Shaun and Isaac discuss teaching around trauma, describing and enacting their workshops for teaching artists, practitioners, and legal advocates who want to learn to use art to mitigate the imprint of the criminal legal system through facilitated workshops. The faculty meeting was held at P.P.O.W. Gallery during “Airhead” (June 28 - August 9, 2024) and as a part of Miss Othmar’s School for Teachers.

The listener is not addressed but an audience in the room is.

-Listening for trauma.

-Teaching is attuning to the space and listening to everything else that’s going on besides what’s being said.

-Empathetic over Sympathetic Listening: “Surely you can’t relate to being in prison if you haven’t been to prison and been lonely in that way but you have experience loneliness.”

-Teaching before asking “what’s your name?”

-Teaching is creating a stage for agency and a play with no known characters.

-“Bees” and “Connection”

Miss Othmar is the name of that teacher of Charlie Brown that’s heard and never seen. Her voice carries no words and transmits no facts. Her professing is an undulating song. Nevertheless C.B. and his classmates seem to follow along.

Miss Othmar is teaching over radio. "Miss Othmar's Meetings with Teachers" is a series that collects the voices of different teachers and facilitators from a variety of fields and their approaches to leading the listener through exercises over radio.

Timmy Simonds is an artist interested in the ways we perceive education and our expectations of the teacher cross culturally. He broadcasts regularly with Montez Press Radio and Wave Farm's WGXC 90.7-FM.

music credit:

Herbie Hancock – Watermelon Man (1973)

Kayanza – Salutation Akazéhé (2015)

Dirty Projectors – Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie (2007)