Walking the Labyrinth

by | Sep 30, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Language, Mapping, Pedagogy, Potpourri, Public Geography

A Framework for Designing Inquiry-Based Expeditions

When we imagine planning an expedition, a project, or even a career step, it’s tempting to picture the path as a straight line: define the goal, create a plan, execute. But anyone who has actually walked such a journey knows it’s rarely so direct.

That’s why I turn to the metaphor of the labyrinth. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth isn’t about dead ends or wrong turns. There is only one path, and though it winds outward and inward, you always move toward the center. The gift of the labyrinth is that it reminds us: progress doesn’t mean walking straight ahead. Progress can mean circling back, pausing, or picking up new tools along the way.

For anyone embarking on an inquiry-driven expedition — whether it’s a research project, a service-learning program, or a self-designed summer of exploration — the labyrinth can serve as both metaphor and method.

Step 1: Glimpse the Center

Every journey starts with a vision, even if it’s fleeting. Write one sentence that captures your central purpose. For example:
 “If my expedition does one thing well, it is…”

This is your north star, your “center.” Don’t worry if it feels fuzzy — clarity comes later.

Step 2: The Turn Outward

The labyrinth doesn’t take you straight to the middle; it pushes you outward first. That’s the part of the journey where doubt, unknowns, and questions surface. Ask yourself:

  • What don’t I know yet?
  • What feels unclear or intimidating?

Naming these uncertainties is not weakness — it’s the work. By acknowledging what’s missing, you create space to learn.

Step 3: Gather Your Tools

We rarely walk alone. Along the path, you’ll need tools — intellectual, relational, and practical — to carry inward. I like to divide them into four categories:

  • Conversations: mentors, peers, or communities to learn from
  • Concepts/Values: the principles that keep you aligned
  • Methods: research, mapping, storytelling, or observation techniques
  • Practices: reflection, rest, journaling, creative rituals that sustain you

Choose three to five. These will be your companions.

Step 4: Twists and Crossroads

No journey unfolds without barriers. Some are practical (time, funding, logistics). Others are external expectations — from family, institutions, or even society’s ideas about what you “should” do.

The regenerative approach isn’t to push through at all costs but to prepare alternate routes that still honor your purpose. Write a few if/then scenarios:

  • If not this location, then that one.
  • If not formal internship, then independent research or service.

Flexibility builds resilience.

Step 5: Return to the Center

Finally, revisit your original vision. With your tools, your unknowns, and your alternate paths in mind, rewrite it. Make it sharper, more grounded, more alive. You’re not back where you started — you’re back with new eyes.

Why the Labyrinth Matters

The labyrinth exercise is not about perfection. It’s about alignment. In regenerative leadership, we learn that when our values and our actions line up, our work nourishes us instead of depleting us. The labyrinth is a reminder that the path is rarely straight — but it is always meaningful.

So the next time you begin planning your inquiry-based expedition, don’t draw a checklist. Draw a labyrinth. Glimpse your center, name your unknowns, gather your tools, prepare your alternate routes, and walk with curiosity.

Because the truth is, the twists are not distractions from the journey — the twists are the journey.

For a short film exploring the labyrinth as guide, click here.

Learn, Unlearn, Relearn

by | Sep 25, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Mapping, Pedagogy, Public Geography

 

This summer, I took part in the Global Citizenship Education course at the University for Peace (UPEACE), a United Nations–mandated institution dedicated to developing leaders who can build a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world. I am pursuing the Global Leadership Diploma through their Centre for Executive Education, and this was the second of five courses in that journey.

From the outset, I realized this course was different. It was not simply about learning the theory of global citizenship education (GCED). It was GCED in practice — modeled for us each week. Through interactive workshops, design-thinking activities, guest speakers, and sustained dialogue, we were not just studying global citizenship, we were living it together in community.

The most powerful dimension of the course was the exchange among participants from across the world. Each week we brought our lived experiences into the space: teachers, activists, administrators, peacebuilders, and learners representing diverse geographies, cultures, and perspectives. Theory never floated above reality; it was tested against stories from Ethiopia, Finland, Puerto Rico, Madagascar, Afghanistan, and beyond.

In that diversity, we were constantly reminded that everyone is both a teacher and a learner. This, for me, is the best part of UPEACE courses: the way they invite us into community, where knowledge flows in multiple directions and the classroom expands across borders.

