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Intentionally Equitable Hospitality Series May 24

View the Daily Nourishing Reflections

Welcome to the Intentionally Equitable Hospitality Series for May 2024

 

Equity Unbound is organizing a month-long community series on Intentionally Equitable Hospitality (IEH) in facilitation. In a series of asynchronous daily activities and three core live sessions, participants will have opportunities to join a nourishing community and learn together about what IEH entails from diverse facilitators, and reflect together on ways to practice IEH by experiencing a variety of facilitation strategies and reimagining them in ways that would make them more welcoming to diverse and marginalized learners/participants.

Who Is This Series For?

This series can help you reflect on and improve your practice if you are anyone who teaches or facilitates or is otherwise responsible for other people’s learning, especially if you care about including everyone and creating a welcoming environment for diverse participants or learners. Whether you teach in K-12, higher education, corporate training, freelance facilitation, or support others as an educational developer, instructional technologist, or coach, or if you are a student or teaching assistant who supports others’ learning or leads meetings in informal or formal contexts.

What is Intentionally Equitable Hospitality?

Intentionally Equitable Hospitality (IEH) reminds us that any workshop facilitator or teacher is a “host” of a space, and as such, is responsible for making that space hospitable or welcoming for others. IEH is a critical praxis that centers equity considerations in whom we involve in the design of a space, including intentionally asking ourselves questions in four phases: pre-design, design, facilitation, and community interactions outside of the moments of meetings/facilitation that can help sustain equity and community.

Since all gatherings are essentially collective endeavors, learning design for equity-in-community is a critical component of IEH facilitation. IEH is a values-based approach that promotes co-learning among students, who might be different in innumerable ways, by prioritizing the needs and wants of the most marginalized among them.

As a critical pedagogical approach, IEH prioritizes the values of social justice while fostering learner/participant agency within the learning space, while never forgetting the ways in which power and oppression work outside of that learning space, and how they influence it.

Intentionally Equitable Hospitality (IEH) is a facilitation praxis that was first developed by the co-directors and members of the grass-roots hybrid movement called Virtually Connecting (Bali, Caines, Hogue, DeWaard & Friedrich, 2019) and later extended to broader contexts by two of the co-founders of Equity Unbound Maha Bali and Mia Zamora (Bali & Zamora, 2022). Much of the text above is extracted from this latter article. You may have experienced IEH in practice in the three-month learning journey called Mid-Year Festival (MYFest).

Themes, Dates & Times of Sessions

There will be daily light asynchronous activities.

There will also be the following synchronous sessions

Three core synchronous sessions:

(all sessions take place at 4pm Cairo, 1pm UTC/GMT, 9am EDT)

    • What makes facilitation equitable? Wednesday, 8 May (click to see in your timezone)

    • Challenges in making facilitation equitable. Monday, 13 May (click to see in your timezone)

    • Designing and assessing for equity in our facilitation. Wednesday, 15 May (click to see in your timezone)

There will also be optional “brainstrust” office hours for you to share your plan for upcoming facilitation sessions and get feedback from facilitators and peers. The dates are TBA, but one of them will be focused on enhancing accessibility.

Who is Facilitating the Sessions?

The sessions will be led by Equity Unbound community leaders and members: Maha Bali, Mia Zamora, Irene Maweu, Yasser Tamer Atef, Theresa Destrebecq, Nate Angell, and Nadine Aboulmagd.

What Will I Learn in the Series?

How can facilitators/teachers foster an authentic and collective sense of belonging when designing for impactful learning? How can we create an equitable environment that is hospitable to diverse participants/learners/students? How can we address the challenges we face in creating equitably hospitable spaces, particularly when facilitating online?

If you have attended an IEH series previously in January 2023, this one will be quite different, not only because of the new facilitators joining us, but also because of the hopefully enriching asynchronous activities and month-long engagement.

What Will Each Session Entail?

This will be a meta-experience — observe everything we do and reflect: for whom is this kind of activity/action welcoming, for whom might it not be? How can we make it more equitable to more groups?

Participants will have an opportunity to learn about the various phases of IEH: pre-design, design, facilitation, and beyond-the-moment, and apply what they’ve learned to particular facilitation/teaching strategies.

Asynchronous

    • Daily throughout May, we will share 1-2 brief videos by diverse experienced facilitators and there will be a few optional light asynchronous activities/prompts throughout the week. These are activities that themselves help build community, while also serving as case study material for exploring the extent to which the activities promote equity, and how they can be done better. These asynchronous activities are themselves activities you can consider using or adapting in your facilitation.

Synchronous

The three core synchronous sessions will involve some whole-group discussions and some breakouts in small groups where you reflect together on the theme of the day, and report back. There will also be an opportunity to do a quick meta-reflection on the session itself.

    • What makes facilitation equitable? In this session, we will focus on the value of warming up, community agreements, and what we can learn from previous equitable facilitation experiences we’ve had. We will also reflect on what Intentionally Equitable Facilitation means in practice.

    • Challenges in making facilitation equitable. We will build on what you’ve been sharing as facilitation challenges, and share some of our (facilitators’ and participants’) reflections on causes for these challenges and potential strategies to overcome them using a simulation activity to practice “intentional adaptation”.

    • Designing and assessing for equity in our facilitation. We will share strategies to help us reflect on our sessions’ designs and actual facilitation, and consider ways of improving equity intentionally within them.

Types of Tickets

We want this experience to be accessible to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Therefore, we have multiple ticket prices as follows:

    1. Early Believer full price is 300 USD. This ticket gives you access to the full month of IEH facilitation, plus the entire three-month learning journey of MYFest24 and any other Equity Unbound activities throughout 2024. Please choose this ticket if you can afford to, as it will help us compensate facilitators for this series, help fund future Equity Unbound offerings, and you will get early access to MYFest24 without any additional payment.

    1. IEH series only: 100 USD. This gives you access to the full month-long event, but not future MYFest events. However, if at any point you decide you wish to join MYFest, you can register for it once registration is open.

    1. Sponsor another person’s ticket. 200 USD. This is the same as “IEH series only” but double, because you’re sponsoring another person’s ticket who cannot afford it (this is not a particular person, but covers for some of the “free” tickets.

    1. Half-off IEH series: 50 USD Same as “IEH series only” but at half price for those who cannot afford full price.

    1. Symbolic contribution: 20 USD. This is the same as “IEH series only” but at a symbolic price for those who cannot afford full price.

    1. Donation: (variable).

    1. Free ticket for students, minorities, adjuncts, participants from emerging economies, or anyone who is otherwise unable to pay any of the other ticket prices.

* **PLEASE NOTE that Eventbrite is set up to make it seem like each sync event date is a separate ticket — but this is not how this event is made. Pay once to get access to all three sessions plus the monthlong event. The reason we’ve added all three dates is to make sure if someone decides to join after they’ve already missed a session, that they can still find tickets.

What is MYFest?

In 2022 and 2023, Equity Unbound organized a Mid-Year Festival (see https://myfest.equityunbound.org for this year’s themes), a three-month choose-your-own-learning-journey event, and we are organizing MYFest24 as well, we just have not fully solidified exact session dates and times.

If you have never participated in MYFest but want to get an idea of what was offered, check out MYFest22-at-a-glance and MYFest23-at-a-glance or check out these playlists (MYFest22 playlist, MYFest23 playlist) of some of the recorded sessions (many sessions were not recorded, however, as they involved intimate conversations and interaction in breakout rooms).

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