Folk School
What animates you?
What challenges you?
What does this mean for your life?
In our folk school, we educate our whole bodies through the healing work of our hands, heads, and hearts. This kind of school looks a lot like seedbanks and nurseries to propagate our own gifts, skills, and imaginations. All so we can get to the root of love, liberation, and living soil!
Inspired by the tradition of Appalachian folk schools, radical underground study, peasant agroecology schools and farmer-to-farmer movements, and the escuelitas of the Zapatistas, we offer workshops on land-and-craft skills, partner with students for practicums and research projects, organize reading roundtables to study and reflect, and encourage deep and lively conversations while we work together about what it means to be alive right now.
The heartwood of the folk school beats with the belief that:
education is waking up our conscience (Paulo Freire)
education is knowing ourselves and knowing others (Parker Palmer)
education is the practice of freedom (bell hooks)
The folk school is a small way we learn what we need to know to be who we need to be for the vital vocation of being human with gifts and gratitude for this good earth.
Sample Past Workshops:
Agroforestry undergrad course with Eastern Mennonite University, Fall 2024
Economics for Emancipation: A Course on Capitalism, Solidarity, and How We Get Free with Francisco Perez, August 9th-11th, 2024
Coppice Agroforestry and Keyline Design with Mark Krawczyk, March 10th-12th 2023
Mutual Aid Roadshow: Collective Power and the Spirit of Regeneration (with Cooperate WNC) at Dreaming Stone Arts and Ecology Center, December 4th 2022
Radical Roundtable on Love, Liberation, and Living Soil with undergrad and grad students, Fall 2019 and Summer 2022
Silvopasture with Steve Gabriel, May 27th-29th 2022
Propagation Power! at Dreaming Stone Arts and Ecology Center, November 20th 2021
Uprooting Racism in the Food System with Soul Fire Farm, December 7th-8th 2019
Pruning and Grafting with Bill Whipple, 2017 and 2018