Global citizenship education also requires unlearning: questioning the frameworks we inherit, recognizing Western-centrism and tokenism, and naming the power dynamics embedded in education itself. We explored empathy and cultural humility, critiques of soft GCE, and the tensions between local and global approaches.

These sessions challenged me to deepen the lexicon I use in my work. Words like empathy, humility, power, justice, accountability grew sharper in meaning through dialogue with others. Vocabulary is never just academic; it frames the way we act in the world.

At the same time, the course constantly turned us back toward practice. Weekly assignments weren’t afterthoughts; they were vehicles for integrating learning into our lives and work. Drafting vision statements, articulating challenge questions, and creating a personal manifesto pushed us to imagine how GCED might live in us as educators, leaders, or community members.

Here, GCED was not abstract. It was a lived pedagogy — a weaving together of head, heart, and hands. Knowledge and skills (cognitive), empathy and values (socio-emotional), and action (behavioral) came together.

If there is one reflection I carry forward, it is this: global citizenship is not a destination, but a cycle. To learn, unlearn, and relearn — again and again.

It sounds simple, but in practice it is profoundly demanding. To learn is to embrace complexity. To unlearn is to let go of frameworks and assumptions that no longer serve. To relearn is to weave new understandings into our lives and actions — anchored in justice, empathy, and sustainability.

Each turn of this cycle deepens our consciousness, sharpens our practice, and roots our commitments more firmly in care for both people and the planet. The lexicon expands, the meanings deepen, and we are reminded that global citizenship is not just something we teach, but something we become.

For me, the course also became a mirror for my ongoing work with The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute (The GIEI). It sharpened my vision of how mapping, storytelling, and inquiry can move beyond “soft” global citizenship toward praxis — where ethos and action are inseparable.

This is the ongoing challenge: how to design learning expeditions that invite learners to see the world, and themselves within it, with renewed consciousness and responsibility. To keep cycling through learn–unlearn–relearn as a lifelong practice.

To the UPEACE team, my fellow participants, and our guest educators: thank you for creating a space that was equal parts challenging, compassionate, and inspiring. The course didn’t just teach global citizenship education — it modeled it, showing us what it can look like when lived in community.

The seeds we planted together will continue to grow, in classrooms, communities, and collaborations around the world.

Incubating Change

by | Sep 1, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Mapping, Pedagogy, Public Geography

 

When an idea is still a seed, it needs the right conditions to grow: time, structure, support, and challenge. That’s what an incubator provides — a space where fragile beginnings can take root, where ideas can be tested, stretched, and prepared for the world.

This summer, I found myself in such an incubator: the Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Social Change course at the University for Peace (UPEACE), a United Nations–mandated institution dedicated to developing leaders who can build a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world. I am pursuing the Global Leadership Diploma through their Centre for Executive Education.

Over several weeks, I joined peers from across the globe — educators, activists, entrepreneurs, and dreamers — each carrying a different seed of an idea. Some arrived with projects already sprouting. Others carried only whispers, questions, or sparks of inspiration. Together, we entered a structured, challenging, and supportive environment designed to help our ideas grow.

 

The first thing we were asked to do was deceptively simple: write our mission statement in just eight words.

It was harder than it looked. How do you distill complexity into clarity? How do you pare down all the nuance, passion, and ambition of a project into a single line that still carries weight?

This exercise set the tone. Incubation wasn’t about fluffing ideas up. It was about stripping them down, examining their core, and making sure they could stand on their own.

From there, the course took us through a series of building blocks:

  • Drafting theories of change — mapping how activities connect to outputs, outcomes, and long-term impact.
  • Exploring legal structures for social enterprises — weighing the tradeoffs of nonprofit, for-profit, and hybrid models.
  • Developing business models and lean budgets — ensuring that inspiring visions could also be viable in practice.
  • Practicing the art of the 60-second pitch — learning how to tell a story that opens hearts and opens doors.

Each week built upon the last, and each assignment pushed us further into the real work of turning vision into strategy.

Learning in Community

No incubator works in isolation. The most powerful part of this course was the community itself.

Our cohort represented a tapestry of contexts and causes: a cultural hub in Thailand, women’s empowerment projects in Central America, climate initiatives in Africa, youth education ventures in Europe and beyond. Each week, we shared not only progress but also struggles.

