Changing the World With Words: TLA Foundations // with Amanda Lacson & Tracie Nichols

This thorough introduction to Transformative Language Arts (TLA) encompasses the personal and the global, the contemporary and the historic, and how TLA can be practiced through writing, storytelling, performance, song, and collaborative, expressive and integrated arts.

We will also explore ethics and considerations for practicing TLA through facilitation, coaching, teaching, and more, with special attention to diversity and inclusion when it comes to bringing more voices to the table.

Each week includes short readings, a lively discussion, and invigorating writing prompts to help you articulate more of your own TLA callings. The weekly writing prompts and pertinent discussion questions give you room to work and play through what you know, are coming to know, and how this knowledge cross-pollinates with what you do and who you are. Websites, videos and/or podcasts, and essays to engage with, bring you face to face with you real-life expressions of TLA as this field, profession, and calling grows around the world.

You can order a copy of The Power of Words: A TLA Reader, the required text for class), here.

This class is required for TLA Foundations Certification.

Week by Week

Week One: TLA History, Fields, and Traditions

An overview of theory and practice, including genres, arts and community practices, ethics, and your own values informing your TLA. Explore TLA in many forms–from poetry therapy to social change theater to healing storytelling–and share what ignites your soul and work. We’ll also look at how we see ourselves in our TLA work and callings and how we’re likely to seen in various communities, and the essential role of self-care in our TLA work and as core to TLA practice.

Week Two: TLA in Service: Health, Healing, Spirituality, and Personal Growth.

We’ll explore how TLA can help people find their way home through health or emotional crises or wounds, spiritual callings, and many manner of personal growth. Starting with the personal, and recognizing how the personal is political, we look at ways in which TLA can foster health, healing, and homecoming, and also some of our cultural biases and blindnesses about such directions. Some of this week’s resources will help us see more of the breadth and depth in how TLA can be effective in various religious and spiritual traditions, mainstream and holistic healing practice, and home-grown and psychological counseling as well as for people living with disabilities or serious illnesses.

Week Three: TLA as Catalyst: Community, Culture, History, and Social Change.

We’ll look at TLA in relation to community-building, culture-shifting, history-revisioning, and social change, and particularly explore what it means and can mean to be part of various communities. To better understand the time and place where we live now, we’ll also explore TLA as a vehicle for diversity and inclusion, including addressing oppression, marginalization, privilege, and access. Additionally, we’ll look at what it means to practice TLA in ways that foster a community ethic of care (as well as supporting individual self-care).

Week Four: TLA & Right Livelihood: Ways to Make a Living and a Life.

What are our callings for how we make a living and how we live a life? We’ll dive into how TLA intersects with our life’s work (whether that work relates to a paycheck, volunteering, creating art or writing, or other aspects of our life), and develop plans for where we’re led to go. We’ll draw from the Buddhist roots of the term “Right Livelihood” to better understand how we can forge good work that makes a positive contribution to our communities and lives.

Week Five: TLA in Action: Facilitation, Consulting, Collaboration, Coaching, and More.

Looking at the ethics and facilitation of our work, art, and community involvement, we’ll discuss and write about the specific forms of TLA we do and want to do, and how strong facilitation of TLA – whether in the form of community meetings, writing workshops, collaborative storytelling or theater projects, or one-on-one coaching – requires us to lifelong students of the art of facilitation.

Week Six: TLA and You: Plans, Visions, and Maps.

Deepening our plans for the work, art, and community-making ahead, we’ll clarify what’s right for us to pursue next, what support and tools we need along the way, and the future envision. This week will focus on what resources and pathways are around us, and how to best discern our own best ways to move forward.

Who Should Take This Class

This class is ideal for a wide variety of people, including professionals who want to infuse TLA into their teaching, counseling, pastoral work, arts collaboration, and community work; community leaders and activists seeking to bring more voice and vision to the table in their communities; and writers, storytellers, performers and other artists who want to develop their facilitation of writing, songwriting, expressive arts, drama therapy and community theater, collaborative arts, storytelling, and integrated arts; and perspective or current students or alumni of TLA studies.

TLAN offers scholarships based on income as well as some partial scholarships for people living with serious illness and/or disability or people of color through the Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Fund. Please fill out this scholarship application form so that we can find the best way to make the class accessible to you.

Format

This is an online class which will be taught via the online platform, Wet Ink. Each week, a new week will open full of resources, reflections, discussion questions, and writing prompts.

Students should expect to spend a minimum 4-6 hours per week perusing resources and readings, answering a discussion question, engaging in several writing prompts, and responding to peers’ work. From our interactions, we sustain a welcoming and inspiring community together.

We will also have three optional 60-minute Zoom sessions at 1:30 p.m. ET | 12:30 CT | 11:30 a.m. MT | 10:30 a.m. PT | 6:30 p.m. UTC on Saturday, November 2, 23 and December 14. (Sessions will be recorded and available only for class participants).

Required Text: The Power of Words: A Transformative Language Arts Reader, edited by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Janet Tallman. You can purchase the text here.

Supplemental Text: Transformative Language Arts in Action, edited by Ruth. A. Farmer and Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. You can purchase this text on Amazon or Rowman and Littlefield. 

About the Facilitators

Amanda Faye Lacson (she/hers) is a Filipina-American writer, photographer and historian. She examines how our identities are shaped, how they impact the way we move in the world, and how we write our history through her creative nonfiction and playwriting; photography documenting the artistic process; oral history-oriented podcast interviewing; and by creating and facilitating community-based workshops for the family historian. Amanda is a board member and Membership co-chair of the Transformative Language Arts Network; writer, performer and director with the Playful Substance theater company; and producer, host and editor of Goddard in the World Podcast. She is also the founder of FamilyArchive Business, a studio designed to support the family historian at any point in the archiving process, from organizing photos in boxes to creating a final product to share with the family.

Recent projects include: writing and performing work based on her experience as a Pinay child and mother in the devised theater piece Raised Pinay: The 5^th Generation; presenting a generative writing workshop on using Transformative Language Arts to create and deepen one’s family archive at the TLAN Power of Words conference; writing a satirical monologue from the perspective of Christopher Columbus reckoning with his legacy in the afterlife, for Playful Substance; and photographing classical Indian dance performance by Brooklyn Raga Massive for Chelsea Factory. Keep up with Amanda's work at amandafayelacson.com.

Tracie Nichols (she/her) is a Transformative Language Artist, poet, and facilitator helping people write themselves home through her ongoing writing circles and writing workshops nurturing personal awareness, resilience, and transformation. Founder of the Saturday Writing Circle and co-founder of Embodied Writers, she currently also serves as the Coordinator for the Transformative Language Arts Network.

Tracie’s appreciation for the power of words to heal and transform started decades ago when she began writing poems because her arms ached from holding the unflinching truth of violence in one hand and the equally unflinching truth of compassion in the other. She realized she'd found home with the Transformative Language Arts Network community when she realized it merged the principles of her graduate degree in Transformative Learning and Change with her passion for writing as path to healing and growth.

Today, she lives in southeastern Pennsylvania with her husband, occasionally her adult children, and a very large ginger tabby cat named Strider, writing poems from her tiny desk under the wide reach of two old Sycamore trees. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rogue Agent, Text Power Telling, kerning and The Weight of Motherhood anthology.

Connect with Tracie at tracienichols.com.