Educational Programs
Staff at the McCluskey Center for Violence Prevention offer a variety of educational programs for the campus community. Our emphasis is on educating, rather than training, which means we focus on long-term, on-going programs designed to engage participants in critical thinking and reflection. Through our educational programs, we encourage people to make sense of sexual violence for themselves, applying the knowledge they gain to their own unique contexts.
One of our strategies for engaging the campus community in on-going education is to facilitate workshops for student organizations, staff development, and guest lectures in classes. Any time we work with a group, we prefer to come twice — once to present initial information, then a second time to provide space for people to make sense of and apply that information. Our workshops are always interactive and built for YOU! We will work with you to develop something based on your needs.
The center's staff can build an educational series from workshops listed below or create something new to fit the needs of your organization. These workshop descriptions are a starting place for the kinds of workshops we can facilitate.
If you are interested in having us present to your student organization, at a staff meeting or to your class, please fill out the form below. We look forward to working with you!
Descriptions of Educational Programming:
Addressing Sexual Violence: Understanding Awareness, Response, and Prevention
Increased attention to sexual violence on college campuses over the past several years is a huge win for student activists! Unfortunately, it has also come with a fair amount of confusion and disagreement about effective strategies for addressing sexual violence. In this interactive workshop, we explore the differences between awareness, response, and prevention of violence. We will also develop strategies to stop violence from happening in the first place within our own circles of influence.
Thinking Like an Abolitionist to End Sexual Violence in Higher Education Contexts
A hyper-focus on policy and one-size-fits all responses has led to stagnant practices to address sexual violence in higher education. Women of color activists and their allies have been advocating for abolitionist philosophies to eradicate violence for decades. In this session, we will explore a brief context of the problem of violence from a power-conscious lens, then highlight several abolitionist philosophies as strategies for eradicating violence in higher education. Specifically, we will examine abolition as the practice of creating what we want our communities to look and feel like by focusing on non-carceral responses to violence, individual and collective healing and engaging in a “million little experiments” to create a better world.
Understanding History and Power to Address Sexual Violence
In this workshop, we provide an overview of the historical roots of sexual violence in the U.S., and connect that history to current social, cultural, structural, and power dynamics operating on college campuses. Using a power-conscious framework, we identify strategies to effectively address campus sexual violence that include shifting attention to the people who cause harm, identifying harmful behaviors, and developing strategies to prevent them.
What is Harm?
Most educational programming about sexual violence has focused on teaching people how not to get harmed, rather than how not to cause harm. The vast majority of sexual violence is committed by someone known to the victim, and often, the person causing harm does not understand their behavior as harmful. In this interactive workshop, we will examine what constitutes harmful behavior and ways to ensure that your behavior does not cross the line from seduction to coercion.
Repairing Harm & Restoring Relationships
Are you unsure how to repair harm you've caused in a relationship? It can be hard to admit, yet all of us have caused harm at some point. Fortunately, many people in our lives care enough about us to have these challenging yet necessary and meaningful conversations. By learning to openly listen and acknowledge when we cause harm, we can avoid perpetuating and deepening harm. In this workshop, we will explore what harmful behavior is and how to begin the process of repairing harm that has already occurred.
Beyond Mandatory Reporting: The Role of Faculty in Addressing Campus Sexual Violence
Faculty play a unique role in educating students about campus sexual violence. Many faculty have a personal investment in and/or research and teaching interests directly related to campus sexual violence, yet feel unsure about how to address these issues through their work. In this workshop, we’ll explore a variety of strategies faculty can use to engage in the topic of sexual violence through their teaching, research and service, as well as how to support campus-wide efforts to address campus sexual violence.
Ending Sexual Violence Through Equitable Student Leadership
Ending sexual violence requires student leaders and activists to use a variety of strategies to effectively work with different stakeholders, including peers, media representatives, university administrators, state and federal-level policy makers. Student leaders must be cognizant of who is and is not present in decision-making arenas and how their own identities and experiences influence how they think about addressing sexual violence. In this session, we will discuss strategies for navigating various roles that may arise in different social settings and examine unique personal strengths as they relate to the movement to end sexual violence.
Diving Deeper into Consent Dialogues
Most students have learned about consent as an enthusiastic “yes.” In this workshop, student facilitators lead a discussion diving deeper into the nuances of consent, tuning-in, healthy relationships, and coercion, giving students the opportunity to have the conversations that are important to them. Through these discussion-based workshops, students create dialogue with their peers by analyzing their own life experiences and how they affect their understanding of harm. Students gain a deeper understanding of their own capability to cause harm, better ways to communicate with their peers or partners, and ultimately how to avoid causing harm through self-awareness and accountability.