When one participant questioned how to sustain her organization without donor fatigue, others offered models they had tried. When another wrestled with impact measurement, the group provided tools and examples.

The course reminded me that social change does not emerge alone. It grows through dialogue, cross-pollination, and the courage to share half-formed ideas in a supportive environment.

Applying the Lessons: GIEI 2.0

For me, the incubator experience crystallized around the next phase of my own work: The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute (GIEI).

The GIEI has long been a space where storytelling, geography, and community engagement intersect — through podcasts, mapping projects, and learning expeditions. But much of it had remained a side initiative alongside full-time teaching. Entering the course, I had a vision for GIEI 2.0, one that could evolve into a nonprofit dedicated to global citizenship education.

By the end of the course, that seed had sprouted into something tangible.  The course gave me not only tools but also confidence: a sense that GIEI 2.0 is not just ambitious, but actionable.

Lessons that Will Stay With Me

Looking back, three lessons from the incubator stand out most:

  1. Story as a Vehicle for Change
    Every venture, no matter how technical, must carry a compelling narrative. Data alone doesn’t move people. Stories do. The course pushed me to translate abstract global statistics into human-scale metaphors — to help others see the world differently.
  2. Sustainability Beyond Finances
    We tend to equate sustainability with survival. But the course reframed it: sustainability is about alignment. The right legal structure, funding model, and organizational design must not only keep the lights on but also reinforce the mission and values.
  3. Community as Curriculum
    The richness of the course came not just from lectures or readings but from the cohort itself. The exchanges, feedback and stories shared became part of the curriculum. The incubator worked because it was populated with diverse, passionate learners willing to listen as much as they spoke.

Looking Ahead

As I step out of this incubator, I do so with both a project in motion and a renewed sense of purpose.

The journey of GIEI 2.0 continues — with the creation of interactive learning tools, workshops, and, eventually, immersive residencies. But beyond that, I carry forward the conviction that entrepreneurship is not just about starting businesses. It is about cultivating imagination, empathy, and resilience — qualities the world urgently needs.

It is about daring to ask:

  • What if we built economies that measured well-being instead of profit?
  • What if education prepared us to collaborate as global citizens, not just compete as individuals?
  • What if leadership was defined by empathy, not power?
  • What if progress meant leaving no one — and no place — behind?

The Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Social Change course reminded me that these questions are not naive. They are necessary.

And perhaps most importantly, it reminded me that I am not working alone. Across continents and disciplines, a generation of changemakers is already incubating their own seeds of change — each distinct, but growing together into something far greater than the sum of its parts.

If you are carrying an idea — whether it’s fully formed or just a whisper — I can’t recommend this course (or one like it) enough. It offers more than knowledge. It offers incubation: a structured, supportive space to test, refine, and prepare your vision for the world.

For me, it was the start of a new chapter. For all of us, it was a reminder that while the world’s population is vast at 8 billion, when reimagined as a village of 100 people — or experienced as a cohort of 25 — it becomes a place where we can truly begin to know one another.

And from there, begin to build a shared future.

Living, Learning, and Leading in Granada

by | Aug 9, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Language, Pedagogy, Spain

This summer, I had the privilege of co-leading The Experiment in International Living’s Leadership Institute: Spanish Language & Community Engagement in Spain, a program that brought together 16 high school students from the U.S. and 18 from Spain for an unforgettable journey in Granada.

From the start, this program was built on four pillars: peer-to-peer exchange, language immersion, social change, and community service. In practice, that meant living together in a residencia during the week, staying with host families on weekends, sharing meals, navigating city streets, and constantly learning from one another — not only through organized activities, but through countless small moments of connection.

Building Connections Across Cultures

U.S. and Spanish high school students lived, learned, and led together — exploring each other’s cultures, building friendships, and practicing cross-cultural competency through real-life connections. The peer-to-peer aspect of the program was its heartbeat: informal conversations in the residencia, shared laughter during meals, and moments of mutual curiosity helped bridge languages and perspectives.

Language immersion came alive not only in the classroom but in the market, on walking tours, during late-night group conversations, and through family life in Granada. Students had to navigate both linguistic challenges and cultural nuances — gaining skills they’ll carry for a lifetime.

