On Saturday, 3 August 2024, the Association for Baha’i Studies (ABS) hosted “Discourse in Action: The First Fruits of the Wilmette Institute Social Transformation Certificate.” This video recording captures the proceedings of the session, which featured presentations from Wilmette Institute graduate students Emily Chou, Geri Lynn Peak, and Susan Wolfe. The session was chaired by Citra Golestani, WI Associate Director.
Videography: Aziza Hutcherson
Learn about WI’s Social Transformation Certificate Program
Excerpts from presentation
“One of the greatest parts of the certificate program’s pedagogy is that it has a course project where we have to go out and have conversation[s]. We have to study first, and then we go out and plan conversations with people in our communities. Then, we come back and reflect on how those conversations went. Then we revise things, and then we go back out and have more conversations… And through that, we’re engaging in this public discourse and also being assisted and accompanied by the course faculty and anyone else who we’re talking to in the class [Zoom sessions] or in the [online] forums in the course. That process really helps us to hone our skills for participating in social discourse.”
–Emily Chou
“The class that we took on the environment blew me away. I had all these ideas… I was recycling… every week. I was driving my hybrid and doing my part, and then it was like wait a minute—there’s a lot more to this… and that was transformative for me.”
–Susan Wolfe
“When I engaged with the Institute, it gave me an alternative perspective. I’m learning that your means must be consistent with your ends; that if you want peace, if you want equity, then you have to do it in a way that is peaceful and equitable.”
–Susan Wolfe
“One of the things I brought into the course is an interest in centering Blackness, which is part of the discourse across the world village—centering Africana and Indigenous—not just harm but wisdom. A lot of people look at—’oh, look how badly they were treated; we gotta think about that’—discounting the fact that we have something to contribute because we have already been cast as worth-less… So my intention was to explore the alignment between the Baha’i Framework for Action and this illustration [Visionary Threads Power Narrative framework–see graphic below, from slide show] I thought is such a strong adaptation of the concept of centering Blackness.”
–Geri Lynn Peak
Source: Insight Center website (https://insightcced.org/).
