The holidays are not always a joyful occasion, especially for those facing hardship or stress. In this activity, students share their feelings about the upcoming holidays and consider how they might provide some encouragement for those who are struggling.

Guidelines about how to structure non formal learning sessions about self-awareness for adult learners with disability: a collection of effective practical exercises.

The purpose of this class is to offer students a new perspective on the importance of our bodily experience to our cognitive and social lives. The curriculum is designed to foster a working appreciation for how better bodily awareness can positively affect how we feel in our bodies, carry and present ourselves for improved social sensitivity and more successful social interactions.

Drama combines the literary arts of storytelling and poetry with the world of live performance. As a form of ritual as well as entertainment, drama has served to unite communities and challenge social norms, to vitalize and disturb its audiences. In order to understand this rich art form more fully, we will study and discuss a sampling of plays that exemplify different kinds of dramatic structure; class members will also participate in, attend, and review dramatic performances.

The Kindness Curriculum, available in both Spanish and English, has been shown to help students self-regulate, improve peer relationships, develop a stronger sense of empathy and kindness, and positively impact academic performance and social competence.

Social-Emotional Learning is essential for work and school environments. Since it is the transition to high school, this is very important at the middle school level. Students will learn how to be self-aware and build healthy relationship skills. Once the entire social-emotional lesson is completed, the students learn how to: work with others, build resiliency, achieve goals, reduce bullying, and prevent risky behaviours. Vanessa Matthiessen, Parker Eklund, and Sarra Choucair 

Unlike film, theater in America does not have a ratings board that censors content. So plays have had more freedom to explore and to transgress normative culture. Yet censorship of the theater has been part of American culture from the beginning, and continues today. How and why does this happen, and who decides whether a play is too dangerous to see or to teach? Are plays dangerous? Sinful? Even demonic? In our seminar, we will study plays that have been censored, either legally or extra-legally (i.e. refused production, closed down during production, denied funding, or taken off school reading lists). We’ll look at laws, both national and local, relating to the “obscene”, as well as unofficial practices, and think about the way censorship operates in American life now. And of course we will study the offending texts, themselves, to find what is really dangerous about them, for ourselves.

A visualization exercise to help you imagine who you want to be in the future.