Dialogue as a Tool for Leadership

On our final full day together, we culminated in a youth-led round robin of dialogues. Six stations invited mixed U.S. and Spanish groups to explore:

  • Youth Voice & Social Change

  • Mental Health, Pressure & Coping

  • Creativity, Identity & Expression

  • Global Citizenship

  • Cultural Missteps & What We Learn from Them

  • Friendship & Connection Across Differences

It was inspiring to watch participants not only share their own perspectives but listen deeply to those of their peers. These conversations modeled the kind of engaged, respectful dialogue that is too often missing in our world — and reminded me that leadership can be built one conversation at a time.

Bringing It Home

The program doesn’t end in Spain. Each U.S. participant will now return home with ideas for Community-Based Initiatives — projects rooted in their local communities but informed by their time in Granada. Whether it’s starting a club, organizing an event, or launching a campaign, they’ll bring forward the empathy, global awareness, and problem-solving skills they cultivated here.

As for me — from the U.S. but living in Spain full-time — I am afforded a unique window into the cultural exchange happening between our students. I often told the group that we, as leaders, were also on our own Experiment exchange — learning alongside them and building bridges in real time.

Granada gave us more than a backdrop. It gave us a shared space to live out the ideals of The Experiment: connecting deeply, thinking critically, and leading with heart.

Roots in the Sky: Returning to The Fountain in Granada

by | Jul 20, 2025 | ASKing the World, Film Review, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Hagiography, Potpourri, Spain

There are films you return to not for plot, but for weather—for their atmosphere, their gravity, their pull on your interior tides. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is one of those films for me. I’ve seen it at least ten times. Each time, I enter its spiral a little differently. Each time, it offers something else.

This time, I watched it in Granada.

Not in a theater—just me, a screen, and the layered hum of a city that refuses to stay in one time–unless, of course, you ignore that palimpsest. I’ve walked through the Albaicín, traced the patterned shadows in the Alhambra, listened to church bells echo through streets once shaped by mosques. Granada is a city that doesn’t forget. It blurs. It folds time inward. And so does The Fountain.

Watching it here, something shifted.

Where You Are Shapes What You See

I’ve always believed that place changes how we experience a film. There are movies that resonate because of when you see them—but others because of where.

Watch Talk to Her in Madrid and it becomes a meditation on distance.
Watch Pan’s Labyrinth in Segovia and the stones seem to whisper Franco’s afterlife.
Watch The Spirit of the Beehive in Castilla and the earth itself feels hollowed out by silence.

And watching The Fountain in Granada?

It felt inevitable. Not like discovering something new, but like opening a letter I’d kept folded for years.

A Familiar Spiral, Seen from a New Angle

I know this film. I know its cuts, its rhythms, its grief. I know the way Izzi smiles in the snow, the way Tom trembles with denial, the way the star—Xibalba—burns with something more than light.

But here in Granada, surrounded by centuries of conquest, devotion, beauty, and erasure, the film felt different. It didn’t just move through time—it held it. It mirrored this place where empires once chased permanence and instead found decay. Where a civilization imagined itself eternal, and was turned into ornament.

The film’s refusal to separate love from death, empire from myth, felt at home here.

Izzi and Isabel

There’s a detail I’d noticed before, but never felt quite as sharply: the Queen in Izzi’s novel-in-progress shares her name—Isabel. In the film, she’s regal, serene, sending her conquistador to find the Tree of Life in Yucatán. In real history, Queen Isabel of Castile sent explorers westward for her own tree: legacy, salvation, dominion.

And Izzi—Rachel Weisz’s Izzi—is dying, but she’s the only one at peace. She understands that death is not the enemy. It is her partner who can’t accept it, who rages and clings and unravels.

Two Izzis. Two Isabellas. One seeks transcendence through conquest. The other, through surrender.

Granada, once ruled by Isabel the Queen, becomes a strange echo chamber for this film. The question lingers: What is the cost of trying to outrun death?

The Tree, the Star, the Stone

The Tree of Life sits at the center of all three timelines in the film—rooted in the past, glowing in the future, decaying in the present. It offers healing. It demands sacrifice. It transcends.

Here in Granada, trees hold history too. The olive, the cypress, the orange blossom. They survive regimes. They outlast architecture. In the gardens of the Generalife, they feel like quiet gods.

And then there’s stone. The stones that built this city, that carry verses and scars. The kind of stones that outlive their makers, but not their meanings.

The film asks: can you live forever through what you build, what you love, what you plant?  Granada doesn’t answer. But it gestures. It points to the ruins, and then to the sky.

