Experiential Workshops

Workshops for Middle and High Schools

All FCLC workshops are empowering, wholistic, dynamic, and interactive.

Civic & Political Activism 101
- Students learn how to lobby, influence decision makers, organize a team and action plan to create community change on any level.
- Students leave empowered knowing they can and do affect substantive change in the world.
- Subsequent community action (resulting from this workshop) catalyzes young people to not just see injustice but to act on it.
Service Learning that Makes a Lasting Difference
- Learn the fundamental steps of community organizing including project planning and logic models.
- Learn concepts of power, privilege, ally-ship, and institutionalized oppression that leads to deductive awareness of service work based on solidarity versus charity.
- Learn how to integrate design thinking and action.
- Think systemically rather than lineraly.
- Engage in a process mutually instructional/beneficial for students and community alike.
Hero's Journey: A Self-Revolution
- Student Outcomes:
  - Explore and gain basic fluency in art forms with which they have little or no experience including: theatre, visual art, spoken word, music.
  - Awaken the skills of communication and creativity/innovation.
  - Build confidence in public speaking by gaining experience in sharing publicly.
  - Experience deep sense of community by the connecting context of ubuntu (I am because you are).
Fieldtrip to Create Art in Nature
- Student Outcomes:
  - Learn to create using only natural objects in nature in a non-verbal community building experience.
  - Learn practical mindfulness breathing and meditation techniques.
  - Gain awareness of the importance of communing in nature.
  - Stir imagination through exposure of images by world renown nature artist, Andy Goldsworthy.
Martin Luther King Jr. Assembly Troupes
- Student Outcomes:
  - Engage with and learn Theatre of Liberation (aka Theatre of the Oppressed) techniques.
  - Learn about historical and current civil rights heroes and sheroes.
  - Produce MLK Jr school assembly.
  - Provide optional curriculum activities across disciplines that integrate with assembly themes.
Art Therapy for Leadership and Insight
- Student Outcomes:
  - Gain access to new way of understanding self and others.
  - Build visual communication fluency in an increasingly visual-centric society.
  - Experience a deep connection to others in a meditative space.
Celtic Wheel of Leadership
- Student Outcomes:
  - Differentiate between leadership styles.
  - Contextualize leadership styles in a conversation around identity and differentiate (ie: cultural, ethnic, racial, gender…)
  - Gain appreciation for multiple styles of leadership and increase ability to collaborate effectively.

For Non-Profits & Schools Serving Youth Preparing for International Immersions

Cross-Cultural Training for Youth Participants in Preparation for International Immersion to Imperialized Countries (aka "Third World")
Student Outcomes:
- Increase awareness of one’s identity, privilege, and power as a U.S. citizen on a global level.
- Begin to cultivate appropriate modesty, humility, and curiosity.
- Gain understanding of cross-cultural differences in relationships, concept of time, cleanliness, etc.
Diversity & Ally-ship Training for Youth Participants in Preparation for International Immersions
Student Outcomes:
- Understand the chart of major global oppressions.
- Understand concepts of agency, targets, systematic/systemic power, institutional power, ally-ship, internalized oppression (and others).
- Understand the difference between charity and solidarity.

Examples of Past Workshops led or co-led by Chris Fontana

Martin Luther King Jr. Assembly Juanita High School, Kirkland, WA

Students (with no previous arts or civil rights experience) wrote a theatrical piece incorporating spoken word and movement for an all school assembly.

Martin Luther King Jr. Assembly Islander Middle School, Mercer Island, WA

Students (with no previous arts or civil rights experience) learned Theatre of the Oppressed techniques and performed a live “Forum Theatre” in which students in the audience participated in trying new ways to address real micro-aggressions in their lives.

Arts in Nature workshop for Wilderness Volunteer Corps, North Cascades, WA

Students raised their awareness of the natural surroundings thorough a guided meditation. Students created individual sculptures from all natural objects and integrated their sculptures, non-verbally, in the final leg of the workshop.

Hero’s Journey: A Self-Revolution for YMCA Black Achievers, Smoke Farm, Arlington, WA

Students (with no previous formal arts experience outside of school) learned spoken word, visual expression, song-writing and theatre techniques. Students created a performance piece.

Lobbying 101: How to get your Senator to Act

High school youth, parents and community members chose the issues that mattered most to them, learned the fundamentals of how to lobby their elected officials, role played and then collected dozens of letters from fellow students and colleagues and lobbied their Senators the following week.

8′ x 16′ Mural at Rainer Beach Community Center Pool

Students learned how to collaborate through the design process and then painted a mural just after 9/11.

Experiential & Service Learning Workshops

The FCLC Experience What they’re saying

“As a veteran teacher, I have faced many challenges in the classroom. With the implementation of a democratic classroom, I still face many of the same challenges, but now I have a classroom full of students who are ready, willing and able to find solutions with me. Over the years, I constantly found myself saying to the students, ‘You have to learn to be responsible,’ or ‘I wish you would learn to solve your problems without my intervening.’ The democratic classroom strategies showed me that I cannot teach responsibility to the students, but I can share responsibility with them, and that has made all the difference.”

Alexis Guerriero
Islander Middle School, Mercer Island
“Sending a team of teachers to this training created an energy around valuing student voice in a democratic classroom. This energy has inspired other teachers to implement similar systems in their classrooms, with the overall benefits being better classroom cultures and students feeling a greater sense of belonging.”

Ted Howard II
Principal Garfield High School
“In my second year of teaching, I have seen leaps and bounds in improving implementation in the classroom. Running a democratic classroom has given me the ability to delegate the “systems management” of running a classroom and relax my workload. This has given me the opportunity to let my personality and preparation shine, and the students have responded in kind. I feel real bonds, have more good days, and look to achieve more and more in the ongoing cultivation of my educational vision.”

David Zilban
Teacher, Fort Vancouver High School, Vancouver School District

The FCLC Experience

What they’re saying

“As a veteran teacher, I have faced many challenges in the classroom. With the implementation of a democratic classroom, I still face many of the same challenges, but now I have a classroom full of students who are ready, willing and able to find solutions with me. Over the years, I constantly found myself saying to the students, ‘You have to learn to be responsible,’ or ‘I wish you would learn to solve your problems without my intervening.’ The democratic classroom strategies showed me that I cannot teach responsibility to the students, but I can share responsibility with them, and that has made all the difference.”

Alexis Guerriero
Islander Middle School, Mercer Island
“Sending a team of teachers to this training created an energy around valuing student voice in a democratic classroom. This energy has inspired other teachers to implement similar systems in their classrooms, with the overall benefits being better classroom cultures and students feeling a greater sense of belonging.”

Ted Howard II
Principal Garfield High School
“In my second year of teaching, I have seen leaps and bounds in improving implementation in the classroom. Running a democratic classroom has given me the ability to delegate the “systems management” of running a classroom and relax my workload. This has given me the opportunity to let my personality and preparation shine, and the students have responded in kind. I feel real bonds, have more good days, and look to achieve more and more in the ongoing cultivation of my educational vision.”

David Zilban
Teacher, Fort Vancouver High School, Vancouver School District