Process
The TLA Network & One City, One Prompt: Transformative Language Arts (TLA) is based on the premise that through our words — on the page, spoken or performed aloud — we can make and keep community, foster greater healing, growth, and culture shift, and bring alive our best visions for the world. The TLA Network’s project, One City, One Prompt, is a series of hosted writing, performance, and community-building events across the country to cultivate greater civility, deeper dialogue, and sense of purpose. For our inaugural year, the overall theme is COMMUNITY. People around the world will explore many aspects of this community, such as what community means, how to create and sustain community, what puts communities at risk and helps them thrive, how eco-community relates to human humanity, and how to hold community across faith, race, ethnicity, class. Each event is hosted by a facilitator who crafts a specific prompt about community that makes sense for the group with which s/he will be working. Each event will be unique, but collectively they will thread ideas towards a shared understanding of our greater national community, allowing participants, through the power of language, to begin to bridge partisan political views and engage in a civil discourse on community values. These events will generate numerous Creations in various media as participants respond with the written word, audio recordings, video, photography, and/or film. Everything we get will be cataloged here, allowing each city’s communal discoveries about itself to be recorded and shared.
A Little Background on TLA: TLA is an emerging field, profession and calling based on an ancient impulse to use the language arts to improve the world. The idea of TLA was developed in 2000 at Goddard College by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg,
where it emerged as a master’s degree in social and personal transformation through the spoken, written, and sung word. Goddard College also founded the TLA conference, the Power of Words, in 2003. Shortly afterwards the TLA Network was formed as a separate organization to take up the work of supporting the Transformative Language Arts. In 2009, the Network took over the reins of the conference, and has since been developing other projects, including publication of the first TLA reader, The Power of Words; on-line classes launched in 2011, and now the One City, One Prompt project. The next Power of Words conference will be in Oct., 2012 in the Philadelphia area.
Philosophy & Process of One City, One Prompt: One City, One Prompt is deeply rooted on the TLA core values, developed as part of the program at Goddard college. These include an acknowledged connection between the personal and social in shaping our lives, an acceptance of change and growth as both individual and communal processes; a commitment to develop greater perspectives on our world; and the premise that participants define the defining terms (naming and claiming their own experience). Each facilitator hosts an event crafted to speak to a particular community at a particular time, and participants respond as they see fit, allowing their voice to speak their wisdom. All events are free of charge to attend participate in.
Want to Host An Event?: If you’re interested in hosting an event, please contact Callid, and read the frequently-asked questions from Facilitators.