Death Is the Road to Awe

There’s a line I’ve always carried from The Fountain:  “Death is the road to awe.”

In Granada, that line stops being metaphor.

Here, we might think of everything as awe. The light on tiled walls. The curve of an arch built for vanished prayers. The hush of twilight in a square where languages once braided together.

But everything is death, too. Not as absence, but as transformation. This city isn’t preserved—it’s composted. Its beauty is rooted in what it’s lost, what it’s blended, what it’s become.

This time, I didn’t watch The Fountain to understand it.  I watched it to stand inside it. And Granada made that possible.

 

#   #   #

 

After ten viewings, I thought I knew The Fountain. But Granada taught me otherwise.

Some films are just films.  Others become companions—haunting you, changing with you, asking new questions as your surroundings shift.  Here, The Fountain wasn’t about escaping death.  It was about learning to carry time—in your breath, in your grief, in the trees you plant knowing they’ll outlive you.  

And in that, it felt like a conversation with this city.  One rooted in the soil. One burning in the stars.

Not a Pilgrimage: A “Visit” to the Capilla Real

by | Jul 13, 2025 | ASKing the World, Hagiography, Language, Mapping, Political Geography, Spain

Granada, Spain — July 12, 2025

On July 12, I visited the Capilla Real in Granada—the final resting place of Isabel and Ferdinand, the so-called Catholic Monarchs. As someone from the Americas (having lived extensively in both the north and south), I arrived not as a passive tourist but as a participant in a longer, more complicated performance of memory and power. The encounter felt layered, conflicted, and deeply political.

To think through this space, I turn to the work of Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, whose concept of “theatre/archaeology” invites us to consider how sites are not just static remnants of the past, but staged events, constructed through layers of material, narrative, and embodied experience. The Capilla Real is not just a crypt; it is a scripted space—a performative apparatus where empire, religion, and heritage rehearse themselves daily.

I wanted to ask: What is being remembered here? And what is being made to disappear?

What is being memorialized—and what is being forgotten?

The Capilla Real monumentalizes the Catholic Monarchs as founders of modern Spain—unifiers of kingdoms and “champions” of Christianity. Yet what is absent from this narrative? The expelled Jewish communities, the forcibly converted Muslims, the erased plurality of late medieval Granada.

What does the architecture tell us? Its late Gothic grandeur stands in symbolic contrast to the nearby Alhambra. The site doesn’t just remember a royal couple—it stages a victory of Christendom.

Ask the site: Who gets to be buried with marble and gold? Who was exiled in silence?

What does it mean to come from the Americas to this tomb?

To stand here, as someone from the Americas, is to feel the afterlives of 1492 humming in the walls. Colonization, extraction, forced conversion, genocide. These are not footnotes; they are structural echoes.

But I visited not on October 12—the official “discovery” date—but July 12: my own day of encounter. This reframes the act. It refuses the commemorative choreography and inserts presence in place of celebration.

Ask yourself: What is my role in this story? Observer? Descendant? Witness? Disruptor?

How is the site performing itself to me?

The Capilla Real is deeply choreographed. Light filters carefully across stone. The tombs are elevated, silent, inaccessible. Reverence is built into the room.

Where are visitors positioned? What are we allowed to see, and how? What narrative are we meant to accept?

Ask the architecture: Who choreographed your gestures? Who wrote your script?

What traces and residues resist the dominant story?

What if we look beyond the polished surfaces? Cracks in stone. Uneven wear on the floor. The proximity of Moorish Granada just outside. Are these material residues that refuse to perform the official memory?

What might be uncovered if we listened for unofficial histories—graffiti, whispered anecdotes, contested memories?

Ask the material: What are you hiding beneath your polish?

What would a counter-monument look like here?

If we were to build a counter-monument in this space, what form would it take? Would it honor the Indigenous peoples of the Americas? The forcibly silenced voices of Sephardic Jews or Andalusian Muslims?

Would it be performative? Ephemeral? Sonic? Could we interrupt this royal narrative with something more plural, contested, and alive?

Ask history: Who else demands to be remembered here?

A Presence That Interrupts

Standing in the Capilla Real, I did not come to venerate. I came to witness. To mark presence. To speak into a silence that has lasted too long.

