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.

 

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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.

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.