An Interview with Deputy Director Lisa Kenner

Earlier this month, we had the opportunity to interview Lisa, the Deputy Director of ConTextos Chicago. She is a seasoned leader who has dedicated her career to providing transformational educational opportunities to children, families, and communities.

Operating with a collaborative mindset and with vision and passion, Lisa founded and led a successful single-site charter school for 12 years in North Lawndale. She thrives in community-based work and has earned the trust and respect of students, families, staff, funders, board members, and community stakeholders.

With decades of education and facilitation experience, this interview holds a treasure trove of knowledge for community advocates and organizers at ConTextos and beyond.

How long have you been a facilitator, both with ConTextos and in life?

I’ve been a facilitator at ConTextos since the very first [Authors] Circle, so I want to say it’s been over eight years now. Our first circle started in Cook County [Department of Corrections] in the basement of Division 10, the first week of February. Prior to that, I started my educational career of learning and teaching, often in alternative formats and settings in probably 1988.

I was also a founding teacher of an alternative middle school that was focused on working with students who were struggling or had dropped out of school. We created an intentional community where teaching and learning looked really different than traditional spaces. It was all built on relationships—less of a vertical paradigm, but rather heterogeneous grouping, mixed groups, project-based, all that good stuff. I learned that curriculum is learned experience. Learning, teaching, healing happens in relationship.

You’ve been an educator and facilitator in a lot of different spaces. What from your previous work has informed your work at ConTextos?

I love this question! I could go in for hours, but I’ll keep it concise.

I think that as an educator, what I’m bringing really intentionally is an unshakable belief system that every human being is important, that every human being is capable, that every human being has unique skill set. It is not, for example, a child who fails in school. It is a school system that does not meet the needs of a child. It’s not a parent who isn’t capable and doesn’t care. It’s an adult learner who hasn’t yet been equipped with the skills and their own terra firma to help co-create a new experience for their child. This does not remove individual accountability at all—it is the importance of understanding the context in which human beings operate.

So a strength I bring, to land the plane, is that I’m very attuned to identifying verbal or non-verbal messages from learners that indicate they don’t think they’re capable. As facilitators, we are embedded in live situations in a community center, in a carceral setting, for example. I am very aware of the belief systems that well-intended adults hold in community centers, along with experiences that our Authors bring from formal education where they’ve learned, “I’m not capable. I can’t write. I can’t read. This isn’t for me.” So many individuals in school really have a fear of writing or have learned they can’t do it. So as an educator, I’m so aware of that in my head and I’m going to be so intentional with the feedback I give, and that’s important so that any individual of any age learns, “I am capable. I wrote a book and that’s big.”

What’s something you’ve needed to unlearn from your educational background that has helped you as a facilitator at ConTextos?

Something I’ve had to unlearn as an educator is that I need to be even more fluid in following the learners, to make sure every Author is able to go at their pace because the goals is we need everyone to have the experience, have the journey, and publish the book. Also, it means really giving time to make sure that every Author is going to do it their way. So in my head, I’m unrelenting that every human being can succeed and do this. It’s the emotional journey. It’s also that, at the end of the day, the Author is literally going to decide what their journey is. I have the faith that it’s like, “Hey, this may be a really different process and path,” and to allow that bandwidth.

When it comes to unlearning preconceived notions, what’s your advice for a new facilitator who may have come from a more formal educational or writing background?

I think one of the key things is to be intentional and framing that this is not an English language arts class, this isn’t a university literature class. It is, in fact, what humans have been doing for thousands of years. We are coming together to be seen and heard, and everyone is an expert in their own mind. I cannot write your memoir—only you can.

This is a spiritual campfire where we are seeing, hearing, and sharing stories. We’re discarding stories that were put on us, that sometimes well-intentioned people spoke into our lives. We’re retrieving stories that we forgot about. We’re making sense of things. We are looking for the story we need to tell, not so much the story that’s easiest to tell or that we usually tell. As facilitators, we’re not trauma diving. That is the absolute opposite of healing, engaged practice. But we come in with the assumption that everyone’s story matters.