I stood before the crypt of Isabel and Ferdinand—the monarchs who set in motion the Reconquista and the conquest of the so-called “New World.” Their bodies rest beneath carved stone, sealed in royal dignity. But outside those tombs, across oceans and centuries, the legacies of their decisions are unburied, unfinished, and still resisted.

And so I said, quietly—perhaps to them, perhaps to myself:

Do you know that peoples in the Americas have resisted your conquest and colonization for over 500 years?

That resistance is not metaphor. It is not memory. It is alive.

Pearson and Shanks remind us that archaeology is not merely about ruins, but about performance, disruption, and presence. In that spirit, I offer these questions—not to find answers, but to refuse silence.

To Isabel and Ferdinand: 

  • When you cast your crowns toward heaven, did you see what fell to earth in your name?
  • What prayers passed your lips as you signed the expulsions—were they for mercy, or for dominion?
  • Did you dream of gold or of glory—or did you simply fear a world not shaped in your image?
  • When you imagined the Indies, did you imagine us—the ones who would inherit both wound and wonder?
  • Did you know your empire would splinter—yet still echo in our languages, our borders, our gods?
  • What does empire sound like when it speaks back to you—not in Latin, but in Nahuatl, Aymara, K’iche’, Guaraní, Garífuna?
  • Can you hear the music now? The fusion of drums and strings, tongues and prayers, born of resistance and necessity?
  • Did you know that seeds carried in your ships would take root in every kitchen, every story, every body? What about the diseases?
  • Did you build a world, or did you scatter one?
  • And when I stand here—an inheritor of what you set in motion—do you see a subject, a stranger, or a question?

This visit was not a pilgrimage.
It was an intervention.
And the performance isn’t over.

Or, in the Guarani…..

Ko jevy ndaha’éi peteĩ ñemomba’e rehegua guata.
Ha’e kuri peteĩ jehasaha.
Ha pe ñoha’ãguasu ndopevéi gueteri.

Mapping Global Competence: A Journey Through Difference, Dialogue, and Action

by | Jun 6, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Language, Mapping, Pedagogy

 

Education must move beyond content delivery and toward cultivating globally competent learners. The Global Competence Certificate program offers a path not only toward deeper understanding of others, but also of oneself. This course is a carefully structured encounter with difference that challenges assumptions, encourages perspective-taking, and builds capacity for action.

Structured around reflective modules and live facilitated dialogues, the course maps a journey that begins with self-awareness and ends with a commitment to transformation. Along the way, participants explore cultural frameworks, value dimensions, conflict styles, inequality, and sustainability, all the while asking essential questions: Who am I in relation to others? How do systems shape interactions? What is my responsibility as an educator and citizen?

Keywords

Cultural Dimensions: Frameworks that place cultural values along continuums (e.g., hierarchy vs. egalitarianism, individualism vs. collectivism) and help explain how different societies prioritize relationships, time, authority, and communication.

Conflict Styles: Based on Dr. Mitchell Hammer’s framework, these styles identify communication as either direct or indirect and emotional expression as either expressive or restrained, giving insight into how cultural differences shape conflict resolution.

Microaggressions: Subtle, often unconscious behaviors or comments that communicate derogatory or dismissive messages to people based on marginalized identities, reinforcing systemic bias and exclusion.

Mainstream and Margin: Social positioning concepts that explore how power and privilege function in institutions and communities, often revealing how certain identities and voices are centered while others are silenced or overlooked.

Stretch Collaboration: A method of working across differences that calls for curiosity, humility, experimentation, and the recognition that we are part of the very problems we seek to solve (Kahane).

Global Goals (SDGs): The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals that form an action-oriented framework for tackling interconnected global challenges like poverty, climate change, gender equality, and education.

WOOP: A research-backed self-regulation strategy (by Gabriele Oettingen) that helps people achieve goals by mentally contrasting their wishes with likely obstacles and developing implementation intentions.

Globally Competent Teaching: A pedagogical stance integrating intercultural sensitivity, inquiry, systems thinking, and action-based learning to prepare students to thrive in and improve a diverse, interconnected world.

Polarization: The sharpening of divisions within society that leads to entrenched “us vs. them” dynamics, often fueled by confirmation bias and zero-sum thinking.

Pluralism: The philosophical and practical commitment to engaging multiple perspectives and values in decision-making, rather than assimilating or eliminating difference.

