How will the Courage Museum address the complexity of courage?
Lauren Trout, Senior Program Associate, WestEd:
This idea of a courage museum and courage, the role that courage plays inside of envisioning and enacting a world without violence is complex, right? And by that, really what we have been exploring in the museum design and the educational programming design is like, how do we hold that complexity? What is that complexity? And so, thinking about a field trip experience, walking through the museum, thinking about professional learning for educators, we knew pretty quickly that it wasn’t just going to be having the right kinds of like words on a document or on the wall, right? Because courage isn’t just this technical thing that if we follow steps one through three, in this order, we’re going to have achieved it.
We’re really, I think, just kind of offering different guideposts around what it means to be in relationship with one another, what it means to hold space, what it means to explore things from an internal level, from an interpersonal level, from a systemic level, right? Really understanding this idea of violence as something that exists on all of these levels, not just interpersonally. And that having critical analysis and opportunities to engage in reflection and storytelling and creativity and visioning are all entry points to start to dismantle the systems that we have that perpetuate violence and create something new.