Description:

• Comfy Cozy Community (CCC) teaching and learning is connected to disability justice tenet #6 of SUSTAINABILITY: We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long term. Our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice and liberation.

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Prior knowledge reflection:

• What are you doing to model rituals and cultures of slowness, relaxation, and ease?

• How can you build in and schedule routines of slowness, relaxation, and ease within daily teaching and learning practices?

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Essential questions:

• How can educators model practices of slowness and imperfection with students?

• How can educators continuously educate themselves and others to learn about, center, and practice built in routines of slowness, relaxation, and ease?

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Objectives:

• To identify and practice concrete ways to build in daily rituals where educators slow down and model this slowness for their students.

• To name tangible ways educators can continue to educate themselves and others to build in routines of slowness, relaxation, and ease.

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Content:

• LA Spoonies Collective was co-founded in Los Angeles, CA by two spirit and Chicana disabled activist, Lilac Vylette Maldonado and more. The LA Spoonies Collective is led by majority sick, disabled, trans, and queer BIPOC low income communities. The LA Spoonies Collective reminds us to slow down, check in with ourselves and each other, and co-create sustainable systems of built in care in support of disability justice. To learn more, read LA Spoonies Collective.

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Effective classroom strategies:

• The first action to proactively creating a mindful routine of slowing down is learning to attend to the needs of our bodyminds as our bodyminds need water, food, rest, breaks, moments of quiet, and meaningful connection in a reciprocal community. Educators can model this slowness by scheduling time at the beginning, middle, and end of the day for educators and students to be in quiet, slow, meditative, and relaxing community, where educators and students can sit in stillness, calming music, nature, and clear our minds.

• Students, staff, educators, and community are invited to continuously learn from the wisdom of multiply marginalized disability justice organizations like LA Spoonies Collective who hold knowledge on the ways disabled people know how to slow down and be attentive to our and each other’s bodymind access needs. Continuously researching, following, and learning from intersectional disabled people such as the LA Spoonies Collective on the ways all can slow down will allow educators to engage in lifelong learning to better center and enact spoonie cultures of slowing down which include less busy work, less quick turn around due dates, and less pressures for perfection. CCC teaching and learning will take place when learning exists for learning instead of expectations to achieve flawless and timely perfection.

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References:

• LA Spoonies Collective; Los Angeles Spoonies Collective, n.d. https://www.spooniecollective.org/