So far at learningandviolence.net, we are educators, activists, artists, musicians, researchers and life-long learners based in Canada. We have spent many years engaged in learning and teaching about the impacts of violence on learning. We work with others across North America and Internationally.
Learningandviolence.net is a hub to support collaborations around understanding and addressing the impacts of violence. Drawing from research, innovative practice and creative arts, we promote curiosity to support personal, educational and ultimately societal transformation.
Jenny Horsman
Dr. Jenny Horsman is a community-based researcher and educator passionate about understanding the ongoing impact of violence on learning. For more than 30 years she has worked with students, educators, counsellors, shelter workers, administrators, and others to support learning and change for all.
She is a recipient of the YMCA Peace Medallion and her work is underpinned by mindfulness meditation practices and an extensive study of the latest neuroscience. She has developed curriculum, conducted training, and delivered workshops and lectures on adult learning and literacy on four continents. Her passionate focus is not only on understanding the impact of violence on learning but more importantly on addressing the ways educational interactions in any setting would change if we all acknowledged and addressed these impacts creatively. She is vehement about the importance of finding ways for institutions, and organizations to recognize the problem is not in individual students or clients, but in the systems that too often make it harder to learn and change. She is a specialist in this area, a UNESCO panelist and juror, a sought after speaker and trainer.
She has written extensively on literacy and pedagogy, and violence and learning, including the books Something in my Mind Besides the Everyday; Too Scared to Learn; and Take on the Challenge. She is developing the revised learningandviolence.net website and is always looking for new allies and resources to help with that task. She dreams the new site will become a widely-used resource and training hub, and a powerful catalyst for educational change in Canada and Internationally.
She upcycles, and creates mosaics, loving the metaphor of crafting new possibilities out of anything discarded! Working with others to help them find a creative voice a way of re-imagining possibilities fascinates her! As an avid cyclist and gardener, she cares for land, and grows connections in every way she can discover.
Check out jennyhorsman.com to see the work Jenny Horsman has done, and what she currently offers. As an internationally renowned presenter, workshop leader, and consultant she is sought after to design and develop training, curriculum, and resource materials.
Talk to her about the specialized trainings she could design for your centre, staff, or program. Tell her about the online courses you would like to see. Check out her current offerings at:
Heather Lash
Heather Lash has been involved in access/transitional education for most of her adult life, both in community-based programs and at Ontario colleges. For the past 9 years she has been a faculty member at George Brown College in Toronto, mainly with the Academic Upgrading program, where she has developed a course aimed at all the non-academic aspects of returning to school after periods of struggle. Her most recent focus is on working with all-Indigenous cohorts and on enriching the engagement of Indigenous students in all programming.
Her graduate studies of Narrative Ethics focused on the philosophical and political dimensions involved in receiving people’s stories of their tough experiences. Those themes continue to motivate her as she researches and writes on the impacts of violence and trauma on learning. She creates spaces where both faculty and students feel safe enough to engage in teaching and learning at their most transformational. She has a breadth of experience designing curriculum and supporting others to create curricula and classroom practices that deeply honour the strengths of diverse students.
Her central preoccupation is bringing love into the classroom, which she believes is integral to our developing ideas of what it means to “Indigenize” the curriculum. She has seen the ways this approach helps the transformations that education badly needs to actually happen!
She has a passion for teaching and facilitating: upgrading and post-secondary students, teachers, and trainers. She has ease and fascination with the metacognitive and can make rich and complex analysis accessible to people with all levels of education. She likes talking about how we talk, and thinking about how we think! She also has intensive and extensive experience tailoring content to specific sectors and specific moments in people’s/organizations’ development.
She would love to have a conversation with you about how she could create a workshop, seminar, or lecture presentation that would meet you, your institution, or your organization, exactly where you are right now.
Network
Sheri Cohen
Sheri Cohen, a Social Worker, is committed to educating the health care system about the impact of violence on chronic illness and caring for self. She is also an artist and community activist around violence and learning disability. “I don’t shy away from suffering, but befriend brokenness so that connectedness can lead to experiences of self-awareness from an embodied place.”
Kim Brodey
Born in 1949, Kim Brodey, informed by her own journey of reclaiming herself from childhood trauma, has gathered a tool bag that draws on a wide range of body centered modalities. Having been a birth midwife, she now midwifes the journey back into your body.
Nadine Sookermany
Nadine Sookermany (she/her) comes to this work as an educator, community activist, parent, partner and advocate for all things political (which of course, is always personal), and is currently the Executive Director of Women’s Health Clinic in Winnipeg, Canada. With decades of experience in the non-profit sector working to end gender-based violence, Nadine always brings a decolonizing, intersectional, feminist lens and passion to anti-violence education and community-based work.
Susan Tiihonen
Susan Tiihonen (she/her they/them) is a queer, disabled multidisciplinary artist, social justice activist and healing arts practitioner. They join the efforts of those who are working to bring about equity, equanimity and justice by using art to create social change. Their videos have been screened at the United Nations in New York City, the TIFF Bell Lightbox and have been used to educate frontline workers in the anti violence sector since 2010.