SEMINARS.
Seminars at The Ed Factory are small learning spaces for sustained collective inquiry. Participants study cultural values, norms, and beliefs and how they shape structures, systems, and everyday experiences. Our studies wrestle with the tangled complexities of self, other, and difference while practicing listening across difference, writing to process thinking, and creative production. Together we read, listen, question, and analyze while producing socially engaged writing and art.
Our seminars examine education, culture, and public life, and they draw on audioethnography and love pedagogy as guiding practices.
Audioethnography combines oral history interviewing, storytelling, image, sound, and digital remix work. Love pedagogy approaches teaching and learning as relational, ethical, and aesthetic work. These practices guide how seminar communities study, think, and create together.
Current Seminars
The seminars below are currently open for registration. Each seminar page includes dates, tuition, fellowship application information, materials, format, and registration details.
The Cost of Care: Boundaries, Youth, Power, & Integrity
Saturday, 22 August 10:00 am - 5:00 pm ET
A live, online, scenario-based seminar for educators who work with young people inside and outside of schools.
The seminar is designed for classroom teachers, youth workers, teaching artists, after-school educators, coaches, program staff, school leaders, counselors, paraprofessionals, and others responsible for creating safe, ethical, and caring learning spaces.
Engaging the Brat: Rethinking Classroom Management
26-27 September & 3-4 October 10:00 am - 5:00 pm ET
A live, online, project-based seminar for educators working inside and outside of schools. Together, we will reconsider what classroom “management” has often taught us to value: compliance, quiet, speed, order, and self-discipline. In direct contrast, we will study and practice a teaching approach rooted in relationship, attention, listening, imagination, and the dignity of every learner.
Public Inquiry as Liberatory Education: Curriculum & Program Design for Teachers & Youth Workers
6 & 13 October / 6:00-8:00pm ET 17, 18, 24, 25 October & 7, 8, 14, 15 November / 11:00am-4:00pm ET
A live, online seminar in curriculum and program design for educators inside and outside schools. Participants study public inquiry as a liberatory education practice, designing work that helps young people investigate the conditions shaping their lives and create public projects that reveal what has not yet been seen, heard, or understood.
Discourses of Difference
Begins 16 January 2027.
Discourses of Difference is The Ed Factory’s foundational seminar, facilitated live, online. Grounded in audioethnography and layered storytelling, it introduces practices for listening closely to language as a way of understanding how people are trying to make sense of American cultural values, norms, and beliefs in their everyday lives and within broader social, political, and economic conditions.
Participants work with oral history interviews, images, and text while learning to attend carefully to language. Interviews, listening sessions, and narrative remix are used to examine how cultural discourses circulate, settle, and shape perception within the institutions and systems that produce them.
Discourses of Difference provides 37.5 hours of live instruction and approximately 6.25 hours of structured work outside the seminar. The seminar is eligible for 1-3.5 graduate-level extension credits through our partner university.
Listen to a sample audioethnography (oral history remix).