Learning and Violence Action

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.

Latest Dispatch

Stuck

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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

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…

The side of a building showing a boarded up window and fire escapes

“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…

parenting

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…