In Place of War

Launched in July 2004, In Place of War project will research and create performance in sites of armed conflict and support and document performance work by artists and communities displaced by war. The project aims to generate information and resources about how performance is responding to war and this will be used to create dialogue with practitioners and researchers internationally.

For more information go to http://www.inplaceofwar.net/

Or contact the team:

Telephone: 0161 275 3784

Address:

In Place Of War

Centre for Applied Theatre Research

School of Music and Drama

University of Manchester

Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

Email: info@inplaceofwar.net

 PTO is a not-for-profit (IRS 501C3) organization with the following mission: To challenge oppressive systems by promoting critical thinking and social justice. We organize an annual meeting that focuses on the work of liberatory educators, activists, and artists; and community organizers.

This organization developed from a series of four conferences held in Omaha, Nebraska from 1995-1998. The conference was based on the ideologies and works of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. Using pedagogy and theatre, they each worked with oppressed peoples of the world to develop critical literacies and actions to overcome social systems of oppression.

For more information go to  http://www.ptoweb.org/

Or contact