OCTOBER READ
radical intimacy by sophie k rosa
Hardcover Hotties Book Club
reading with care and curiosity
Educational environments often demand a level of vulnerability from their participants as they share personal anecdotes, etc. In conceiving of educational partnerships as friendships, missteps and imperfections allow for moments of amiable support to emerge and to persist throughout relational exchanges. For Hardcover Hotties Book Club, friendship is active -- it encompasses earnest dedication to the creation and maintenance of safe and inclusive educational spaces where friends (both new and old) feel valued, heard and respected, and all who enter such spaces are held accountable to similar standards. Friendship necessitates safety, comfortability, and empathy -- it is purely nurturing and compassionate. To strive for such meaningful connection and support is to encompass care in its strongest sense, and to claim responsibility for the essential labor of patient time and intentional effort that is fundamental to loving friendship. Empowerment and mutual growth manifests itself through the excitement that individuals bring when learning becomes lighthearted and intrinsically motivated.
Hardcover Hotties Book Club recognizes that collective interdependence is fundamental to the livelihood and liberation of our kin in a social and political environment where individualism has largely advanced as the status quo. Community breeds creative thought through constructive and positive feedback. The relationships and partnerships in which we engage are creatively constructed, inspiring radical change that precipitates the imagining of an ideal community space and the systems, worlds, and lives outside of those that are traditionally used to dominate and oppress.
Our Pedagogical Principles
What does this mean?
Hardcover Hotties’ four pedagogical principles embody the foundational values on which our community learning and educational practices rest.
Or, rather, our four ice cream scoops that make the sweetest sundae that is Hardcover Hotties Book Club. (๑>•̀๑)
Community in Creative Collaboration
1. Community in Creative Collaboration
2.
Radically Alternative Space
3.
Friendship
as Care Work
4.
Intention
and
Integrity
Hardcover Hotties Book Club understands the institutional shortcomings that hold the potential to leave hopeful and eager learners hurt, harmed, or defeated, and recognizes the contentious nature of learning environments which can bring with them such feelings of anxiety or fear. The “radically alternative space” is an ideal environment which promotes unconventional approaches to knowledge exploration through the prioritization of care and compassion and the embrace of loving connection across difference, in terms of both education and, more broadly, lived experience. The cultivation of this space challenges the hierarchical practices of educational institutions through interdisciplinary and intercultural learning to promote curiosity and holistic understanding.
Radically Alternative Space
Friendship as Care Work
Hardcover Hotties Book Club and its members move through each day intentionally and with integrity -- ideally defining the group as practitioners whose habits embody the work with which we interact. It is through observation of purposeful and deliberate action and interaction that our dedication to intention and integrity is recognized as honesty, transparency and sincerity that is grounded in strong moral virtue to which we are deeply committed. Integrity recognizes responsibility and power held, and actively works to dismantle accountability as a shameful tool in redefining it as a positive mechanism through which personal growth is encouraged and good will is assumed as the norm.
Intention and Integrity
