CHLOE ZELKHA
Sample Workshop Topics
Leadership & Organizing
Community organizers have long understood the power of storytelling (and story-listening!) for effective movement work. Stories ground us, connect us to each other, and often explain our motivations in a way that facts and statistics cannot. Perhaps most importantly, telling and listening for stories can be a powerful way to build relationships. Through group brainstorms, skill-building activities, and practice, together we'll craft and tell strategic stories that can strengthen our work, our connections, and our understanding of ourselves.
Storytelling: Leading with Narrative
Introduction to Community Organizing
Community organizing is a method of social change that brings folks together to act on shared self-interest. In this session, we will explore what makes organizing different from other models for change, the cycle of organizing, and core relational tools like storytelling and one-to-ones. Through skill-building presentations, creative activities, and group sharing--and with a lot of interactive practice and real-world examples--we'll explore the art of building communities for strategic action.
Giving & Receiving Feedback
Giving and receiving feedback can sometimes feel taboo, scary, or risky. Sometimes, this means we don't even get to hear our positive impact on others, let alone the stuff that might help us grow. It also means our giving feedback muscle can be weak; we don’t know how to say things in a way that's kind, honest, hearable, and humble. This workshop is a chance to reflect on and practice these elusive skills. Blending techniques from The Food Project's "Straight Talk" practice, nonviolent communication, and other modalities, participants learn and practice giving and receiving feedback, and some different models for introducing this practice into their workplaces and communities.
Liberation Series
This is a series of workshops that give participants tools for thinking and talking about power and oppression. Looking both inward and outward, we will examine the ways privilege and oppression show up in ourselves and our lives, as well as how they function on a macro scale. Using embodied exercises (playback, theatre of the oppressed, art), group discussion, solo reflection, and storytelling, we’ll experiment with and imagine more liberatory ways of being. Workshops include: The Cycle of Socialization, Levels of Oppression, Exploring Privilege, Solidarity & Allyship, & Self-Sustainability.
Teaching & Learning
Experiential Ed: Strategies for Deep & Engaged Learning at All Ages
Social-Emotional Learning Lab
We know that our students need social and emotional skills--not just for academic learning--but also to grow and thrive in their school communities and beyond. In this workshop, we will explore approaches for teaching to the whole child in the framework of social-emotional learning. Participants will have a chance to share their own wisdom and SEL resources with each other, and to experience some backpocket SEL activities and strategies from the field.
Trauma-Informed Pedagogy
This workshop provides a framework for creating learning environments that attend to the whole person. Trauma-informed pedagogy creates opportunities for all young people to thrive and grow emotionally, socially, and intellectually. We will learn basic brain science and theories for understanding trauma and its impacts on the body, explore the role of feelings in the classroom, learn creative and fun downregulation activities, and celebrate the transformative power of community and relationship. Participants will also have the opportunity to build a downregulation toolbox for their classrooms, and to collaboratively revise lesson plans with an eye to new frameworks. Through collaborative games, storytelling, group discussion, and multimodal content, we will together imagine and experience what a trauma-informed and emotionally-attuned classroom can look like.
Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness meditation is a practice that invites the mind to see and notice what is here now. We gently train the mind to slowly settle and drop into direct experience, with as little judgment--or impulse to change, fix, alter, or make anything in particular happen--as possible. When we can do this, we get to be really intimate with the present moment, and sometimes even have experiences of insight. Participants experience a few different mindfulness practices, and have a chance to hear their experience normalized, ask questions, practice in community, and tune into what is happening right here.
Singing Circles, Listening Circles, & Contemplative Services
Singing Circles are a chance to experience the magic of communal song (and the silence that comes right afterwards), from simple chants to multi-part harmonic songs, and with plenty of time for participants to teach and lead as well.
Listening Circles are a chance to share what's on our hearts and minds in community, woven together with moments of stillness and song.
Contemplative services are a chance to slow down and invite ourselves into presence through song, silence, and poetry. I love leading both secular and Jewish services.
Ritual
Ritual helps us mark time and transitions, but it can also have transformative power, not only acknowledging but actually shifting our emotional state or self-understanding. I love crafting and leading solo rituals and rituals where we get to be witnessed by community. I especially love working on creative grief rituals (see my zine for examples!), rage rituals, and those that use the Jewish practice of mikveh.
Isn't learning a joy?! And isn't school (often) a drag? Let's explore the art and science of making learning experiences playful, emergent, authentic, and motivating. In conversation with our own most profound learning experiences, the cognitive science of how people learn, and inspiring pedagogical models of what learning can and should look like, we will explore how to design for flow, deeper understanding, expansive transfer, and belonging.