Dr. Farima Pour-Khorshid

CSMP Lead Learn 2023: Staying the Course

Thursday, February 9th 9:00 – 10:20 AM

Title:

Healing Centered Engagement Toward Individual, Relational, and Institutional Wellness

Presenter Biography:

Dr. Farima Pour-Khorshid is a Bay Area educator, organizer, and scholar. She taught at the elementary grade levels in her home community for over a decade and spent the latter half of her teaching career also supporting educators locally, nationally, and internationally through her roles as a university professor, teacher supervisor, educational consultant, and community organizer. She is now an assistant professor and teacher supervisor at the University of San Francisco in California. Much of her work is rooted in her grassroots education organizing within the Teachers 4 Social Justice organization, the Abolitionist Teaching Network, and the Education for Liberation Network which organizes the Free Minds Free People conference.  She is deeply committed to centering abolitionist teaching and healing-centered engagement within and outside of the field of education. As such, she is one of the editors, authors, and organizers collaborating on the 2021 book release, "Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for K-12 Educators.  This toolkit is a collaboration between the Education for Liberation, Critical Resistance, and several other grassroots abolitionist and justice-centered collectives.

Presentation Description:

Drawing from the Healing Centered Engagement framework and Dr. Angela Davis’s decades of work bridging prison abolition to K-12 education, Dr. Farima will share her personal life experiences of navigating pain, healing, and abolition inside and outside of K-12 schools. She will highlight how colonial schooling, trauma, grief, and punishment eventually led her to abolitionist teaching and breaking cycles of harm at the individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels. Healing and abolition are vital for collective liberation and teaching can be a journey toward being in right relation to ourselves, one another, land, resources, power, and ancestors. This talk is an invitation to collectively imagining and creating another world that we know is possible.