We as facilitators also aren’t there to fix things. I am, as a facilitator, responsible for helping create a space where people are leaning in to support each other. People do their own healing. Human beings save themselves. We’re here to create a space for people to bee seen or heard. Get rid of what’s weighing them down. And sometimes rediscovering who they are. So the pedological, academic stuff I’m telling you about that I bring is a foundation, and it’s important to model and nurture the overarching emotional courage.

ConTextos Authors go through a revision process for their work. Can you explain what that is specifically in our process and what makes it different from a traditional revision process?

I’ve told our program team that it took me multiple circles until I really understood what the revision phase of circle looks like and why that’s the most important part. Revision is where we’re asking questions of each other that could jostle some of our assumptions that could align with the truth of our own human, unique journey. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. My mother was dying and ultimately passed in hospice while I was facilitating my first circle. So I was doing a lot of writing. One always has to model as a facilitator—you’re doing the work, you’re sharing. So I was writing a lot about that journey and presented a draft, and in it I had talked about not being there when my mother died. Because of the shared journey of sharing writing, one of the Authors said, “You know, you weren’t physically at her bedside, but how do you define ‘being there’?” And he gave me examples of ways I had shown up for my mother.

So to this day, I no longer think I abandoned my mother. That’s the sauce.

Another example, I was reading a book by an Author in Cook County the other day. I said, “I just have a question. When I read these words, it reads like when you’re coming home, you’re coming home hard and heavy. Is that how you see yourself coming?”

He said, “No, people think I’m coming home like that.” He started to explain the ways that he’s changed his point of view, and I said, “Wow. I completely believe that, but that’s not on the page yet, and if someone didn’t know you, they wouldn’t learn that.” So another example of the power of revision is where you reclaim who you are.

So when you say “revision,” there’s the traditional idea of “Does what’s on the page match what you’re trying to say?” But it’s also revising how we see ourselves.

That’s exactly what it is. You know, I always tell the authors that the stories are looking for you as much as you’re looking for it. There’s just such beautiful nuance to it. I love circle so much.

There’s so much of the circle process that invites people to be themselves, and I’m also hearing that there’s a lot of things that may come up that can be really heavy. When it comes to taking care of yourself to make sure you can show up in the circle space, do you have advice or things that work for you?

One key thing is debriefs with colleagues. It’s so important that we continue to co-create what we do in circle with ourselves as adult learner practitioners that have our full lives too. One thing Rosondunnii (Mental Health Consultant at ConTextos Chicago) has pointed out to me is that the work we do is really intense and we’re front line workers in spiritual, emotional crisis and complex trauma spaces. We are also showing up in our own communities. We aren’t driving out of state to support people and then coming home. I’ve had a number of students I’ve raised with parents that are in county jail in circles. So it’s personal. And it’s not just me. Every member of our team is showing up in our communities. Our own community of how we come together, process, laugh, heal, cry, unpack—that’s very important.

It’s also about remembering our mission and theory of change. We are strong in creating spaces for people to keep on their healing journey and finding ways to impact policy and dutybearers. With all that we’re learning about the impact of systems, what do we do with that? It’s like Mother Jones said, “You pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

As we wrap up our conversation, I’d like to leave some time for you to share anything else you’d like new facilitators (or people who are just curious about ConTextos) to know.

We’re innovating different models to see how to best make what the Authors Circle journey can look like and feel like. Today’s discussion was mostly about our writing-focused circles, which are our bread and butter, but we can imagine alternatives and continue to expand variations and possibilities. Even right now, one of the stars in our constellation, Kalief, is working on curriculum to pilot a collaboration with a few schools that weaves ConTextos’ priorities with a crochet project. During the COVID-19 lockdown, we did an open drop-in circle online. Anything is possible!

Interested in collaborating with Contextos?