Virtuous Cycles and Transformative Education: a conversation with Kendall Bryant

Engaged & Public Humanities student Cameron Newman interviews her fellow cohort member Kendall Bryant, a Bowie, Maryland native and rising second year, on their work at the Red House. The following interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Cameron: What work do you do for Georgetown?

Kendall: I work at the Red House, which is the university’s internal research and design unit, focused on innovating the education that we do here. So we come up with really out-of-the-box curriculums, new ideas for making the Georgetown education feel fresh, interesting, inclusive, and more relevant for the world’s issues. 

C: That’s so cool. So you did a case study for Interspaces recently about a project that you worked on. Do you want to share a little bit about the project?

K: Yeah. So as a part of the Red House’s mission of making education more inclusive, there came a time when we really thought it was important to think about trauma-informed education, and we began to work with this international consortium of organizations called the well-being project. And their whole mission is to help to push a culture of well-being across the world. We are a part of their higher education network, but we were basically tapped to create a research project and conduct research on the nature of trauma and the ways that often social change makers activists undergo a lot of trauma in the work that they do or they encounter a lot of trauma and the work that they do, you know what I’m saying? Social workers, nurses, teachers, all of these folks who make a great impact in our communities, are impacted by trauma in ways that sometimes they don’t get the chance to take care of or other people don’t understand about the people who are doing this kind of work. So we came up with a framework, which is actually a set of frameworks for thinking about the complexity of trauma as it manifests in cycles, right? Vicious cycles of traumatization, but then virtuous cycles of healing, you know? So we think about it in cycles, we think about it on three levels, individual, communal and systemic, understanding that we have to think about each of these levels in order to create holistic change.

We can’t just think about the individual. If we’re just thinking about the individual, it becomes like a one bad apple situation, it becomes a character. You have to think about the way that trauma impacts communities, and the ways that there are communal dynamics that either help to continue these cycles of traumatization or cycles of healing, and also understand the systemic level of everything. If you’re only thinking about the individual and you’re not thinking about how trauma manifests on the systemic level, that’s how you get people thinking racism is just like a one-to-one relationship between people, right? There is a system layer. There’s a way that America was built, it’s political, economic systems were built to give some people resources and other people no resources, you know what I’m saying? And so we find it really important to think about all of these levels to create the kind of holistic methods and practices and approaches to wellbeing that can actually create change in our world. So these are a couple of things. 

There’s also two other layers. There’s lenses for really holding and contending with the complexity of trauma and healing. I won’t get into them. There are eight of these lenses, but there are different angles that you can really kind of enter into a problem with, and understand how maybe narrative shapes the issue, how histories shape the issue, right? Those are just two of the lenses, and the last thing is the four pathways to repair, reconnection, accountability, and resilience. The journey framework has these four different components within it and it’s all just meant to give people more tools and more insight in dealing with the impacts of trauma, in their work and in their lives. So that’s basically what we did on September 18th last year. We took people on the journey through all of these different parts of the framework, we had some practitioners come in and talk about their own experiences with trauma and the work that they do. We also had two women come from Bopal, India who survived the chemical spill that happened there. They came in and they talked about their own experiences, and how trauma has manifested on individual, communal and systemic levels within that tragedy. We had journalists come in to talk about the impact of trauma in their work and what happened January 6th, and the work that they were doing January 6th. We had um a global mental health scholar who has degrees in medicine to talk about how in certain areas of the world, where environmental injustices are greater, there’s also mental health impacts to that. And then we had practitioners who were talking directly about higher education, and about how systems within higher education are not built for the wellbeing of students, so that was a really impactful session as well. We brought together a lot of different perspectives, and we’re able to take participants through a true vivid, vibrant journey of just contending with the trauma in our world, in our context, and then also being able to work together to think about different ways to enact healing as individuals, as community members, and as people who work systems, who press the buttons, sometimes pull the levers, you know? 

C: I wish I could have been there, that’s what I’m concluding. 

K: That was a day!

C: A long day, it sounds like, but I’m sure full of lots of good discussions. And so, you took that experience and you turned it into a case study. Looking back on it almost a year later, you have new insights into it, you look at it differently. Did the case help you think through it in a new way? 

K: I think the event was really promising, one of my first experiences seeing the power of sharing these frameworks and these tools for analysis. People really found it valuable and continue to find it valuable and apply it to their own work and are interested in using the frameworks for dealing with the issues that they’re focused on. I have a friend who organizes for environmental justice in DC. There are severe environmental injustices in some of the wards in DC. and certain places that are built on toxic waste sites and disproportionately black areas. It’s just it’s not great at all. And this friend isn’t Georgetown affiliated, but they were able to come to a program that I did within the community, it was at a place in Columbia Heights where I used the framework and they’re thinking about using that as a way to think about how to propose a way that their organization does their work. That is exactly what we want, you know? 