From Reflection to Action

What distinguishes this course is its recursive rhythm: reflect, discuss, apply. The early modules ask participants to situate themselves along cultural continuums. Are you more high-context or low-context in your communication? Do you navigate conflict with a preference for accommodation or discussion? These inquiries are not merely academic; they serve as mirrors and windows—allowing one to better understand self and others, recognize implicit bias, and shift behavior toward inclusivity.

As the course moves into themes of inequality and marginalization, it invites educators to name the ways power operates within their communities. Through exercises around spiritual diversity, microaggressions, and mainstream vs. margin, participants confront both privilege and exclusion. It is a journey of discomfort, empathy, and eventually, solidarity. This segment feels particularly critical today, as educational spaces must contend with their own roles in perpetuating systemic inequities.

The Power of Dialogue 

Live sessions form the emotional and intellectual core of the program. With expert facilitation, these dialogues move beyond “sharing” and into the realm of co-construction of meaning. They allow for vulnerability, cultural exchange, and collective problem-solving. In these spaces, the ethos of educational theorists like Paulo Freire—learning as dialogue, as praxis—feels very much alive.

These conversations are not tidy. They mirror real-world complexity. But through guided inquiry and storytelling, participants engage difference with openness, building the skills to do the same in their own classrooms. These moments are reminders that inclusion is not only about curriculum design—it’s about human interaction.

Linking to Theory

While the course avoids academic jargon, its foundation aligns with thinkers like Martha Nussbaum, whose concept of “narrative imagination” calls us to see the world through others’ eyes as an ethical imperative. Similarly, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s work on cosmopolitanism—valuing universal dignity while respecting local diversity—animates much of the program’s spirit.

In modules addressing polarization and conflict, participants indirectly wrestle with insights from social psychology and intercultural communication theory. Yet the learning remains grounded in practice, helping educators make theory tangible in the classroom.

Big Questions That Linger

  • What does it mean to “know” another culture? What are the ethical limits of such knowing?
  • How can we foster global understanding without lapsing into tokenism or reinforcing savior narratives?
  • In an age of disinformation and polarization, what role does education play in cultivating epistemic humility and discernment?
  • How do educators sustain inclusive practices when faced with resistance from institutions or communities?
  • What does civic responsibility look like in a world of overlapping crises—climate, migration, inequality?

A Personal Cartography

By the end of the course, participants are not handed a map—they are asked to draw their own. From initial self-assessment to final action planning using tools like WOOP, the program scaffolds a transformation in awareness, pedagogy, and presence.

The course is not a checklist. It is a compass. It fosters dispositions—curiosity, humility, resilience—that are essential for teaching and leading in a global age. Through sustained reflection, brave conversation, and inspired action, participants emerge with more than insight—they leave with intention.

For educators committed to justice, inclusion, and global citizenship, this course offers both a challenge and a gift. It reminds us that global competence is not a final destination. It is a way of being—with others, for others, and always becoming.

Kevin of the Valley, Kevin of the Birds

by | Jun 3, 2025 | Geographical Imaginations, Hagiography, Language, Mapping

 

Today (June 3) is St. Kevin’s Day. My name saint. St. Kevin of Glendalough.  Not a figure from obscure Irish hagiography, but a presence who has, over time, shaped how I imagine attention, how I hold questions, how I understand stillness.

There’s no grand sermon in Kevin’s story. No fiery conversions. Just a man in a stone cell, one arm outstretched through the threshold, and a blackbird that comes to nest in his palm. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t shake her off. He stays—long enough for the eggs to hatch and the young to fly.

What kind of listening does that require? What kind of patience?

Seamus Heaney turns this moment into something more than legend. In his poem St Kevin and the Blackbird, he wonders whether Kevin is “self-forgetful or in agony all the time.” Whether he still feels his knees. Whether he’s praying—or simply becoming the prayer itself.

“To labour and not to seek reward,” Heaney writes,
“he prays, a prayer his body makes entirely…”

That line gets me. Not because I think it’s something to achieve, but because it names something so few of us are taught: that attentiveness—costly, embodied, quiet attentiveness—might be the most necessary thing. To let something land. To let it stay. To not flee discomfort or mystery. To become hospitable, even to the wild.

The miracle, if there is one, is not in the bird. It’s in the stillness. In a form of presence that does not insist or interpret, but holds. Not grasping. Not passive. Just utterly available.

