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. Seminar 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.

The seminars 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.

Discourses of Difference

Foundations Seminar

Discourses of Difference is the foundational seminar in The Ed Factory’s seminar series. 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 recorded speech, image, 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 is a 37.5-hour seminar. A syllabus and supporting documentation can be provided for institutional approval or professional learning credit if needed.

Oral history remixes and pocket films produced by participants during Discourses of Difference may become part of the Young People’s Archive, a digital collection of collaborative media—audio, images, text, and video—that examines and reframes American experience through the voices of everyday people. The seminar culminates in a public Hearing Collective where narrators and participants listen together and reflect on what the work reveals.

Young People’s Archive & Hearing Collective

Seminar Origins

The Discourses of Difference seminar was originally designed by Lisa Arrastia and first taught in the Program of Writing and Critical Inquiry at the University at Albany (2015–2018). It later became a required graduate-level teaching licensure course taught in Massachusetts from 2020 to 2025.

UPCOMING SEMINAR

Discourses of Difference

7–8 June / 11am-4pm ET
21–22 June / 11am-4pm ET
5–6 July / 11am-4pm ET
19–20 July / 1:00-3:00pm ET

37.5-hour seminar

REGISTER

  • Discourses of Difference unfolds across four intensive live, online weekends with time between sessions for reading, interviewing, editing, and the attention required to return carefully to the language of others and to recognize and consider the perceptions that emerge when listening across difference. The seminar is intentionally structured as an extended immersion rather than a short workshop, allowing participants to conduct interviews, spend time with the words of others, and return to them with greater attention and care.

    In the seminar, participants dare to ask difficult questions, place themselves inside other people’s words, and learn to listen beneath those words—across difference and toward connection. Through sustained inquiry and collective listening, the seminar explores how American cultural values, norms, and beliefs shape perceptions of self, other, and difference.

    Discourses of Difference is a small, cohort-based seminar of 37.5 hours. A syllabus and supporting documentation can be provided for institutional approval or professional learning credit if needed.

  • Discourses of Difference is a seminar for those interested in learning to listen across difference through careful attention to language, narrative, and lived experience.

    Educators working inside and outside of schools, writers, artists, researchers, and community practitioners—as well as others who want to engage in narrative inquiry—may be especially drawn to this work.

    Participants should be prepared for careful listening, sustained attention to language, creative production, and thoughtful engagement with the words and experiences of others.

    Experience is always optional at The Ed Factory. No prior experience is required for this seminar.

  • Participants will need:

    • A quiet place to join the seminar on Zoom

    • A smartphone with basic voice and video recording capability

    • Access to Google Drive

    • A laptop or desktop computer

    Audio editing instruction will be provided for both Mac and Windows users. A list of free audio and video editing tools will be shared during the seminar.

    • Standard Tuition: $495

    • Early Registration: $395

    Fees support seminar instruction, a field guide, guest honararia, and the sustained guidance required for interviews, editing, and collective listening sessions.

    Programs at The Ed Factory are intentionally priced to remain accessible while supporting the time and labor required to sustain the work.

    Reduced-rate access is available when cost is a barrier.

  • Reduced-rate access is available when cost is a barrier. Please reach out through Connect if you would like to discuss options.