The one thing about the September gathering was that I just wish that there were people from DC organizations. There were a lot of Georgetown affiliated people there, which was beautiful, but I just wish there were people from Harriet’s wildest dreams, from One DC, from a lot of different organizations who are doing really remarkable work to get people resources or to raise awareness about violence in the community, you know. So I just wish there was more of a community presence there and that feeling continues especially as being somebody in this program where like our entire job and everything that we think about is how do we engage communities as people who are seated in the university? How do we make sure that those relationships are mutual and reciprocal? And this is stuff that I’m actively thinking about in my job, and as I’ve been taking classes in this program, and as I’ve been trying to do my job, it’s become increasingly urgent to really think about what it means to do community-engaged work. What does it mean that we have this framework and we’re saying it’s for social change makers, but there are no grassroots organizers in the room when we’re talking about these things, you know? There are no people who are boots on the ground, like fuck the police, none of these people are in the room, so who and what is this actually for?

C: On that note, are these resources available? If someone were to stumble upon this interview and think, “that sounds really cool, I wanna learn more.” Is there a place that they could go? 

K: Not yet. We are putting it together, actually. So I’m going to be presenting at the Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Summer Institute at the end of May. By the time we present at that conference, we will have online assets for people to access. This paper and the frameworks and all of this stuff has been in the making for a while. We are in the process of publishing, but sadly, Al Bertrand, who was the head of GU press, passed away very recently. And he was the person we were working with to get the paper published. So, yeah, there’s definitely going to be some time needed for us to actually publish it in the way that we want to. My heart goes out to him; it makes me so sad. Life comes at you fast, man. 

C: So true. On a less somber note, You do this incredible work, and you’re also a student in this program. How do you feel like the classes that you’ve taken have fit in with the work that you’re doing, if at all? 

K: “Public Humanities Writing” was great because this is where I wrote the case study. Every part of that work, I was able to apply back to the work that I do with the Red House. I got the opportunity to write about the work that I do and like to really think about and dig more deeply into the community engaged parts of my work, because that’s important to me. Like, I mean, it’s not even always easy to be like, I want to have an event. I want to use our resources to bring people together around these things that we’re thinking about and talking about in our offices, you know. So I just think in general, ENPH has really helped me to dig more deeply into the community engaged sides of my work and to really be able to have simple vocabulary around that work. I also took a class with Ijeoma Njaka on anti-racism and higher education, and that was really fun and really cool. In some way it was about experimental design. We had to design something. It could have been a story, could have been a storyboard, could have been a space or something. But it had to be something that challenges racism and higher education. And so I came up with this gallery idea that’s really a lot to explain right now, but I did take that class last semester. 

C: And you do this work, and you’re a student, but you also have a personal praxis, removed from the institution. Do you want to share about that at all, about how your personal practice integrates with what you do in school and work?

K: Yeah. I mean, as cheesy and cliché as it might be, I truly believe in peace and love. I truly do believe in peace, love and harmony, and it shows up in the work that I do and how I show up to that, and it is the heart of why I do the work that I do. I think I was positioned to focus on what it means to transform an education at Georgetown, so that it can be more geared toward peace and love, you know? Education is one of the most influential parts of our society and especially as a Black person in America, I grew up knowing the importance of education and also recognizing the ways that education has been weaponized and turned towards assimilation and not necessarily trying to enrich our skills, but trying to kind of dull our senses to fit into a kind of mold. I grew up with all those conversations about what education is and what it’s for and how it’s been used for good and for bad, and all these different kinds of things. Ultimately, I think it’s a tool that can and should be shaped towards a better future. I really do think that the educational systems create the futures that we dream of, and to be doing the kind of work that I do, it helps me to kind of put my hat in the ring a little bit and try to push for more inclusive pedagogies, to push for trauma-informed pedagogies, to propose some wacky ways that people aren’t thinking about the future because they’re not reading the black studies texts I am. 

I have a space here to really be able to push for the type of future that I want. I want a vibrant and kind future. I want people to be nice to each other. I want to be safe. I want us to be able to like to be in conflict and then resolve that, you know, and to learn from one another and I think there are ways that our current systems don’t allow for us to do that all the time. They want us to be in competition with one another. They really get students to prioritize numbers and letter grades over actually absorbing content and internalizing it and using it for the things that they care about. I just want to contribute to a shift in education where we actually are educating the whole person. We are not actually educating the whole person at Georgetown. We’re educating the pre-professional part of the person. As much as I can in my work, I’m pushing for a more holistic education where students aren’t just feeling like they have to keep their heads down and get a consulting job after they graduate. I really want students to be able to also find value in the parts of their education that are just much more about self-discovery and figuring out what they actually want, because that’s what got me to where I’m at and it feels pretty good. 

C: That’s such a beautiful vision that you’ve that you’ve cast here, and I’m rooting for you in the work that you’re doing. Are there any concluding words that you wanna put out there? 

K: Catch us at TLISI if you’re around on Tuesday, May 20th! Also, just think about what you can do as an individual person. If you are just thinking about yourself and working from that perspective, think about what you can do to help to bring virtuous cycles in your life. and in the lives of the people that you are around. It could be really small things. There are so many ways for us to create the world that we wanna see. Just remember you have the power. 

C: Alrighty, thank you so much for your time!

K: Of course.