Embedded Files
LEAPPS is a Community of Practice (CoP) of UIC faculty, staff, students, and community partners who are committed to social justice and bringing liberatory approaches to teaching and learning spaces, broadly defined, including classrooms and community programs. In fall 2023, LEAPPS began as a pilot program within the CEnTL Initiative and met four times over the 2023-2024 academic year to engage in pedagogy-focused learning and practice.
LEAPPS Participants
LEAPPS Participants
LEAPPS was made up of 17 total teachers and learners, many of whom are also UIC alumni:
5 faculty members
4 students
4 staff
3 community partners
1 administrator
Participants represented the following institutions and organizations:
UIC SPH Community Health Sciences division
UIC SPH Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (EOHS) division
UIC SPH Collaboratory for Health Justice (CHJ)
UIC SPH Office of Academic Affairs
UIC Public Health Undergraduate (PUBH) program
UIC Neighborhood Centers
UIC School of Law
Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH)
Sinai Urban Health Institute (SUHI)
LEAPPS Sessions Touched on Topics such as:
LEAPPS Sessions Touched on Topics such as:
Liberation, radical love
Popular education
Praxis
Grief and hope
Grounding in somatics
Positionality
Centering lived experiences
Intersectionality
History of education in the United States
Neoliberalism in higher education
Imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy
Navigating institutions
Transdisciplinary solidarity
Vulnerability
Accountability
Generative conflict
LEAPPS Drew on the Following as Grounding Frameworks:
LEAPPS Drew on the Following as Grounding Frameworks:
“In struggle that is principled, we struggle for the sake of building deeper unity, we are honest and direct while holding compassion, we each take responsibility for our own feelings and actions, and seek deeper understanding by asking questions and reading a text (such as an article or proposal) before we launch our counter argument.”
“In struggle that is principled, we struggle for the sake of building deeper unity, we are honest and direct while holding compassion, we each take responsibility for our own feelings and actions, and seek deeper understanding by asking questions and reading a text (such as an article or proposal) before we launch our counter argument.”
-- N'Tanya Lee of LeftRoots
-- N'Tanya Lee of LeftRoots
LEAPPS Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
LEAPPS Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What did LEAPPS look like in practice?
In practice, LEAPPS participants attended an orientation and met as a group four (4) times over the academic year, each time for three (3) hours. Each session included food, brief check-ins, an occasional show-and-tell, discussion prompts, activities, conversations guided by a circle keeper, and physical items to ground the conversation, where the themes for each session tended to emerge from the group itself. The first session oriented us to collective understandings, a history of education and neoliberalism in the U.S., grounding frameworks and principles, and shared agreements about how we would use the LEAPPS space, interact with each other, and hold each other accountable. Following sessions dived deeper, concretely and abstractly, into topics related to pedagogy, vulnerability, generative conflict, radical love, strategies for organizing, and more. 1-on-1 debriefs with the circle keeper or planning team members were offered after each session as a space to co-digest and -reflect.
How can I join LEAPPS?
We will announce if/when LEAPPS or LEAPPS-like sessions will renew as we seek ways to embed this work into existing UIC resources.
If you are interested in LEAPPS, please reach out to the Project Manager (PM), Emily Etzkorn, at eee2@uic.edu.
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