I think that’s why I walk(ed) as a pilgrim to Glendalough. To Kevin. Not as a seeker of escape or sanctity, but to be in the presence of a witness—one who stood for a way of being: the long patience of love, the unshaken hand, the refusal to close.

Today, I say his name with quiet reverence. Kevin of the valley. Kevin of the birds. Not a figure to admire, but a silence to be met. A name to carry. A story to return to.

Perhaps I shall walk the valley of the two lakes again—with a bird in hand.  Again.  And again.  

Sabbatical

by | May 23, 2025 | Alto Aragon, Geographical Imaginations, Mapping, Public Geography, Spain

This image functions as a whimsical and quietly profound visual metaphor for a sabbatical year. The juxtaposition of me reclining in a bathtub—an object synonymous with rest and cleansing—against the backdrop of overgrown grass, rusted farm equipment, and the wild encroachment of nature, immediately invites interpretation.

The choice of setting, far removed from domestic comfort, adds depth. The bathtub, now dislocated from its traditional role, becomes a throne of introspection in the wilderness. The lush, untamed grass cradles the scene, suggesting growth, freedom, and the slow but inevitable reclaiming power of nature. Meanwhile, the rusting machinery, remnants of labor and utility, speaks to the pause from productivity that a sabbatical often implies. It is both a literal and metaphorical “letting things go to seed.”

What makes the image compelling is its stillness—I don’t look at the camera. My gaze is directed off-frame, my body relaxed, as though meditating or simply existing. The pose, casual yet deliberate, embodies the spirit of disengagement from haste. However, this retreat isn’t escapism; rather, it’s a confrontation with stillness and solitude. There’s an edge of humor too—bathing in grass next to a plow feels absurd yet liberating. 

Photo by Sonia Ibáñez Pérez

From Consumers to Citizens: The Role of Question Formulation in Democratic Education

by | May 3, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Pedagogy

In November 2019, I began my formal study of the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) through the Right Question Institute and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). I had long believed that student voice and inquiry were central to meaningful learning, but the QFT offered something I hadn’t yet found: a clear, intentional structure to support all learners—regardless of age or background—in generating and improving their own questions. It was a framework that not only aligned with my values but gave me a concrete way to practice them in the classroom. What began as a deep interest quickly became an ongoing thread through my professional development and a defining lens for how I think about pedagogy, equity, and democratic education.

The QFT is more than just a structure for generating questions—it’s a powerful lever for shifting the culture of learning from compliance to inquiry, from answer-seeking to meaning-making. And over the years, as I’ve returned to the QFT through different programs and settings, I’ve come to see that question formulation is not a strategy I use—it’s a stance I take as an educator.

In spring 2022, I continued this journey through the National Geographic program Teaching Students to ASK Their Own Geo-Inquiry Questions. That course further expanded my lens. It pushed me to think about how student questions shape not just classroom discussions but real-world investigations. Framing and refining geo-inquiry questions gave students agency not only over their learning, but over the issues they choose to explore in their communities and across the globe. In this context, questions became tools of both understanding and action.

Most recently, in April 2025, I returned to the Right Question Institute and HGSE for Questions at the Core: Extending the Question Formulation Technique to Sustain an Inquiry-based Culture in Schools. This course took me beyond individual lessons and toward the systemic implications of question-driven learning. It challenged me to consider how the QFT could function not just as a classroom practice but as a shared cultural norm—across grade levels, content areas, and professional learning spaces. What would it mean for teachers, too, to center their own inquiry? What would it look like to build a school where questioning is not only taught, but expected, modeled, and protected?

Across these experiences, my commitment has deepened to an idea that feels more urgent than ever: If we want to cultivate democratic learning communities, we must begin by ensuring that every learner—student and adult alike—has the skill, confidence, and opportunity to ask questions that matter. We cannot expect young people to participate meaningfully in the world if they’ve only been trained to answer. We must give them practice in framing problems, interrogating assumptions, and following their questions wherever they lead.

In many schools, the default model treats students as consumers of information, preparing them to perform, comply, and compete. But in a world that needs more critical thinkers, collaborators, and change-makers, we need something different. Question formulation is one pathway toward that difference. It shifts the posture of learning from passive to active, from isolated to communal, from transactional to transformational.

The Question Formulation Technique reminds us that democracy begins with a question—and that education, at its best, prepares us not just to answer, but to ask.