At LAVA - Learning and Violence Action - we hold a radical respect for the ways all people negotiate hardship and injustice.
We offer resources and create community to
- Increase understanding of the complexities of violence and trauma
- Appreciate the brilliance of human survival strategies
- Recognize the impact of such experiences on learning in every setting and at every age
- Work for change in institutions and organizations, and
- Support greater learning success for babies, children, youth, and adults
This site is for you if you learn, teach, counsel, or support learning and change in any role.
Key Themes
Violence
Violence is anything that objectifies people, other creatures, or the earth - seeing that being as a thing to use, exploit, or damage
Survival Strategies
Our gorgeous, powerful brains! They helped us survive, but how they do that impacts how we learn
Supporting Learning
When we acknowledge the impact of violence on learning, we can become curious and creative to support successful learning
Social Responsibility
Learning takes place in the world, a world to which we all have a responsibility – a response ability
Our Guiding Principles
Curiosity
Curiosity is the heart and foundation of our approach
Connection
Connection allows us to be present to learning
Conscious Awareness
Many of us have trouble staying present in the face of difficulties
Dispatches
from the front lines of learning and teaching
Stuck
It has been very difficult to begin writing this post, the silently blinking cursor being the logical form for the content at hand. Often, we experience repeated or sustained sensations, and then name them with an emotion, followed by finding a narrative to justify the name (Tingling eyes – I am lonely – I moved…
“It’s almost never something else”
Article 26 of The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) names education as a fundamental right. We can further intuit that in many less tangible ways, learning is close to the heart of what makes us human. So what has happened in the lives of people who have a difficult or joyless relationship…
Challenging Parenting
March 2016: I discovered I was pregnant. It was not long at all after, that I began to explore my feelings (and insecurities) about parenting. And by explore, I mean take a straight up nose dive into a black hole of mixed emotions, mainly led by my fears of inevitably becoming the parent to my…