In Your Shoes employs techniques rooted in theatrical performance to bring students of diverse social, cultural, and religious backgrounds into deep, challenging, and mutually respectful dialogue with one another to promote mutual understanding and empathy. In the pilot episode of How to Have a Conversation, Ijeoma Njaka, Inclusive Pedagogy Specialist and facilitator of In Your Shoes; and Ashanee Kottage, scientist storyteller activist from Colombo, Sri Lanka; share their experiences, reflections and lessons learned from engaging with In Your Shoes. In Your Shoes was founded as a collaborative project of Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, Georgetown’s Democracy & Governance program, and Patrick Henry College.
Ijeoma Njaka is an educator, artist, and writer. She currently works at a split position at Georgetown University: she is the Senior Project Associate for Equity-Centered Design at the Red House, a unit that is shaping a new learning paradigm that expands high-impact practices and fosters a culture of equity, innovation, inquiry and collaboration at Georgetown; and the Inclusive Pedagogy Specialist for the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, a center of learning, practice, policy, global theater and performance that harnesses the power of global performance to humanize politics. As an educator, she specializes in inclusive pedagogy and anti-bias education for student, faculty, and staff audiences. Inspired by the power of arts and museum education, she curated (In)Visibility at Georgetown: Past, Present, and Future, an art exhibit highlighting the work and experiences of marginalized students at Georgetown as an educational experience.
Ashanee Kottage is a scientist storyteller activist from Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is currently a Research Analyst at the Earth Commons, an environment and sustainability institute and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics working to communicate climate science and socio-ecological issues.
This episode of How to Have a Conversation is María José Pareja Rozo’s capstone project for the MA Program in Engaged and Public Humanities at Georgetown University. This project was made possible by the support of Kathryn Temple, Michael Coventry, Ricardo Ortiz, Sara Restrepo Quintero, Daniel Leguizamón, Christian Medina, Laura Alhach and Nayib Chalela. Special thanks to Ijeoma Njaka, Ashanee Kottage, Shiva Subbaraman, and everybody from the In Your Shoes project, the Lannan Center and the Gelardin Center for their valuable contributions to this episode. The artwork and design were created by Natalia Pareja Goethe. Music by Doctor Turtle, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Learn more and find the full transcript on the How to Have a Conversation website.
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