Workshop | Interactive Interruption: Anti-Racism Experiential Learning through a Theater Model

In this 2 part interactive and engaging workshop, Rakeem and Kasia will focus on two of the most important components of anti-racism work; relationship and action. This workshop is designed for beginning, intermediate and advanced learners who engage through multiple modalities. This approach gives all participants a chance to learn from the instructors as well as co-participants, following in popular education pedagogy as illustrated by Paolo Freire.

This workshop is a highly engaging interactive setting that utilizes large group sharing, small group breakout conversations, instructor facilitation and role playing to create mechanisms for deep self-reflection and continued growth and development. As participants engage in the three-hour session, they will find entry points to anti-racism work to highlight the ways in which racism infects our minds, bodies, relationships, and workplaces.

Throughout the first half of the workshop, participants will explore what prevents us from being our most aspirational selves in moments of tension, turmoil and discomfort. As a group, we will explore how the influences of power, societal norms and our individual positionalities (our sense of self and our worldview as determined by our intersectional identities) guide our decision making during these moments. Participants will have opportunities to ask questions, engage in small group conversation and openly reflect.

During the second half of the workshop, participants will learn dozens of accessible strategies for interrupting racism in various spaces. By practicing these strategies together, all participants will be able to learn from each other and offer and receive important feedback reflective of a multitude of identities. Using a Theater of the Oppressed model allows the participants to see and practice skills to help organically explore and resolve complex (but often everyday) situations that arise in many workplace settings.

All learning styles, abilities, and identities are welcomed.

Collectively, the team of folks at Engage to Change has over 50 years of experience conducting anti-racism and anti- oppression training, strategic planning, consulting, change management, and restorative conversations. We take an approach to the work that encourages engagement and exploration for all participants. Over the past few years, we have provided consultation, trainings, and support for many organizations and educational institutions including but not limited to: the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the Oregon Health Authority including their Office of Equity and Inclusion, Multnomah Bar Association, Prosper Oregon, Lemelson Foundation, Friends of Baseball, Legal Aid Services of Oregon, Oregon Law Center, National Lawyers Guild, Lewis and Clark Law School, Willamette Law School, Tonkon Torp, Stoel Rives and Marmoset Music and many more.

We have conducted hundreds of in person trainings, workshops, conversations, and engagements with a wide spectrum of state, city, federal governments and workplaces as well as community organizations, law firms, not-for-profit and educational institutions. During COVID, Engage to Change conducted over 2000 hours of online interactive trainings and workshops to over 50 government agencies, organizations, businesses and not for profits.

Engage to Change is a trusted partner of many governmental, not-for-profit, legal, educational, philanthropic, and healthcare organizations in their anti-racism efforts. Often we are invited into collaboration with groups for smaller projects and then asked to return to complete additional work that is longer term, more complex, and supportive of the group’s anti-racist organizational change efforts. In partnership with the groups we work with, we craft specific goals and content that honors where that group is and what would best work to help them shift. Below is a small sampling of some of the more recent projects.