Transformation, healing, and elevation of self and others

Erin Gravelle (MA EDU ’12), shares how she was able to engage in a “learning to learn” process that emerged from the stories of her own life in her work, “Skating Circles Around Myself: A Heuristic Exploration of Storytelling and Fear.”
Her graduate thesis asks: “Why do we humans do the things we do?  How do we navigate the experience of life as a human who relates to other humans?”  Erin conducted an extensive project that culminated in a website that presented the origins of, and processes through which she collected, personal narratives that reflected unique navigations of fear that were inherent to a situation.
Gravelle—an accomplished ice skater and instructor, community educator, and Goddard activist—was able to “tilt” into a “widening perspective” that story can be a powerful way to explore and transform fear, especially as it relates to and potentially limits learning.
By using story as activism, she offers illustrations of how transcendence may impact lives once too afraid to shift self and world.
 

Note: an abridgment of this story appears in the article, “Is Activism Dead?” in the Clockworks Fall/Winter 2015 issue on page 10.